The Read: Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe
Friday's Child Is Describing Lived Experience As It Presents Itself
Why did I get this book?
I read Bakewell’s biographical explication of Montaigne and thought it was a stunningly great book, so I was primed to read this when it came out.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. Bakewell is one of the clearest and most readable writers about philosophy that I’ve ever read.
Also the book helped me prepare my thinking that led to yesterday’s discussion of friendship in academia.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It may guide me on a re-reading of Camus and de Beauvoir. I also think there are short sections of it that I might just keep consulting regularly, particularly the definitions of both of the major schools of thought covered in the book.
Quotes
“Sartre first realised what a celebrity he had become on 28 October 1945, when he gave a public talk for the Club Maintenant…Both he and the organisers had underestimate the size of the crowd that would show up for a talk by Sartre. The box office was mobbed; many people went in for free because they could not get near to the ticket desk. In the jostling, chairs were damaged, and a few audience members passed out in the unseasonable heat. As a photo-caption writer for Time magazine put it, ‘Philosopher Sartre. Women swooned.’”
“When these friendships soured, it was generally because of ideas—most often political ideas. The existentialists lived in times of extreme ideology and extreme suffering, and they became engaged with events in the world whether they wanted to or not—and usually they did. The story of existentialism is therefore a political and historical one; to some extent, it is the story of a whole European century.”
“[Murdoch] observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as it they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.”
“Although each of these movements disagreed with each other, most were united in considering existentialism and phenomenology the quintessence of what they were not. The dizziness of freedom and the anguish of existence were embarrassments. Biography was out, because life itself was out. Experience was out; in a particularly dismissive mood, the structuralist anthropologists Claude Levi-Strauss had written that a philosophy based on personal experience was ‘shop-girl metaphysics’. The goal of the human sciences was ‘to dissolve man’, he said, and apparently the goal of philosophy was the same. These thinkers could be stimulating, but they also turned philosophy back into an abstract landscape.”
“Besides claiming to transform the way we think about reality, phenomenologists promised to change how we think about ourselves. They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences.”
“For Heidegger, this means not only starting with Being but ensuring constant vigilance and care in thinking. He generously helps us to achieve this by using a frustrating kind of language. As his readers soon notice, Heidegger tends to reject familiar philosophical terms in favour of new ones which he coins himself.”
“Heidegger is philosophy’s great reverser. In Being and Time, it is everyday Being rather than the far reaches of cosmology or mathematics that is the most ‘ontological’. Practical care and concern are more primordial than reflection. Usefulness comes before contemplation, the ready-to-hand before the present-at-hand. Being-in-the-world and Being-with-others before Being-alone.. We do not hover above the great rich tangle of the world, gazing down from on high. We are already in the world and involved in it—we are ‘thrown’ here. And ‘thrownness’ must be our starting point.”
“Heidegger gives us a different way of understanding why, sometimes, it can be so disproportionately disheartening to have a nail bend under the hammer, and to feel everything turn against you.”
“Heidegger’s Nazism was significant because he was now in a position of real power over others’ lives. He had developed from being the nutty professor in funny clothes, writing beautiful and barely comprehensible works of genius for the few, into the official whom every student and professor would have to court. He could ruin careers and endanger people’s physical safety if he chose to. Heidegger had said that Dasein’s call would be unrecognisable, but few people reading Being and Time could have imagined that it would sound so much like a call to Nazi obedience.”
“They [Sartre and de Beauvoir] became partners in a long-term but non-exclusive relationship which lasted all their lives. It was perhaps made easier by the fact that, after the late 1930s, it was no longer a sexual one…They also agreed two long-term conditions. One was that they must tell each other everything about their other sexual involvements: there must be honesty. They only kept partly to this. The other was that their own relationship must remain primary: in their language, it would be ‘necessary’ while other relationships could only be ‘contingent’. They did stick to this, although it drove away some long-term lovers who grew tired of being considered accidents.”
“His dream was to pass through the world unencumbered. The possessions that delighted Beauvoir horrified Sartre. He too liked travelling, but he kept nothing from his trips. He gave away books after reading them. The only things he always kept by him were his pipe and his pen, and even these were not for getting attached to. He lost them constantly, he wrote: ‘they’re exiles in my hands’. With people, he was generous to the point of obsession. He gave money away as fast as it came, in order to get it away from him, like a hand grenade.”
“Merleau-Ponty too, having been radicalised by the war, was still desperately trying to be less nice.”
“Like Sartre watching the workers, Camus was attracted and repelled. Above all, he could not understand the apparent lack of anguish in America. Nothing was properly tragic.”
“One thing about the existentialists seriously bothered American intellectuals, and that was their low taste in American culture—their love of jazz and blues, their interest in the sleazy murders of the Deep South, and their fondness for potboilers about hitmen and psychopaths.”
“The late Heidegger is writing a form of poetry himself, though he continues to insist, as philosophers do, that this is how things are; it is not only a literary trick. Rereading him today, half of me says ‘What nonsense!’ while the other half is re-enchanted.”
“[Arendt] disapproved of his [Heidegger’s] hiding out in Todtnauberg to grumble about modern civilisation, safely remote from potential critics who did not bother to climb up a mountain just to reprimand him. ‘Nobody is likely to climb 1,200 metres to make a scene’, she claimed. A few people did just that, however. One was his former student Herbert Marcuse, formerly an impassioned Heideggerian and now a Marxist. He made the journey in April 1947, hoping to get an explanation and an apology from Heidegger for his Nazi involvement. He did not get either.”
“One striking link between these radical ethical thinkers, all on the fringes of our main story [Levinas, Weil and Marcel] is that they had religious faith. They also granted a special role to the notion of ‘mystery’—that which cannot be known, calculated or understood, especially when it concerns our relationships with each other.”
