Insight Editions · No. 43
At the Existentialist Café
Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Sarah Bakewell
Sarah Bakewell's group biography traces phenomenology and existentialism through the lives, ideas, political choices, and relationships of Sartre, Beauvoir, Heidegger, Husserl, and their contemporaries.
A study guide to At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
How the argument builds
- The spark (Ch 1-3). A cocktail starts it all: Husserl's "to the things themselves" and Heidegger's question of Being.
- The test (Ch 4-6). 1933: Heidegger's Nazi rectorship against Jaspers's communication and Husserl's "heroism of reason"; the rescue of Husserl's archive.
- The flowering (Ch 5, 7). Nausea, the Occupation, Being and Nothingness: radical freedom and bad faith; liberation and fame.
- The divergence (Ch 8-10). Heidegger turns to technology and letting-be; Beauvoir writes The Second Sex; Merleau-Ponty builds a philosophy of the body.
- The quarrels (Ch 11). Communism and friendship: Sartre breaks with Camus, Aron and Merleau-Ponty.
- The legacy (Ch 12-14). Anti-colonialism, feminism, authenticity culture and Prague dissent; the departures; a verdict on what remains.
Argument map: two strands, a historical test, three divergent paths, one verdict.
Chapter guide
| Ch | Title | Core content |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sir, What a Horror, Existentialism! | Apricot cocktails; 1945 fame; nine-point definition |
| 2 | To the Things Themselves | Husserl, intentionality, the epoché |
| 3 | The Magician from Messkirch | Heidegger, Being, Dasein, Davos 1929 |
| 4 | The They, The Call | 1933; das Man; Jaspers; Husserl's death |
| 5 | To Crunch Flowering Almonds | Nausea; Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty; the contract |
| 6 | I Don't Want to Eat My Manuscripts | Munich; rescue of the Nachlass; life-world; Stein |
| 7 | Occupation, Liberation | Camus; Being and Nothingness; bad faith; America |
| 8 | Devastation | Heidegger's turn; Jaspers; Levinas; Sartre meets Heidegger |
| 9 | Life Studies | The Second Sex; the gaze; Saint Genet; Flaubert |
| 10 | The Dancing Philosopher | Merleau-Ponty: body, fold, chiasm |
| 11 | Croisés comme ça | Communism; breaks with Camus and Merleau-Ponty; Hungary |
| 12 | The Eyes of the Least Favoured | Fanon; Wright; Colin Wilson; Patočka and Havel |
| 13 | Having Once Tasted Phenomenology | The deaths, 1959-2013 |
| 14 | The Imponderable Bloom | Verdict: freedom, technology, heroes |
Cast spine of the Café story.
Chronology at a glance.
Why biography is the argument.
Two paired vocabularies.
Memorable stations.
Legacy fork Bakewell chooses.
What the book is doing
Bakewell is not writing a textbook of theses. She is writing philosophy as a group biography of attention: who looked carefully at lived experience, who flinched under politics, who still offers tools for living with ambiguity. The apricot-cocktail scene is emblematic: a tip from Aron, a method from Husserl, and two young writers who decide to become philosophers of freedom.
Cast quick map
- Husserl: method of returning to the things themselves; teacher betrayed.
- Heidegger: brilliance of Being and Time; Nazi choice; silence that never heals.
- Sartre: freedom, bad faith, engagement; monstrous energies and real goods.
- Beauvoir: ambiguity, situation, gender, ethics that stay inhabitable.
- Merleau-Ponty: embodied perception; Bakewell's preferred lasting path.
- Camus: revolt and measure; friendship broken in public.
Reading order tip
Newcomers can start with Ch1 and Ch5 (cocktails), then Ch2 (method), then jump to Ch14 (verdict). Scholars can walk Ch3-4 (Heidegger), Ch7-8 (war), Ch11-12 (politics) in sequence.
Overview pad farm.
Sir, What a Horror, Existentialism!
Book arc preview from Ch1.
You can make philosophy out of this cocktail
Beauvoir, about twenty-five, and Sartre, twenty-seven, short, wall-eyed and magnetic, were home from provincial teaching posts (Le Havre and Rouen) when their friend Raymond Aron, back from Berlin, described phenomenology: forget the old puzzles about whether things are real, and describe the phenomena as they appear. Husserl's cry was "To the things themselves!"; Heidegger added the forgotten question of Being. "If you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!" Sartre "turned pale", bought Levinas's book on Husserl, tore its uncut pages open in the street, and arranged a year at the French Institute in Berlin for 1933-4. He came back with a blend: German method, Kierkegaard, and his own literary flair. The result was modern existentialism, "international in impact, but remained Parisian in flavour".
Figure 1.1: Sartre and Beauvoir around 1945, the "king and queen of existentialism".
Sartre's philosophy covered waiters, vertigo, shame, jazz, desire and "lots of sex", written like a novelist. Its centre was freedom: things and animals have natures; a human has none in advance. "Existence precedes essence": thrown into the world, I make myself through action, "always a work in progress".
Fame, 1945
On 28 October 1945 the Club Maintenant lecture was mobbed; chairs broke and people fainted ("Philosopher Sartre. Women swooned," wrote Time). It became Existentialism and Humanism, built around a former student torn between caring for his mother and joining the Free French. Priests, philosophers and his own inner voice could not decide for him. Sartre's answer: "You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent."
The Vatican put Sartre's complete works on the Index in 1948 (Beauvoir's Second Sex followed); Communists hated it too, since free individuals spoil determined history. Attacks only made it fashionable.
Saint-Germain nights
Figure 1.2: The Café de Flore in 1947 (Doisneau), where Sartre and Beauvoir wrote because it was warmer than their hotel rooms.
The precursors
| Kierkegaard (1813-55) | Nietzsche (1844-1900) | |
|---|---|---|
| Style | A goader who knocked walking companions into the gutter | Aphorist; philosophy as "involuntary memoir" |
| Target | Descartes' generic "I"; Hegel's Absolute Spirit | Christianity and traditional philosophy |
| Key idea | "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" | God is dead; affirm every moment |
| Answer | A leap of faith into the Absurd | Self-assertion without resentment |
| Sartre's take | Took "existence" and anxiety; rejected faith | Closer to his atheism |
The two nineteenth-century heralds and what Sartre took from each.
Legacy, decline, return
The Second Sex (1949) was the most life-changing existentialist book. Existentialism gave impetus to gay people, anti-colonial fighters and civil rights (Martin Luther King read Sartre, Heidegger and Tillich), and in 1968 the slogans ("It is forbidden to forbid") echoed it. On 20 May 1968 Sartre addressed 7,000 students at the occupied Sorbonne. About 50,000 people followed his funeral on 19 April 1980.
Bakewell bought Nausea at sixteen for its Dalí cover, stared at a tree in Reading's gardens, played truant, studied philosophy at Essex and dropped out of a Heidegger PhD. By the 1980s structuralists had declared experience "shop-girl metaphysics" (Lévi-Strauss). Rereading Merleau-Ponty decades later, she found the existentialists newly relevant to surveillance, data-farming and anxiety of choice: they asked "what are we? and what should we do?"
- Concern with individual, concrete existence.
- Human being differs from things: I am what I make myself; I am free,
- therefore responsible,
- which brings anxiety.
- But freedom is always within situations.
- I am passionately engaged in projects.
- So existence is ambiguous: bounded yet transcendent.
- Phenomenological existentialists offer no rules, only description of lived experience,
- aiming to awaken us to more authentic lives.
Her method borrows Iris Murdoch's "inhabited philosophy" and Merleau-Ponty's "Life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life", with Being and Time and Being and Nothingness "chopped in shards ... like chocolate chips in a cookie". The story is full of quarrels: Heidegger against Husserl, Sartre against Camus, Merleau-Ponty and Marcel, and Koestler punching Camus in the street.
To the Things Themselves
Phenomenology ignition.
The watchmaker gone mad
Sartre spent 1933-4 in Berlin reading Husserl, becoming "a real little Buddha" on beer and dumplings, but never met him. Husserl lectured with meticulous gestures ("a watchmaker gone mad"), and joked that his philosophy was like the boyhood pocketknife he sharpened until only the handle was left. Born in 1859 in Prossnitz, Moravia, to a Jewish family (he converted to Lutheranism), a sleepy schoolboy except in mathematics, he was converted to philosophy in Vienna (1884-6) by Franz Brentano, an ex-priest who urged students to criticise the past and be methodical. Logical Investigations (1900-1) and Ideas (1913) brought him to Göttingen and then Freiburg.
Figure 2.1: Edmund Husserl in 1932, founder of phenomenology.
1916 was terrible: his son Wolfgang was killed at Verdun, aged twenty. Husserl worked through depression, running a "laboratory" of assistants who taught "phenomenological kindergarten" (Edith Stein's phrase) and transcribed his tiny Gabelsberger shorthand, which he rewrote into new works each time. He always chose the topic that seemed "most distressing and uncertain".
Describe phenomena
The liberation is wide. Wine tasting is phenomenology. Music is melancholy or rising, as in The Lark Ascending. Mystical experience can be described without proving it. Medicine can take symptoms seriously: Oliver Sacks's leg, healed yet felt as "a wax model" in A Leg to Stand On, got therapy because the feeling counted. But rigour is demanded: not "How lovely!" but plaintive, dignified or sublime? And in theory the epoché neutralises the "isms", from scientism to fascism, giving phenomenology "a surprisingly revolutionary edge". Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist torn between psychology and philosophy, wrote a fan letter admitting he did not know what phenomenology was; Husserl answered, "You are using the method perfectly. Just keep it up."
Intentionality
From Brentano Husserl took intentionality (Latin in-tendere, to stretch towards): consciousness is always of or about something: loving something, judging something, dreaming of a watch-checking rabbit. Try thinking of nothing for two minutes; the mind forages "like a squirrel in a park". So the mind "hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness". Bracketing reality on both sides lets the philosopher study the dance in the middle.
The epoché sets aside both old puzzles and leaves the relation between them as the field of study.
Sartre outward, Husserl inward
Sartre's short essay on intentionality (begun in Berlin, published 1939) attacked the "digestive" model of mind, the spider dissolving its prey. Consciousness instead bursts out "to the tree", has "no 'inside'", and is thrown "into the dry dust of the world". To retreat into "a nice warm room with the shutters closed" is to cease to exist. Bakewell calls it "the most readable introduction to phenomenology ever written".
| Sartre's reading (1933-9) | Husserl's turn (1910s-20s) | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Outward, into the world | Inward, toward certainty |
| Model | A "great gust of wind" | Descartes' withdrawal; Augustine's "go back into yourself" |
| Consequence | No fixed nature: freedom | Transcendental idealism |
| Critics | Edith Stein left after a two-hour argument in 1917 |
Two directions for one idea.
Husserl's longing for certainty drew him toward Descartes; his Paris lectures of February 1929 (which Sartre and Beauvoir missed) ended with Augustine: "Truth dwells in the inner man." Later still he turned back outward to a shared "world". Edith Stein, whose thesis was on empathy, argued with him on the "dear old leather sofa" and resigned; barred from posts as a woman and a Jew, she converted after reading Teresa of Ávila. In 1918 her place went to Martin Heidegger, who "would prove far more trouble to the master".
The Magician from Messkirch
Heidegger rise and fall with Husserl.
The great master of astonishment
Being and Time opens with Plato's Sophist: we thought we understood "being" and "have now become perplexed". The most perplexing thing is that we are not perplexed: Leibniz's question, why is there anything rather than nothing, should simply make us say "wow!" (Steiner: Heidegger "put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious"). It was also a snub to Husserl's inwardness, despite the dedication "in friendship and admiration". The spark came from Brentano too, but his thesis on Aristotle's meanings of "being".
Bells, barrels and forest paths
Figure 3.1: Messkirch: the baroque church and, opposite, the sexton's house (middle of three) where Heidegger grew up.
Born on 26 September 1889, the son of the church sexton and master cooper, Martin rang the bells before 4 a.m. at Christmas and gathered wood for barrels. He did his homework on a forest bench and later titled books Holzwege (Forest paths) and Wegmarken (Trailmarks). An old townsman remembered: "He was the smallest, he was the weakest ... the most useless. But he was in command of all of us." He studied divinity, then borrowed Husserl's Logical Investigations from the library and kept it for two years. He married Elfride Petri in 1917; their son Hermann later revealed that his real father was a doctor with whom Elfride had had an affair.
Heidegger courted the grieving Husserl from 1916 ("O your youth, what a joy it is to me"), signed letters "Dear fatherly friend", got Marburg (1924, a "foggy hole", where he had an affair with his student Hannah Arendt), and in 1928 succeeded to Husserl's Freiburg chair. Elfride had a hut built at Todtnauberg, where he wrote with "the calm rhythm of a man chopping wood".
Figure 3.2: Heidegger's hut at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest.
In tailored peasant dress (students called it his "existential" look), he raised "a breathtaking swirl of questions" into "dark clouds of sentences from which the lightning flashed" (Gadamer): the "little magician from Messkirch". Hans Jonas found him more exciting than Husserl "because he was much more difficult to understand". Arendt: "Thinking has come to life again ... one can perhaps learn to think."
The vocabulary of Being
| Term | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Ontological difference | Being (Sein) is not itself a being (Seiende) | Point at huts and clouds saying "Look: being!" and nobody learns |
| Dasein | "Being-there": the entity whose Being is a question for it; avoids "man", "mind", "soul" | Me, as starting point, but not via psychology or biology ("ontical" sciences) |
| Being-in-the-world | Everyday, busy involvement, not contemplation | Hammering, not staring at a "Hammerding" |
| Care, concern | Dasein's Being is involvement, including neglect ("deficient" modes) | Building a bookcase |
| Ready-to-hand / present-at-hand | Equipment in use vs object stared at | The hammer working vs the broken hammer |
| Mitsein | Being-with others; the "with-world" | The boat on the shore: useful to someone |
| Thrownness | We find ourselves already in the world | The starting point for everything |
Heidegger's key terms in Being and Time as Bakewell introduces them.
Why can't he speak plainly? Günter Grass mocked "spuds forgetful of Being". Steiner thought Heidegger wanted his strangeness felt, like Brecht's estrangement effect; Bakewell compares him to Gertrude Stein as an experimental modernist. But he insisted he was a philosopher out to "destroy the history of metaphysics".
When things break
The hammerhead flies off; the computer freezes; Nicholson Baker's stapler "slumps toothlessly". The ready-to-hand flips into the present-at-hand and reveals "the obstinacy of that with which we must concern ourselves". On a larger scale everything can come apart, as in Hofmannsthal's Letter of Lord Chandos (1902), where a man stares for hours at a mossy stone: a breakdown of Being-in-the-world. In questions and discomfort philosophy begins, and Germany in the 1920s was full of both.
Rupture with Husserl
Figure 3.3: Heidegger and Husserl in 1921, before the break.
Husserl read Being and Time at Lake Como, writing "?!" in the margins. Heidegger privately called him "ludicrous" ("No one knows what [phenomenology] is," he told Jaspers in 1923). Their joint Encyclopaedia Britannica article (1927) collapsed. For Husserl, Heidegger never left the "natural attitude" and was doing mere "anthropology" (1931); for Heidegger, Husserl was stuck in the contemplative mind. Bakewell judges Heidegger "ignoble" but Husserl too possessive: "the more revolutionary a philosophy is, the more it is likely to be revolted against."
On 24 July 1929, his Freiburg inaugural, "What Is Metaphysics?", opened with a deadpan joke and analysed moods: in anxiety the world turns unheimlich, "not homely", revealing "the total strangeness of beings" and the question: why beings rather than nothing? A listener nearly fainted with ecstasy. Husserl decided Heidegger's philosophy must be fought and "rendered impossible forever".
The They, The Call
Being and Time social self.
Anaesthesia
Visitors found Weimar Germany impoverished and polarised (Simone Weil saw bowler-hatted old men begging). Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933; the Enabling Act followed on 23 March, then surveillance laws, Jewish boycotts and dismissals, the banning of trade unions, and book burnings on 10 May. Sartre in Berlin "rediscovered irresponsibility" until rallies and street brutality gave him nightmares of blood on bowls of mayonnaise. Sebastian Haffner wrote of "a kind of anaesthesia": murders committed "like schoolboy pranks". Bruno Bettelheim noted that few will risk their lives over raising an arm, yet that is how integrity erodes. Arendt later called the failure to think "the banality of evil".
Rector Heidegger
Arendt asked him in the winter of 1932-3 whether he was a Nazi; he angrily denied it, and they lost touch for seventeen years. In April 1933 he became rector, joined the party, gave pro-Nazi speeches, was reportedly at the Freiburg book burning, and in his rectoral address of 27 May turned questioning and freedom into "labour, military and knowledge service" for the Volk. He planned Nazi philosophy camps at Todtnauberg. The Black Notebooks (published 2014) confirm anti-Semitism held "by conviction". Enforcing the April laws hit Husserl, who lost his emeritus rights; his wounded son Gerhart lost his Kiel chair. The Heideggers sent only flowers and a cool letter, and the 1933 edition of Being and Time dropped the dedication to Husserl.
Heidegger's Nazi years in brief.
Jaspers: limit situations and the art of talk
Figure 4.1: Karl Jaspers in the 1930s, philosopher of "limit situations" and of communication.
Jaspers built on Kierkegaard: Grenzsituationen (limit situations) such as life-or-death choices, mortality or guilt box us in while pushing us to the edge of experience; they cannot be solved abstractly, only lived. Chronically ill and short of breath, he budgeted his energy, thought in partnership with his Jewish wife Gertrud, and held that "uncommunicativeness in a philosopher is virtually a criterion of the untruth of his thinking". He and Heidegger became friends from 1920 and planned a joint journal, but in March 1933 Heidegger said "One must get in step"; at a Heidelberg speech Jaspers sat with legs outstretched "and did not budge"; over dinner Heidegger praised Hitler's "wonderful hands", and he left Gertrud almost without a goodbye. Jaspers never forgave that, and later blamed himself for not confronting his "intoxicated" friend.
Death, resoluteness and the Volk
For Heidegger, Dasein is historical and local, not universal. Being and Time (only its first part was finished) points to Time as the meaning of Being: authentic Being-towards-death and "anticipatory resoluteness", in which Dasein finds "its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up". These pages "sound most fascistic"; Hans Jonas later recognised the "Blood-and-Soil" undertones he had missed in seminars. Yet the same ideas could have founded anti-totalitarian heroism.
Heidegger resigned on 14 April 1934, restored the Husserl dedication in 1935, and blamed his error on "Dummheit". In fact in August 1934 he proposed a Nazi philosophy academy; in Rome in 1936 he wore the party pin while sightseeing with his part-Jewish student Löwith; in 1937 he refused to strike a damning sentence from a political report on his assistant Max Müller ("Don't hold it against me"). Müller replied: "The point is my existence." Arendt and Sartre both concluded he had "no character": the philosopher of Mitsein and solicitude showed none. Rejecting a Berlin chair in 1934, he cited a farmer neighbour's silent shake of the head and the forest where "all things become solitary and slow", rural kitsch that suited the regime.
Figure 4.2: A bench at Todtnauberg: "In thinking all things become solitary and slow."
| Person | Response to Nazism | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Arendt | Arrested 1933; fled via a house with doors in two countries | Prague, Geneva, Paris, New York |
| Cassirer | Left Hamburg in May 1933 | Oxford, Göteborg, Yale; died 13 April 1945 |
| Jaspers | Stayed; lost post in 1936 over his marriage | Lived cautiously in Heidelberg |
| Husserl | Refused a Californian post | Warned of Europe's crisis; died 1938 |
Leaving or staying, 1933-8.
Husserl, denied travel, sent a letter to the 1934 Prague congress calling for scholars' Selbstverantwortung (answerability to themselves), and in Vienna and Prague in 1935 demanded a "heroism of reason" against irrationalist mysticism. The Crisis of the European Sciences appeared in Belgrade in 1936. After a fall he declined, saying "Philosophy has to be built up all over again from the beginning", and died on 27 April 1938: "He died like a holy man." Malvine guarded his ashes and archive. Heidegger, pleading illness, skipped the funeral.
Uncanniness, read twice
Bakewell lingers on the word unheimlich. Haffner used it for the mood of 1933, when ordinary life carried on beside arrests and beatings. