Review of At The Existentialist Café

My last two reviews in these pages were by two women writers, whom I, as a reader, have described as existentialist in their approach by providing a genuine insight into what it means to be a human being in the ordinary cut and thrust of everyday living, as well as providing us with interesting stories. Existentialism is, then, a comprehensive approach that emphasises the actual experiences of living as reflected upon by those who belong to this school of thinking.  It emphasises individuality, freedom and responsibility.  We do not receive our individuality or selfhood complete or fully shaped.  Rather, the existential call is to make, form, shape or create our essential "self."  This is the burden of freedom, according to Jean-Paul Sartre.  In this regard, he underlined one central tenet of existentialism, that is, that "existence precedes essence," that we simply don't have a predetermined purpose or essence.  We are condemned, as Sartre put it, to exercise our freedom through making responsible choices, standing up for authentic values, committing to causes, establishing our own meaning in our lives, and discovering our own values, even if they differ from those of others.  All of this is a heavy burden which we are called on to carry.  No one else can carry it for us.  If we let others do so, and make poor excuses for our failure, we are guilty of "bad faith" in ourselves.  An important point to make here is that many existentialist authors turned to novels and plays, as human experience is hard to reflect adequately in learned or abstract prose.  Of course, they did write the learned and abstract prose, too, but it was always by way of profound reflection on their experiences.  Sartre wrote at least 5 novels, the most read of which is Nausea (1938). 

There are many introductions to existentialism, such as that of Iris Murdoch, who introduced the writings of Sartre to the Anglophone world way back in the early 1950s.  She was attracted by his emphasis on freedom and individual responsibility, both of which created meaning for the individual.  She described existentialism as a philosophy one could "live in" or "inhabit."  There are many other weighty introductions, but all make quite a heady and tortuous read for anyone not interested in philosophy qua philosophy.  The book I am about to review here has a most attractive and interesting title: At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails. (Chatto & Windus, 2016).  It was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2016 by The New York Times and was authored by the English philosopher Sarah Bakewell.  It reads like a day-to-day account of the lived lives and reflections thereon of Jean-Paul Sartre, his life companion Simone de Beauvoir and many others.  Indeed, it is a story of real people, well told, as if we are sharing cocktails with these two and other major existentialists, such as Camus (though he hated the term "existentialism"), Heidegger, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, and many more.  This is a light but incisive and entertaining introduction.  It was also serialised and read on BBC Radio 4 soon after its publication.  I could not recommend a more engaging and accessible introduction to what existentialism truly entails.

Bakewell opens her book with the big questions of life being discussed over cocktails at a moment in time, the very root of existentialism, at "the turn of 1932 - 3, when three young philosophers (Sartre, de Beauvoir and Aron) were sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the Rue du Montparnasse in Paris, catching up on gossip and drinking the house specialty, apricot cocktails." (p. 1) We readers are invited to sit with them, as it were, and digest their thoughts over 355 pages.  Raymond Aron, according to Bakewell, pointed to their drinks and said, "You can make philosophy out of this cocktail." (p. 3)  He had just returned from studying in Germany, where he had encountered and read much of Husserl's thinking on a new field, or even a new approach in philosophy, named phenomenology.  At the time, de Beauvoir was 25 and Sartre and Aron were 27.  “Phenomenology,” argued Aron, demanded a close scrutiny of the elements of everyday life, “the things themselves.”  In other words, Husserl recommended that direct and immediate experience of phenomena was infinitely superior to pre-conceived notions, theoretical assumptions or subjective interpretations of those things.  Phenomenology is about how things appear to the raw experience or consciousness of the perceiver. The more abstract, theoretical and subjective had to be "bracketed out" or ignored as far as possible, as Husserl declared.  "The things themselves" are not necessarily the physical objects themselves, but rather the way those objects are given to us in experience.  This, then, includes not only sensory perception but also the way we experience time, emotions and other aspects of consciousness.