“To make matters more confusing and further demean the book, English-language paperback editions through the 1960s and 1970s tended to feature misty-focus naked women on the cover, making it [The Second Sex] look like a work of soft porn. Her novels got similar treatment. Strangely, this never happened with Sartre’s books.”
“Sartre proved to be an overwhelming guest, talking incessantly in rapid French which Huston could barely follow. Sometimes, after leaving the room, Huston would still hear Sartre raving on, apparently having failed to notice his listener’s departure. In fact, Sartre was just as puzzled by his host’s behaviour. As he wrote to Beauvoir, ‘suddenly in mid-discussion he’ll disappear. Very luck if he’s seen again before lunch or dinner’.”
“During another late-night carousel in 1947, however, the friendship question came up again, and this time the mood was less good humoured. Koestler clinched his side of it by throwing a glass at Sartre’s head—not least because he got the idea, probably rightly, that Sartre was flirting with his wife Mamaine…Sartre and Beauvoir eventually came to agree with Koestler about one thing: it was not possible to be friends with someone who held opposed political views.”
“Many years later, in an interview just before Sartre’s death, his young assistant Benny Levy challenged him—quite aggressively—to say who exactly it was that vanished when the pro-Soviet apologist in Sartre finally disappeared. Who died, he asked? ‘A sinister scoundrel, a dimwit, a sucker, or a basically good person?’ Sartre answered, mildly, ‘I’d say, a person who’s not bad.’”
“Even when existentialists reached too far, wrote too much, revised too little, made grandiose claims, or otherwise disgraced themselves, it must be said that they remained in touch with the density of life, and that they asked the important questions. Give me that any day, and keep the tasteful miniatures for the mantlepiece.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
As an undergraduate, I was so taken by a course on critical theory in the English Department that I begged the professor to take me on in a directed reading that would extend the course and take us into some major texts. He obliged and was very good-humored about the fact that I had absolutely no fucking idea what was happening in some of the texts he lobbed at me. The worst week I think was reading Heidegger’s Being and Time, which I cheerfully claimed to have read entirely, which was both true and not true. I’d read it in the sense of turning the pages sequentially and looking at the words on each page. I did not read it in the sense of understanding anything at all that I was seeing. I spent a lot of time that week dutifully turning those pages, mind you, but it may literally be the most futile labor I have ever undertaken. There are things we are not meant to do by ourselves, and that was undoubtedly one of them.
More seriously, this book did make me think once again that my generational cohort’s encounter with theory was hamstrung in some important ways by our lack of historicism, e.g., we read philosophers and intellectuals out of sequence, or without awareness of the sequential development of their thought. I think at least for me, that meant that phenomenology and existentialism weren’t something that I got much exposure to, working as I did after the “linguistic turn” in historical scholarship—so I also didn’t really know what was going on in something like Joan Scott’s famous essay critiquing the use of “experience” in historical analysis.
I’m tempted to say that a lot of the terrain that philosophy and critical thought traverse doesn’t make sense until you’re old enough that you can apply some experience to it (both life experience and the experience of thinking about many things as a scholar or intellectual) but that’s a rather phenomenological position in and of itself. More to the point, it’s also untrue in the sense that all of the intellectuals that Bakewell discusses thought their characteristic thoughts with great energy and perception as young people. But I cannot think of myself around the age of 20 or even in my late 20s and readily see how I could have understood in any deeper sense what all of this was fully about.
Bakewell does a marvelous job talking about her own readings—and frustrations with—many of the works of the authors she covers.
The late chapter on Merleau-Ponty is terrific. I previously knew very little of his thinking, so maybe I was taken with the explanation here more than someone who is familiar with him would be. On the flip side of things, Camus gets pretty seriously elbowed out of the whole story, which is interesting. I get the sense that Bakewell thinks that Camus doesn’t really fit on the philosophical family tree the way that Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty do, and that he only becomes narratively salient to a history of personal and political entanglements between existentialists and phenomenologists when he had his break with Sartre after Sartre’s rather depressing turn to dogmatic (and pro-Soviet) Marxism.
One odd thing about that turn, it seems to me, is that it kept existentialism from becoming one of the acknowledged wellsprings of a certain kind of libertarian-conservative mindset in the US. This is not a knock on existentialism on my part—it’s just very striking to read through Bakewell’s multi-part definition of existentialism and think of the resemblances between it and the sort of stew of Oakeshott, Kirk, Burke and Hayek that high-toned conservative thinkers in the US in the 1970s and 1980s set their sights too. Or for that matter, there’s also some clear resemblances to American pragmatism (which Bakewell notes once or twice), which makes me think I need to re-read Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. I kept thinking about why existentialism seemed so disgraced or set aside by the time I was in college in the 1980s (but maybe it’s making a comeback lately?) is explained by nothing more than Sartre’s appalling record of political error from the 1950s onward.
I kind of wish Bakewell had spent more time with existentialism’s side currents and consequences, with the cultural and literary works it influenced outside of the core French creators, with thinkers like Senghor, Memmi and Fanon (who show up late in the book), or with writers like Wright and Baldwin Unlike her extraordinary book on Montaigne, the desire to cover the entire “cafe” leads to a kind of looseness of focus at times—I don’t always get a really profound sense of the situated lives of all of these different people. Husserl and Heidegger feel more in focus, interestingly, than Sartre and Beauvoir—but maybe that’s because there is so much to say about Sartre and Beauvoir but also because so much has been said.
I think if you were looking for a clear explanation of phenomenology and existentialism, you could read the first quarter or so of the book, up to its initial engagement with Heidegger, and stop there. If you want to understand how existentialism went from being the hottest trend in philosophy to being regarded as laughably outmoded (again, with a possible turn of the wheel right now), you’d have to get to the end of the book.