At the Existentialist Café (46 page)

This idea was also at the heart of a famous 1978 essay by Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, dedicated to Patočka’s memory. In an oppressive state, Havel wrote, people become co-opted in subtle ways. He gives an example: a
greengrocer receives from his company’s head office a sign bearing the standard message, ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ He is supposed to put it in his window, and he does so, although he cares not a bean for its message — for he knows that all kinds of inconveniences may ensue if he does not. A customer who sees the notice doesn’t consciously think about it either; she has the same notice in her own office anyway. But does this mean that the sign is meaningless and harmless? No, says Havel. Each sign contributes to a world in which independence of thought and personal responsibility are quietly eaten away. The signs, in effect, emanate from the Heideggerian ‘they’, and they also help to keep it going. All over the country, even in the offices of the most senior figures, people simultaneously suffer from the system and perpetuate it, while telling themselves that none of it matters. It is a giant structure of bad faith and banality going all the way to the top. Everyone is ‘involved and enslaved’.

For Havel, this is where the dissident must step in, to break the
pattern. The rebel demands a return to the
‘here and now’, Havel says — to what Husserl would have called the things themselves. He conducts an
epoché
, in which the cant is set aside and each person sees what is in front of his or her eyes. Eventually, the result will be an
‘existential revolution’: people’s relationship to the ‘human order’ is overhauled and they can return to the authentic experience of things.

A revolution did come in 1989; it brought Havel to power as the country’s first post-Communist president. He would not please everyone in this role, and the revolution was not as phenomenological or existential as he might have hoped. At least, few thought of it that way any longer. But there was certainly an overhaul. The phenomenological imperative to go straight to experienced reality may have had a more lasting impact here than Sartre’s more overt radicalism. Perhaps phenomenology, even more than existentialism, is the truly radical school of thought. Brentano, the original phenomenological rebel, would be entitled to feel proud of the long line of influence he had.

13

HAVING ONCE TASTED PHENOMENOLOGY

In which there are departures
.

Forwards, always forwards! was the existentialist’s cry, but Heidegger had long since pointed out that no one goes forwards forever. In
Being and Time
, he depicted Dasein as finding authenticity in ‘Being-towards-death’, that is, in affirming mortality and limitation. He also set out to show that Being itself is not to be found on some eternal, changeless plane: it emerges through Time and through history. Thus, both on the cosmic level and in the lives of each one of us, all things are temporal and finite.

This idea of Being or human existence as having an inbuilt expiry date never sat so well with Sartre. He accepted it in principle, but everything in his personality revolted against being hemmed in by anything at all, least of all by death. As he wrote in
Being and Nothingness
, death is an outrage that comes to me from outside and wipes out my projects. Death cannot be prepared for, or made my own; it’s not something to be resolute about, nor something to be incorporated and tamed. It is not one of my possibilities but ‘
the possibility that there are for me no longer any possibilities’. Beauvoir wrote a novel pointing out that immortality would be unbearable (
All Men Are Mortal
), but she too saw death as an alien intruder. In
A Very Easy Death
, her 1964 account of her mother’s last illness, she showed how death came to her mother ‘
from elsewhere, strange and inhuman’. For Beauvoir,
one cannot have a relationship with death, only with life.

The British philosopher Richard Wollheim put all this another way. Death, he wrote, is the great enemy not merely because it deprives us of all the future things we might do, and all the pleasures we might
experience. It takes away the ability to experience anything
at all
, ever. It puts an end to our being a Heideggerian clearing for things to emerge into. Thus, as Wollheim says, ‘
It deprives us of phenomenology, and, having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up.’ Having had experience of the world, having had intentionality, we want to continue it forever, because that experience of the world is
what we are
.

Unfortunately, this is the deal we get. We can taste phenomenology only because, one day, it will be taken from us. We clear our space, then the forest reclaims it again. The only consolation is to have had the beauty of seeing light through the leaves at all: to have had something, rather than nothing.

