At the Existentialist Café (52 page)

12
  ‘Trolley problem’: for more, see David Edmunds,
Would You Kill the Fat Man?
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

13
  Student story: Sartre,
Existentialism and Humanism
, 39–43. There are similarities with the situation of his friend and former pupil, Jacques-Laurent Bost, who sought Sartre’s opinion in 1937 about going to fight in the Spanish Civil War: see Thompson,
Sartre
, 36. In his novel
The Reprieve
, Sartre lent a similar dilemma to his character Boris, based on Bost.

14
  ‘There is no traced-out path’: Sartre, interview with C. Grisoli, in
The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV
, 15 (originally published in
Paru
, 13 Dec. 1945).

15
  Sartre on Hiroshima: Sartre, ‘The End of the War’, in
The Aftermath of War
(
Situations III
), 65–75, this 65.

16
  
Index
: J. M. De Bujanda,
Index des livres interdits, XI: Index librorum prohibitorum
(Geneva: Droz, 2002) lists Sartre’s
opera omnia
, 808 (Decr.
S. Off. 27-10-1948), and Beauvoir’s
Le deuxième sexe
and
Les Mandarins
, 116 (Decr. 27-06-1956). See Thompson,
Sartre
, 78.

17
  ‘Sickening mixture’:
Les nouvelles littéraires
, quoted in ‘Existentialism’,
Time
(28 Jan. 1946), 16–17, this 17.

18
  ‘If you were twenty’: Cazalis,
Les mémoires d’une Anne
, 84.

19
  ‘Sir, what a horror!’: Marcel, ‘An Autobiographical Essay’, 48.

20
  Private room: POL, 534. Enjoying the bustle of cafés: Contat & Rybalka (eds),
The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre
, I: 149, quoting Roger Troisfontaines,
Le choix de Jean-Paul Sartre
, 2nd edn, (Paris: Aubier, 1946), which in turn quotes remarks made by Sartre in Brussels, 23 Oct. 1945.

21
  ‘So long as they were interesting’: Grégoire Leménager, ‘Ma vie avec Boris Vian (par Michelle Vian)’,
Le nouvel observateur
(27 Oct. 2011).

22
  ‘Drowning victim’ and ‘shredded and tattered shirt’: Michelle Vian,
Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
, 46, 48, quoting Pierre Drouin, ‘Tempète très parisienne’,
Le Monde
(16–17, May 1948), and Robert de Thomasson,
Opéra
(Oct. 1947) respectively. Long hair: Gréco,
Je suis faite comme ça
, 81. Turban: POL, 504; also see Beauvoir,
Wartime Diary
, 166 (22 Nov. 1939). You can see the ‘look’ in the Lorientais jazz-club scenes in Jacques Becker’s excellent 1949 film,
Rendezvous de juillet
.

23
  Wols: FOC, 248–9.

24
  Camembert: Cohen-Solal,
Sartre
, 262.

25
  Singing: MDD, 335. Donald Duck: POL, 324.

26
  Sartre’s face: Aron,
Memoirs
, 23; Violette Leduc,
Mad in Pursuit
, tr. Derek Coltman (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1971), 45–6; Sartre, ‘The Paintings of Giacometti’, in
Situations
[IV], 175–92, this 184.

27
  Légion d’honneur and Académie française: John Gerassi, ‘The Second Death of Jean-Paul Sartre’, in W. L. McBride (ed.),
Sartre’s Life, Times and
Vision du Monde (New York & London: Garland, 1997), 217–23, this 218. Beauvoir was offered the Légion d’honneur and rejected it in 1982: Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir
, 606.

28
  ‘My life and my philosophy’: Cohen-Solal,
Sartre
, 142 (citing Sartre’s diary, 15 Jan. 1940).

29
  Two million words: M. Scriven,
Sartre’s Existential Biographies
(London: Macmillan, 1984), 1.

30
  
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
: The full Danish title is
Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler. Mimisk-pathetisk-dialektisk Sammenskrift, Existentielt Indlæg
.

31
  ‘One was always being pushed’: Garff,
Søren Kierkegaard
, 313.

32
  Horse and passion: Kierkegaard,
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
, 261.

33
  ‘Abstraction is disinterested’: ibid., 262.

