A writer is a person who describes, and thus a person who is free – for a person who can exactly describe what he or she experiences can also exert some control over those events.
(At The Existentialist Café, page 104)
Brilliant
Suffice to say this is the only book I’ve ever read which not only explains what phenomenology was, but makes you understand how cool and revolutionary it felt in the 1920s.
It also provides, better than anything I’ve ever read, an intellectual biography of Martin Heidegger, explaining his initial devotion to the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, then their growing estrangement, in terms of their diverging philosophies and worldviews.
I thought the book would be mostly about Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, and they certainly appear at the beginning and then feature in the second half – but the central achievement of At The Existentialist Café is to embed them among a) the broader strands of existentialist thought of the 1920s, 30s and 40s b) among a whole range of other thinkers who emerge as at least, if not more, interesting than the famous three, namely:
- Husserl and Heidegger, who are worth reading about again and again
- their disciples, like Karl Jaspers or Emmanuel Levinas
- French colleagues, especially the fascinating figure of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- and related writers – there’s a section on Black American émigrés to post-war Paris such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, which is very enlightening
Bakewell has the priceless gift of being able to weave together biography, cultural context and summaries of (sometimes very difficult) philosophical writings, to dazzling effect. She doesn’t just summarise the philosophy but – in the classic existentialist style – makes you feel the force and excitement of the ideas of Husserl or Heidegger.
Thus the chapter on Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic, The Second Sex, makes it sound like not just another long old dusty tome languishing on your to-do list – but an intellectually thrilling, world-changing book which is still completely relevant to our contemporary situation.
Similarly, her description of Heidegger takes full account of his personal weirdness, his obsessions and narrowness, his impenetrable home-made jargon and, of course, his notorious Nazi sympathies – but nonetheless argues strongly for the sheer beauty of many passages in his strange disorientating philosophy, and actually manages to convey this.
Her description of Richard Wright immediately made me want to run out and grab a copy of his novel, Native Son. The same for the works of Merleau-Ponty – until this book just a name I’d come across in biographical sketches of Sartre, but who now emerges as a fascinating thinker in his own right – and for Emmanuel Levinas and Karl Jaspers, and so on.
Edmund Husserl (1859 to 1938)
At the turn of the twentieth century Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) thought that philosophy had become too technocratic, too dominated by bloodless, calculating scientific attitudes, by grand theories starting from over-familiar axioms or philosophical cruxes. But it is obvious that humans – even philosophers – are already in the world, engaged in all kinds of ways with eating, drinking, sleeping, and managing innumerable encounters with other people.
Edmund Husserl
Husserl advocated stripping away, ‘bracketing out’, all the philosophical, rational, technical and scientific terminology from our thoughts (in a move known as the ‘phenomenological reduction’) and then trying to describe what it feels like to think, to see, to perceive, to encounter others – in other words, to be. Husserl’s war cry was ‘To the things themselves!’
The word ‘phenomenon’ is used because it’s an ancient Greek word meaning appearances; generations of philosophers have got hung up on the fundamental question of whether what we (seem to) perceive reflects an actual world ‘out there’. Who cares, says Husserl. If what all of us perceive of the world is the phenomena which fill our minds, so be it: Describe them! Describe the phenomena!
Successive generations of students came to study with him in Freiburg, nicknamed by Levinas ‘the city of phenomenology’, through the 1910s and ’20s. But, unfortunately, they all tended to then go off and develop their own versions of phenomenology. Some were atheist (Heidegger), some were Christian (Jaspers), or at least spiritual – all can be interpreted as part of the anti-rational reaction between the wars which included, in the broadest perspective, movements like Surrealism or Fascism.
Martin Heidegger (1889 to 1976)
Martin Heidegger grew up in a small German village, helped out with church chores, admired traditional local craftsmen, went for long walks in the huge Black Forest. As a student he went to study under Husserl in Freiburg and for three years was his assistant, many thought he was the chosen heir and successor.
Martin Heidegger
But Heidegger grew apart from the master, considering that phenomenology applied itself too promiscuously to all kinds of areas of mental perception and experience, while all the time missing the key, fundamental issue: the nature of existence itself.
For Heidegger all previous philosophy, since the time of Plato and Aristotle, concentrated on knowing, with two thousand years of thinkers elaborating vast superstructures and generating thousands of terms describing theories of sense perception and knowledge and so on.
Heidegger thought this was all a mistake. Every previous philosopher had been in a sense too complex, and had missed the most fundamental thing, the thing right in front of their noses – the fact that we exist at all. What is existence? What the hell is being?
Where Husserl had developed the ‘phenomenological reduction’ as a manoeuvre designed to focus the area of study, Heidegger spoke of the ontological difference. This is the distinction between beings of which there are, of course, an almost infinite number and a vast number of ways of studying – and Being itself, the fundamental bedrock of all lesser beings.
‘Forgetting’ the difference between Being and beings allows traditional philosophers to ‘fall’ into well-worn habits of doing psychology or sociology or any of scores of human sciences, i.e. studying the myriad individual entities in the world: but what of Being itself, the deep ocean which underpins all of existence? What do we know of that? How do we go about understanding the most fundamental aspect of the universe – the simple fact that it exists.