And so, in short, according to Bakewell, phenomenology became the jumping off point for existentialism.  In the world of Descartes and most modern philosophy, the "I" is the objective observer of reality.  It is in this sense generic, and could apply to anyone, but the "I" as used in existential literature from Kierkegaard onwards is the anguished and anxious "I".  It is the suffering subject we relate to as we engage with the central character or protagonist in the creative writings of Dostoevsky, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus and many of the novelists and thinkers I have reviewed in these pages.  They all cut life down to its bare essentials and deal with the big issues of life, those issues that make us ponder our meaning and significance in the world.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume saw the human person or self as a mere "bundle of perceptions" (the generic "I" of the objective observer) while existentialists like John-Paul Sartre and others would see the selfhood of individuals as "bundles of fleshly urges." (The angst-ridden and super-anxious "I" of Kierkegaard and his more modern kindred spirits).  This comparison, to my mind, gets at the heart of true existential philosophy. Bakewell's text is alive with relevant and striking quotations and allusions.  For example, she instances the character called Boris in Sartre's novel The Reprieve, who muses about his insignificance in the scheme of things thus: "How many omelettes will I manage to eat before I am killed in this war?" (Quoted p. 124).  We can really imagine a soldier pondering that question over a hurried breakfast. 

For Sartre, nothing in the world happens out of necessity.  Everything is contingent or random.  In Nausea, the protagonist Roquentin is frightened by the outrageous "this-ness" of things, that is by the sheer contingency and randomness of things in his quotidian world.  The nausea is that malaise that happens to us in the face of that randomness.  Again, let's remember that Sartre fought in the Resistance during World War Two, and when he spoke and wrote about the "nothingness" of existence, he would have been referring to the obvious disappearances of people.  Speaking of how two attractive Czech women disappeared from their usual spot in the Café Flore: "It was unbearable to see their empty places - it was precisely nothingness." (p. 146)

A central word in existentialism is Angst or anxiety.  Anxiety abounded during the time Sartre and de Beauvoir were writing, a deep abyss at the heart of humanity, traceable back to Kierkegaard when modern writers dicuss existentialism.  Indeed, it lies at the very heart of the existential approach to psychotherapy today.  While Karl Jaspers spoke about "limit situations" (Grenzsituationen), Irvin Yalom speaks about "ultimate concerns," a term he borrowed from Paul Tillich through his existentialist mentor Rollo May.  I have discussed the contribution of Yalom to existential psychotherapy in these posts before.  Basically, Yalom believes that the therapist will eventually confront the issues of (i) death and dying, (ii) freedom, (iii) isolation and (iv) meaninglessness with each individual client.  All these issues are dealt with in Bakewell's book.  She also discusses the early contribution of Swiss psychiatrists Drs Medard Boss and Ludwig Binswanger who answered Sartre's call that therapists must treat patients as individuals struggling with questions of meaning and choice rather than a mere set of symptoms. 

She also discusses the contribution of Heidegger to existentialism in a conversational way, as well as examining his probably Nazi links.  Another interesting fact is her discussion of Hannah Arendt's romantic relationship with this German philosopher and her changing views of him and his philosophy over her lifetime.  Another factor that concerned most existentials of this period was that of being engaged or "engagé" as Sartre put it, that is an openness to commitment to action, to see your words and thoughts come alive in political and social activities.  Arendt criticized Heidegger for his lack of social and political commitment in the second half of his life.  Apparently, she felt that he had cut himself off from involvement and accused him of hiding away from criticism in his mountain retreat at Todnauberg.  For existentialists, commitment and engagement with life matter.  Another existentialist, Catholic this time, Gabriel Marcel styled such commitment or engagement as "disponibilité" or "availability" which implies what it actually says on the tin, to use a cliché.  For Marcel ethics must trump everything else in philosophy.  In Sartrian language, tolerance is not enough, it is never enough.  Engagement trumps tolerance.

However, I cannot finish this review without mentioning Bakewell's wonderful discussion of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.  She told her partner Sartre that she wanted to write what it was like growing up as a girl.  Here, if anywhere, Bakewell finds a totally new and brave voice "bracketting" assumptions in a Husserlian fashion, and looking with completely fresh eyes at her subject in a truly existentialist manner.

Bakewell's concluding words are encouraging, and stress that the existentialists demand rereading because they "remind us that human existence is difficult and that people often behave appallingly, yet they also show how great our possibilities are" (p. 319).  On the final page she tells us that thirty years ago she felt that the "ideas were the thing" but that now she has come to the opposite conclusion: "Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so." (p. 326)  Wouldn't you, like me, love to have an apricot cocktail with Sarah Bakewell somewhere in Paris?  You'd never know, but we might discuss some of the foregoing thoughts?