Some of the most likeable people to have made their appearance in the sparkling, tinkling, bustling and quarrelsome existentialist café of our story were also the first to leave it.

Boris Vian was only thirty-nine when he died, on 23 June 1959, of a heart attack, which came while he was in a cinema attending a preview of a film based on his novel
I Spit on Your Graves
. He disliked the film and was just voicing a protest from his seat when he collapsed. He died on the way to the hospital.

Just over six months later, on 4 January 1960, Albert
Camus was killed in a car crash with his publisher Michel Gallimard, who was driving. The car smashed into one tree and then another, twisting itself round and scattering most of its metal to one side of the tree, its engine to the other, and Camus through a rear window. In the mud a short distance away, a briefcase was found, inside which were Camus’ journal and the unfinished manuscript of
The First Man
, his autobiographical novel about his childhood in Algeria.

Beauvoir heard the news about Camus from Claude Lanzmann, who phoned her at Sartre’s apartment. She put down the phone, shaking, and told herself not to be upset. Come now, she said to herself: you are not even close to Camus any more. Then she looked out of Sartre’s window, watching the sun set over the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church, unable either to weep properly or to feel better. What she
mourned, she decided, was not the forty-six-year-old
Camus who had just died, but the young freedom fighter of the war years — the friend they had lost long ago.
Sartre felt this way too: for both of them, the true Camus was that of the Resistance and
The Stranger
, not the later one. They never forgave him for his political views, but Sartre wrote a generous obituary in
France-Observateur
. He summed Camus up as an heir to the great tradition of French
moralistes
, an untranslatable word which implies both a moralist in the English sense and a curious observer of human behaviour and character. He was, said Sartre, a man whose ‘stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, waged a dubious battle against events of these times’. When
Beauvoir was interviewed by Studs Terkel for American radio in the same year, she concluded that Camus was an ethical thinker rather than a political one — but she admitted that young people could learn from both approaches.

Another untimely death occurred that year. In Paris, Richard Wright suffered a fatal heart attack on 28 November 1960, aged fifty-two. Some of his friends, as well as his daughter, wondered whether he had been assassinated by the CIA: a mysterious woman had been seen leaving his room not long before his final collapse. The US government had indeed continued to harass and obstruct him for years. But Wright had been in poor health ever since a bout of amoebic dysentery in 1957, which left him with liver problems. These were not helped by his taking bismuth salts, which were supposed to be an alternative cure but instead gave him metal poisoning.

Although Wright had written little fiction in recent years, he had continued to write essays and polemics, and had also developed a love of Japanese
haiku. Among his late works is a sequence of beautiful small poems about peach trees, snails, spring rain, storm clouds, snow, chickens that look smaller after being soaked by rain — and a tiny green cocklebur, caught in the curls of a black boy’s hair.

A year later, on 3 May 1961, the fifty-three-year old
Merleau-Ponty, looking as slim and fit as ever, died of a heart attack. He had been with friends in his family apartment on the boulevard Saint-Michel. They
chatted for a while, then
Merleau-Ponty left them talking in the living room while he went into his study to finish some notes for a lecture on Descartes the next day. He never came back.

Again, Sartre found himself writing an obituary of a friend with whom he had fallen out, this time in a special issue of
Les Temps modernes
. Again, his obituary was thoughtful and generous, and it became the source of much of what we know about their friendship and disagreements. He mentioned that he and Merleau-Ponty had bumped into each other a short time earlier, when Sartre was giving a talk at the École normale supérieure. Sartre was touched that Merleau-Ponty had come to hear him, and afterwards hoped that they would keep in contact. But Sartre’s own reactions were slowed (he was groggy with a case of flu, he said) and Merleau-Ponty was taken aback; ‘he hadn’t said a word about feeling disappointed, but for a split second, it crossed my mind that his face had saddened.’ Sartre felt optimistic all the same: ‘ “Everything is just as it was,” I told myself. “Everything will begin anew.” ’ A few days later, he heard that Merleau-Ponty was dead.