Heidegger wanted to single-handedly overthrow the existing tradition and replace it with a philosophy which systematically explores the nature and consequences of Being. Since no-one else had done this, he naturally had to make up his own terminology for the rapidly proliferating series of ideas and concepts this point of view generated.
Dasein is probably the single most important new term: rather than refer to mankind, or humanity, or people, Heidegger uses Dasein (literally ‘there-be’, more loosely ‘being-there’) to denote the presence of the human in the world. Dasein can then be examined from various perspectives, in relation to other Dasein, to the inanimate world, and to death.
The scale of Heidegger’s ambition – working through a completely new way of seeing and understanding human existence – explains why his work is so often seen as a momentous revolution in philosophy and he is often credited with being the most important 20th century philosopher.
Many readers then and now are put off by his tendency to generate long portmanteau words to try and describe the slippery concepts he’s noticing and explaining. Bakewell comes up with the characteristically useful suggestion that Heidegger (whose work she knows very well, having begun a PhD on him) can sometimes be thought of as a Modernist, experimental writer. His aim is to defamiliarise the world, to constantly make us aware of the strangeness of existence. This is a generally accepted technique in a wide range of literary writers; why not in a philosopher, too?
Existentialism
According to Sartre in Being and Nothingness, there are two types of being: being-in-itself (être-en-soi) describes all inanimate objects and animals; they just persist in their pre-ordained, unthinking selfhood. And this is contrasted with being-for-itself (être-pour-soi) i.e. human beings.
We can think and, above all, choose. We are thrown into the world, interacting with objects and other people, from earliest consciousness and, at countless moments, can choose what to do. We may well be constrained by biology, culture, history and so on, but – deep down and fundamentally – human beings are free as no other entities in the universe are. Free to choose and, when you reflect on it for a moment, this means that the accumulation of all our choices amounts to who we are.
Thus, human beings are unique in that we are continually inventing and creating ourselves through our choices, as no other entities in the world seem to.
Jean-Paul Sartre
This is the meaning of the catch-phrase, ‘Existence preceded essence’. We are born, thrown into the world, grow, exist and then we choose what we want to be. We exist first – and then we create our essence. There is (on this reading) no pre-existing human nature, or not enough to interfere with the radical uniqueness each of us possesses.
This explains existentialism’s thrilling sense of liberation and freedom for a whole generation of young people after the war.
For sure, Sartre also emphasises the weight of responsibility anyone who really acknowledges their freedom must consequently feel; he bandies around words like anguish and angst quite freely. But the reward for fully acknowledging your freedom and responsibility, is a sense that you are living an ‘authentic’ life, true to yourself, making conscious choices to be what you want to be.
This idea – whether the life you’re living is ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ – in popular phraseology whether you’re being true to yourself or are a ‘phoney’ – became a dominant idea in pop culture for decades. ‘Phoniness’ is a central issue in the classic teen novel of angst and alienation, Catcher in the Rye (1951).
In fact all these key terms – existentialism, essence, freedom, anguish, authenticity – were widely popularised through newspapers, magazines, radio and so on to become key ideas, feelings, subjects of debate and rules for living among young people in the decades after the war.
Levinas, Merleau-Ponty et al
Bakewell explains how this radical new way of thinking about philosophy (and the drastic new ideas it threw up about human beings, life, society and ethics) opened up all sorts of new perspectives, which were followed up and worked out by slightly more peripheral figures such as Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and many others.
Thus Bakewell paints a really broad and deep and engaging picture of the philosophical tides surging around between-the-wars Western Europe into which keen young, clever young intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir arrived. Her accounts of their early works make sooooo much sense because she locates them as dialogues and divergences from the writings of these other, earlier, figures who she has spent the first half of the book so thoroughly explaining.
Weil, Arendt, de Beauvoir
Bakewell’s book embodies, for me, the best kind of feminism, which is that she doesn’t nag and complain about all the men being sexists or misogynists (as they probably were); instead she accentuates the positive and devotes a lot of space to showing how many women thinkers of the time more than held their own against the men, and made valuable contributions in their own right.
Simone de Beauvoir is mentioned throughout, as she reacted to the developments in phenomenology and developed her own brand of existentialist thought. She emerges as more nuanced, subtle and life-affirming than Sartre with his queasy hallucinations of being. Bakewell’s passage summarising The Second Sex not only places it among, but makes it sound just as exciting as, the masterworks of Darwin, Freud and Einstein.
Simone de Beauvoir
But Bakewell also devotes a long, sympathetic section to the strange, passionate, mystical figure of Simone Weil who achieved a staggering amount in her short life (she died from self-induced starvation Emmanuel presumably some form of anorexia Emmanuel aged just 34).
And she spends some time explicating the biography and changing ideas of Hannah Arendt (1906-75) who, in the 1920s, studied with all three of Heidegger, Husserl and Jaspers, before pursuing her own, definitive, explorations of power and violence.
Her book made me realise how pitifully ignorant I am of the writing of all three of these women, but then it made me realise how ignorant I am of the entire Continental tradition she’s describing. Must try harder.
Summary
If you’re at all interested in the intellectual life of mid-twentieth-century Europe, this book is absolutely vital. It is one of the best, most thorough, capable, calm and lucid, but exciting and motivating books of intellectual history I’ve ever read.
Related links
Related reviews
- Sartre reviews
- Camus reviews
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