At the Existentialist Café (50 page)

Such tasks are easy for humans because we swim in perceptual and conceptual complexity from a young age. We grow up immersed in the ‘imponderable bloom’ of life and relationships — a phrase borrowed from E. M. Forster’s prescient 1909 science-fiction story, ‘The Machine Stops’. It tells of a future humanity living in isolated pods beneath the Earth’s surface. They rarely meet in the flesh, but communicate through a remote vision-phone system. A woman in her pod in Australia can talk to her son in Europe: they see each other’s images on special plates which they hold in their hands. But the son complains, ‘
I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.’ The simulacrum is no substitute for the real Other. As Forster glosses it, ‘The imponderable bloom, declared by discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was ignored by the machine.’

This ‘bloom’ of experience and communication lies at the heart of the human mystery: it is what makes possible the living, conscious, embodied beings that we are. It also happens to be the subject to which phenomenologists and existentialists devoted most of their research. They set out to detect and capture the quality of experience
as we live it
rather than according to the frameworks suggested by traditional philosophy, psychology, Marxism, Hegelianism, structuralism, or any of the other -isms and disciplines that explain our lives away.

Of all these thinkers, the one who most directly tackled Forster’s bloom was the one from whom I had initially expected nothing very dramatic: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In
The Phenomenology of Perception
, he put together the fullest description he could of how we live from moment to moment, and thus of what we are — from the woman who ducks as she enters a room in a tall hat to the man who stands by a window watching the vibrating branch from which a bird has just flapped away. Merleau-Ponty arguably left the most lasting intellectual legacy of all, not least in his direct influence on the modern discipline
of
‘embodied cognition’, which studies consciousness as a holistic social and sensory phenomenon rather than as a sequence of abstract processes. Merleau-Ponty gave philosophy a new direction by taking its peripheral areas of study — the body, perception, childhood, sociality — and bringing them into the central position that they occupy in real life. If I had to choose an intellectual hero in this story, it would be Merleau-Ponty, the happy philosopher of things as they are.

Someone else shared Merleau-Ponty’s instinct for the ambiguity and complexity of human experience, and that was Simone de Beauvoir. Besides her work in feminism and fiction, she devoted her philosophical writing to exploring how the two forces of constraint and freedom play themselves out through our lives, as each of us slowly becomes ourselves.

This theme guides
The Second Sex
and
The Ethics of Ambiguity
, and it also runs through her multi-volumed autobiography, where she depicts herself and Sartre and countless friends and colleagues as they think, act, quarrel, meet, separate, have tantrums and passions, and generally respond to their world. Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs make her one of the twentieth century’s greatest intellectual chroniclers, as well as one of its most diligent phenomenologists. Page by page, she observes her experience, expresses her astonishment at being alive, pays attention to people and indulges her appetite for everything she encounters.

When I first read Sartre and Heidegger, I didn’t think the details of a philosopher’s personality or biography were important. This was the orthodox belief in the field at the time, but it also came from my being too young myself to have much sense of history. I intoxicated myself with concepts, without taking account of their relationship to events and to all the odd data of their inventors’ lives. Never mind lives;
ideas
were the thing.

Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so. That is why, among all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the
world’s ever-changing substance. It gives us all the fury and vivacity of the existentialist cafés, together with ‘a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert’ — and all the rest of the exquisite, phosphorescent bloom of life, which reveals itself to human beings for as long as we are lucky enough to be able to experience it.

(Illustrations Credit 14.2)

CAST OF CHARACTERS

A who’s who for reference
.

Nelson Algren
(1909–1981): Author of
The Man with the Golden Arm
and other novels of the American underbelly; Simone de Beauvoir’s (mostly long-distance) lover from 1947 to 1950.

Hannah Arendt
(1906–1975): German philosopher and political theorist based in the US after fleeing Germany in 1933; former student and lover of Martin Heidegger; author of
Eichmann in Jerusalem
and other works.

Raymond Aron
(1905–1983): French philosopher, sociologist and political journalist; schoolmate of Jean-Paul Sartre; he studied in Germany in the early 1930s and told his friends about phenomenology.

James Baldwin
(1924–1987): American author of novels and essays exploring race and sexuality; he moved to Paris in 1948 and spent much of the rest of his life in France.

Hazel Barnes
(1915–2008): American translator and philosophical author who translated Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness
in 1956.

William Barrett
(1913–1992): American populariser of existentialist ideas; author of
Irrational Man
(1958).

Jean Beaufret
(1907–1982): French philosopher who corresponded with and interviewed Martin Heidegger and popularised German existentialist ideas; his questions prompted Heidegger to write his
Letter on Humanism
(1947).

Simone de Beauvoir
(1908–1986): Leading French existentialist philosopher, novelist, feminist, playwright, essayist, memoirist and political activist.

Jacques-Laurent Bost
(1916–1990): French journalist who studied with Jean-Paul Sartre, co-founded
Les Temps modernes
, married Olga Kosakiewicz, and had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir.

Franz Clemens Brentano
(1838–1917): German philosopher and former priest
who studied psychology and became the first to explore the theory of intentionality, which became fundamental to phenomenology. Edmund Husserl studied with him in Vienna from 1884–6; Brentano’s thesis on Aristotle’s uses of the term ‘being’ also inspired Heidegger.