Merleau-Ponty’s body lies in his family grave in Père-Lachaise cemetery, together with his mother and his wife Suzanne, who died in 2010. It is on the other side of Paris from Montparnasse, where Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s grave is. Merleau-Ponty can be found in one of the cemetery’s quietest and least frequented corners, surrounded by trees.

One philosopher who had expected to die of a heart attack at a young age, but did not, was Karl
Jaspers. On marrying, he had warned Gertrud that they could not expect long together, perhaps a year or so. In fact, he lived to eighty-six, and died on 26 February 1969 — Gertrud’s birthday.
Heidegger sent her a telegram afterwards with the simple words: ‘In remembrance of earlier years, in honor and sympathy.’ She wrote back on the same day, ‘Thinking likewise of the earlier years, I thank you.’ She lived until 1974.

Perhaps the best way to mark Karl Jaspers’ passing is to revisit a radio talk he gave about his life, as part of a series in 1966–7. He spoke
of his childhood by the North Sea, and especially about holidays with his parents in the Friesian islands. On the island of Norderney one evening, his father took his hand as they walked to the water’s edge. ‘The tide was out, our path across the fresh, clean sand was amazing, unforgettable for me, always further, always further, the water was so low, and we came to the water, there lay the jellyfish, the starfish — I was bewitched,’ said
Jaspers. From then on, the sea always made him think of the scope of life itself, with nothing firm or whole, and everything in perpetual motion. ‘All that is solid, all that is gloriously ordered, having a home, being sheltered: absolutely necessary! But the fact that there is this other, the infinity of the ocean — that liberates us.’ This, Jaspers went on, was what philosophy meant to him. It meant going beyond what was solid and motionless, towards that larger seascape where everything was in motion, with ‘no ground anywhere’. It was why philosophy had always, for him, meant a ‘different thinking’.

Seven months after the death of Jaspers came that of another philosopher who had written about human life as a constant journey beyond the familiar: Gabriel Marcel, who died on 8 October 1973. For him, as for Jaspers, human beings were essentially vagabonds. We can never own anything, and we never truly settle anywhere, even if we stay in one place all our lives. As the title of one of his essay collections has it, we are always
Homo viator
— Man the Traveller.

Hannah
Arendt died of a heart attack on 4 December 1975, aged sixty-nine, leaving a manuscript of Sartrean dimensions which her friend Mary McCarthy edited for posthumous publication as
The Life of the Mind
. Arendt never quite resolved the puzzle of Heidegger. Sometimes she condemned her former lover and tutor; at other times she worked to rehabilitate his reputation or to help people understand him. She met him a few times when she visited Europe, and tried (but failed) to help him and Elfride sell the manuscript of
Being and Time
in America to raise cash. Elements of his work always remained central to her own philosophy.

In 1969, she wrote an essay which was published two years later in
the
New York Review of Books
as ‘
Martin
Heidegger at Eighty’. There, she reminded a new generation of readers of the excitement his call to thinking had generated, back in the ‘foggy hole’ of Marburg in the 1920s. Yet she also asked how he could have failed to think appropriately himself in 1933 and thereafter. She had no answer to her own question. Just as Jaspers had once let Heidegger off lightly by calling him a ‘dreaming boy’, so Arendt now ended her assessment with an overgenerous image: that of the Greek philosopher Thales, an unworldly genius, who fell into a well because he was too busy looking at the stars to see the danger in front of him.

Heidegger himself, although seventeen years older than Arendt, outlived her by five months, before dying peacefully in his sleep on 26 May 1976, aged eighty-six.

For over forty years, he had nursed his belief that the world had treated him badly. He had continued to fail to respond to his followers’ hopes that he would one day condemn Nazism in unambiguous terms. He acted as though he was unaware of what people needed to hear, yet his friend Heinrich Wiegand Petzet reported that Heidegger knew very well what was expected: it just made him feel more misunderstood.