34
  Descartes: ibid., 265–6.

35
  ‘Anxiety’: Kierkegaard,
The Concept of Anxiety
, 61.

36
  Bus stop:
Sartre By Himself
, 16.

37
  ‘A kind of involuntary’: Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil
, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003), 37 (part 1, s. 6).

38
  King: ‘Martin Luther King Jr. Traces His Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’, in Arthur and Lila Weinburg (eds),
Instead of Violence
(New York: Grossman, 1963), 71. He read Sartre, Jaspers, Heidegger and others, as well as Paul Tillich, American existentialist theologian. See also: Eugene Wolters, ‘The Influence of Existentialism on Martin Luther King, Jr.’,
Critical Theory
(8 Feb. 2015), which refers to King’s essay ‘Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’ and his notes in the King Archive.

39
  Slogans: listed on
https://libcom.org/history/slogans-68
.

40
  Demanded freedom: Sartre, ‘Self-Portrait at Seventy’, in
Sartre in the Seventies
(
Situations X
), 3–92, this 52.

41
  Sorbonne: Marguerite Duras muttered, ‘I’m fed up with the star system,’ according to Beauvoir. See ASAD, 460–62, and Cohen-Solal,
Sartre
, 462.

42
  Funeral: ‘Enterrement de Sartre’ on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9UoHWWd214
. See Hayman,
Writing Against
, 439; Cohen-Solal,
Sartre
, 522–3; Lévy,
Sartre
, 2.

43
  Lanzmann: quoted in Ursula Tidd,
Simone de Beauvoir
(London: Routledge, 2003), 160.

44
  Chestnut tree: Sartre,
Nausea
, 183–4.

45
  ‘Shop-girl metaphysics’ (
‘une sorte de métaphysique pour midinette’
): Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, tr. J. & D. Weightman (London: Penguin, 1978), 71, and in French, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), 63. ‘To dissolve man’: Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), 247.

46
  ‘A sense of freedom’: Michel Contat, interviewed for the BBC series
Human, All Too Human
(1999), episode 3: ‘Jean-Paul Sartre: the road to freedom’.

47
  ‘Life becomes ideas’ and ‘A discussion’: Merleau-Ponty,
The Visible and Invisible
, 119.

48
  ‘Inhabited philosophy’: Murdoch,
The Sovereignty of Good
(London & New York: RKP, 2014), 46.

49
  Label: FOC, 46.

Chapter 2: To the Things Themselves

1
    Population and hikers’ outfits in 1930s Freiburg: Martin S. Briggs,
Freiburg and the Black Forest
(London: John Miles, 1936), 21, 31.

2
    ‘The City of Phenomenology’ and ‘For the young Germans’: Levinas, ‘Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology’, in
Discovering Existence with Husserl
, 32–46, this 32, 37. For Levinas’ own discovery story, see interview in Raoul Mortley,
French Philosophers in Conversation
(London & New York: Routledge, 1991), 11–23, this 11.

3
    ‘Real little Buddha’: Sartre,
War Diaries
, 123.

4
    ‘At Husserl’s expense’: ibid., 184.

5
    Blond hair: memories of a former schoolmate as quoted in Andrew D. Osborn,
The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: in its Development from His Mathematical Interests to His First Conception of Phenomenology in
Logical Investigations (New York: Columbia University/International Press, 1934), 11; also see Spiegelberg, ‘The Lost Portrait of Edmund Husserl’, 342, quoting Husserl’s daughter and reproducing images of the portrait.

6
    ‘Watchmaker’ and ‘the fingers’: Gadamer,
Philosophical Apprenticeships
, 35, the watchmaker comparison being quoted from a friend, Fyodor Stepun.

7
    Film:
A Representation of Edmund Husserl
, film by James L. Adams (1936), available online at
http://www.husserlpage.com/hus_imag.html
. Taken from a video cassette produced by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, c. 1991.

8
    Pocketknife: Husserl told the story to Levinas, who passed it on to S. Strasser, the editor of the
Husserliana
edn (
Hussserliana
I:xxix); it is retold in Karl Schuhmann,
Husserl-Chronik
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 2. Husserl’s comment, ‘I wonder whether …’ comes from a version heard by Beauvoir and noted in her diary: Beauvoir,
Wartime Diary
, 161 (18 Nov. 1939).

9
    ‘In the habit of falling’: Andrew D. Osborn,
The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl
(New York: Columbia University/International Press, 1934), 11.

10
  Brentano: Husserl, ‘Recollections of Franz Brentano’ (1919), in
Shorter Works
, eds P. McCormick & F. Elliston (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 342–8. Also see T. Masaryk & K. Čapek,
President Masaryk Tells His Story
(London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1934), 104–5, and Moran,
Introduction to Phenomenology
, 23–59.

11
  Husserl’s grief and depression: see Moran,
Introduction to Phenomenology
, 80–81, and Kisiel & Sheehan,
Becoming Heidegger
, 360 (Husserl to Heidegger, 10 Sept. 1918), 401 (Husserl to Pfänder, 1 Jan. 1931).

12
  Kindergarten: Borden,
Edith Stein
, 5. ‘I am to stay’: Stein,
Self-Portrait in Letters
, 6 (Stein to Roman Ingarden, 28 Jan. 1917).

13
  ‘Most distressing’: Dorion Cairns,
Conversations with Husserl and Fink
, ed. by the Husserl Archives in Louvain (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 11 (13 Aug. 1931).

14
  
‘A new way’
and ‘to see what stands’: Husserl,
Ideas
, 39.

15
  ‘Give me my coffee’: Moran,
Husserl
, 34, citing and translating Gerda Walther’s account of a seminar in 1917, from Walther,
Zum anderen Ufer
(Remagen: Reichl 1960), 212. Heidegger, by contrast, preferred tea: see Walter Biemel, ‘Erinnerungen an Heidegger’, in
Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie
, 2/1 (1977), 1–23, this 10–11. For more recent philosophising about coffee, see Scott F. Parker & Michael W. Austin (eds),
Coffee — Philosophy for everyone: grounds for debate
(Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and David Robson, ‘The Philosopher Who Studies the Experience of Coffee’ (an interview with David Berman of Trinity College, Dublin), BBC Future blog, 18 May 2015:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150517-what-coffee-says-about-your-mind
.

16
  Music and phenomenology: see, for example, Thomas Clifton,
Music
As
Heard: a study in applied phenomenology
(New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1983).

17
  Sacks’ leg: Sacks,
A Leg to Stand On
, 91, 96. On medicine and phenomenology, see works including S. K. Toombs,
The Meaning of Illness: a phenomenological account of the different perspectives of physician and patient
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), and Richard Zaner,
The Context of Self: a phenomenological inquiry using medicine as a clue
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981). For many other applications of phenomenology, see Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard (eds),
The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology
(London & New York: Routledge, 2012).

18
  Jaspers and Husserl letters: Jaspers,
Philosophy
I, 6–7 (1955 epilogue), quoting both; also see Kirkbright,
Karl Jaspers
, 68–9, citing Jaspers to his parents, 20 Oct. 1911.

19
  ‘A
different thinking
’: Jaspers,
Philosophy of Existence
, 12.

20
  In love, something is loved: Brentano,
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint
, 88.

21
  ‘To wrest oneself’ and ‘in a nice warm room’: Sartre, ‘A Fundamental
Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: intentionality’, in
Critical Essays
(
Situations I
) 40–6, this 42–3 (originally published in 1939).

22
  Sartre was already becoming aware: Sartre developed his analysis of Husserl further in
The Transcendence of the Ego
, tr. A. Brown, foreword by S. Richmond (London: Routledge, 2004) (originally published in
Recherches philosophiques
in 1934).

23
  ‘Withdraw into himself’: Husserl,
Cartesian Meditations
, 2. Also see Paul S. MacDonald,
Descartes and Husserl: the philosophical project of radical beginnings
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2000).

24
  Augustine: Husserl,
Cartesian Meditations
, 157.

25
  Debate and ‘dear old leather sofa’: Stein,
Self-Portrait in Letters
, 10–11 (Stein to Roman Ingarden, 20 Feb. 1917); also see Alasdair MacIntyre,
Edith Stein: a philosophical prologue
(London & New York: Continuum, 2006), 103–5. Her thesis: Stein,
On the Problem of Empathy
. Her doctorate was awarded in Freiburg in 1916, and the dissertation published in Halle, 1917.

26
  Hamburg: Stein,
Self-Portrait in Letters
, 36 (Stein to Fritz Kaufmann, 8 Nov. 1919).