ALSO BY SARAH BAKEWELL The Smart The English Dane How to Live: or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Bakewell First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 2016 Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas Drawings at beginning and end by Andreas Gurewich All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Bakewell, Sarah, author. Title: At the existentialist café : freedom, being, and apricot cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others / by Sarah Bakewell. Description: New York : Other Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2015047824 (print) | LCCN 2016000382 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590514887 (hardback) | ISBN 9781590514894 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Existentialism. | Philosophy, Modern — 20th century. | Philosophy — France — History — 20th century. | Philosophers — France — Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Philosophers. | PHILOSOPHY Movements Existentialism. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. Classification: LCC B819 .B313 2016 (print) | LCC B819 (ebook) | DDC 142/.78 — dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047824 v3.1 For Jane and Ray CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication 1 Sir, What a Horror, Existentialism! 2 To the Things Themselves 3 The Magician from Messkirch 4 The They, The Call 5 To Crunch Flowering Almonds 6 I Don’t Want to Eat My Manuscripts 7 Occupation, Liberation 8 Devastation 9 Life Studies 10 The Dancing Philosopher 11 Croisés comme ça 12 The Eyes of the Least Favoured 13 Having Once Tasted Phenomenology 14 The Imponderable Bloom Cast of Characters Acknowledgements Notes Select Bibliography List of Illustrations 1 SIR, WHAT A HORROR, EXISTENTIALISM! In which three people drink apricot cocktails, more people stay up late talking about freedom, and even more people change their lives. We also wonder what existentialism is. It is sometimes said that existentialism is more of a mood than a philosophy, and that it can be traced back to anguished novelists of the nineteenth century, and beyond that to Blaise Pascal, who was terrified by the silence of infinite spaces, and beyond that to the soul-searching St. Augustine, and beyond that to the Old Testament’s weary Ecclesiastes and to Job, the man who dared to question the game God was playing with him and was intimidated into submission. To anyone, in short, who has ever felt disgruntled, rebellious, or alienated about anything. But one can go the other way, and narrow the birth of modern existentialism down to a moment near the turn of 1932–3, when three young philosophers were sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, catching up on gossip and drinking the house speciality, apricot cocktails. The one who later told the story in most detail was Simone de Beauvoir, then around twenty-five years old and given to watching the world closely through her elegant hooded eyes. She was there with her boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre, a round-shouldered twenty-seven-year-old with downturned grouper lips, a dented complexion, prominent ears, and eyes that pointed in different directions, for his almost-blind right eye tended to wander outwards in a severe exotropia or misalignment of the gaze. Talking to him could be disorienting for the unwary, but if you forced yourself to stick with the left eye, you would invariably find it watching you with warm intelligence: the eye of a man interested in everything you could tell him. Sartre and Beauvoir were certainly interested now, because the third person at the table had news for them. This was Sartre’s debonair old school friend Raymond Aron, a fellow graduate of the École normale supérieure. Like the other two, Aron was in Paris for his winter break. But whereas Sartre and Beauvoir had been teaching in the French provinces — Sartre in Le Havre, Beauvoir in Rouen — Aron had been studying in Berlin. He was now telling his friends about a philosophy he had discovered there with the sinuous name of phenomenology — a word so long yet elegantly balanced that, in French as in English, it can make a line of iambic trimeter all by itself. Aron may have been saying something like this: traditional philosophers often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment. They set aside most of what had kept philosophy going since Plato: puzzles about whether things are real or how we can know anything for certain about them. Instead, they pointed out that any philosopher who asks these questions is already thrown into a world filled with things — or, at least, filled with the appearances of things, or ‘phenomena’ (from the Greek word meaning ‘things that appear’). So why not concentrate on the encounter with phenomena and ignore the rest? The old puzzles need not be ruled out forever, but they can be put in brackets, as it were, so that philosophers can deal with more down-to- earth matters. The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible. Another phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, added a different spin. Philosophers all through history have wasted their time on secondary questions, he said, while forgetting to ask the one that matters most, the question of Being. What is it for a thing to be? What does it mean to say that you yourself are? Until you ask this, he maintained, you will never get anywhere. Again, he recommended the phenomenological method: disregard intellectual clutter, pay attention to things and let them reveal themselves to you. ‘You see, mon petit camarade,’ said Aron to Sartre — ‘my little comrade’, his pet name for him since their schooldays — ‘if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!’ Beauvoir wrote that Sartre turned pale on hearing this. She made it sound more dramatic by implying that they had never heard of phenomenology at all. In truth, they had tried to read a little Heidegger. A translation of his lecture ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ had appeared in the same issue of the journal Bifur as an early Sartre essay in 1931. But, she wrote, ‘since we could not understand a word of it we failed to see its interest’. Now they saw its interest: it was a way of doing philosophy that reconnected it with normal, lived experience. (Illustrations Credit 1.1) They were more than ready for this new beginning. At school and university, Sartre, Beauvoir and Aron had all been through the austere