Sonia Brownell
(later Orwell) (1918–1980): English journalist, assistant editor of
Horizon
; had an affair with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and later married George Orwell.

Albert Camus
(1913–1960): French-Algerian novelist, essayist, short-story writer, playwright and activist.

Ernst Cassirer
(1874–1945): German philosopher and historian of ideas, specialising in studies of science, Kant and the Enlightement; debated with Heidegger at a 1929 conference in Davos, Switzerland.

Jean Cau
(1925–1993): French writer and journalist; Sartre’s assistant from 1947.

Anne-Marie Cazalis
(1920–1988): French writer and actor; one of the ‘existentialist muses’ of the Saint-German-des-Prés district in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(1821–1881): Russian novelist generally considered a proto-existentialist.

Hubert Dreyfus
(1929–): American philosopher, professor at the University of California, Berkeley; a Heidegger specialist who also writes about technology and the internet.

Jacques Duclos
(1896–1975): Acting Secretary General of the French Communist Party 1950–53; arrested in 1952 on suspicion of plotting to send messages via carrier pigeons. The ‘pigeon plot’ incident helped to radicalise Sartre.

Ralph Ellison
(1914–1994): American writer, author of the novel
Invisible Man
(1952).

Frantz Fanon
(1925–1961): Philosopher and political theorist born in Martinique; author of works on postcolonial and anti-colonial politics, notably
The Wretched of the Earth
(1961), for which Sartre wrote the foreword.

Eugen Fink
(1905–1975): One of Husserl’s key assistants and colleagues in Freiburg, later involved with the Husserl Archives in Louvain.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
(1900–2002): German philosopher, best known for his
work on hermeneutics; studied briefly with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg and recorded anecdotes about both.

Jean Genet
(1910–1986): French thief, vagrant and prostitute turned poet, novelist and autobiographer; subject of Sartre’s major work
Saint Genet
(1952), which began life as a foreword to Genet’s works.

Alberto Giacometti
(1901–1966): Italian-Swiss artist, noted for his sculptures; a friend of Sartre and Beauvoir who sketched Sartre and others.

J. Glenn Gray
(1913–1977): American philosopher, professor at Colorado College, and translator of Heidegger; also wrote
The Warriors
, a sociological study of men in war.

Juliette Gréco
(1927–): French singer and actor; one of the ‘existentialist muses’ of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, and a friend of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and others.

Václav Havel
(1936–2011): Czech playwright and dissident; studied phenomenology with Jan Patočka, and served as president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic from 1989 to 2003.

G. W. F. Hegel
(1770–1831): German philosopher whose
Phenomenology of Spirit
and dialectical theory influenced most of the existentialists.

Elfride Heidegger, née Petri
(1893–1992): Wife of Martin Heidegger; bought and designed their property in Todtnauberg.

Fritz Heidegger
(1894–1980): Banker in Messkirch, brother of Martin Heidegger; helped him type his manuscripts and tried to make him write in shorter sentences.

Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976): German philosopher who studied with Husserl; author of
Being and Time
and many other influential works.

Friedrich Hölderlin
(1770–1843): German poet admired and studied by Heidegger.

Edmund Husserl
(1859–1938): Philosopher born in German-speaking Moravia; founding father of the phenomenological movement; disappointed mentor to Martin Heidegger.

Malvine Husserl, née Steinschneider
(1860–1950): Wife of Edmund Husserl, also born in Moravia; helped to manage the rescue of his archive and manuscripts in 1938.

Gertrud Jaspers, née Mayer
(1879–1974): Wife of Karl Jaspers and collaborator on much of his work.

Karl Jaspers
(1883–1969): German existentialist philosopher, psychologist and political thinker, based at the University of Heidelberg until 1948 when he and his wife moved to Switzerland; friend of Hannah Arendt and, intermittently, of Martin Heidegger.

Francis Jeanson
(1922–2009): Left-wing French philosopher, co-editor of
Les Temps modernes
; in 1952 he wrote a critical review of Camus’
The Rebel
which triggered the falling-out between Camus and Sartre.

Hans Jonas
(1903–1993): German philosopher, mostly based in the US; former student of Heidegger, and author of works on technology, environmentalism and other themes.

Walter Kaufmann
(1921–1980): German-American philosopher and translator, born in Freiburg; author of the popular work
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
(1956).

Søren Kierkegaard
(1813–1855): Danish proto-existentialist philosopher and contrarian of a religious bent, influential on the later existentialists.

Arthur Koestler
(1905–1983): Hungarian novelist, memoirist and essayist; friend of Sartre and others, but fell out with them over politics.

Olga Kosakiewicz
(1915–1983): Actor, protégée of Beauvoir and lover of Sartre; married Jacques-Laurent Bost.

Wanda Kosakiewicz
(1917–1989): Actor, sister of Olga and lover of Sartre.

Victor Kravchenko
(1905–1966): Soviet defector to the US, author of
I Chose Freedom
(1946), which occasioned a high-profile lawsuit and controversy in France in 1949.

Ludwig Landgrebe
(1902–1991): Austrian phenomenologist who worked as Husserl’s assistant and colleague in Freiburg, and then in the Husserl Archives in Louvain.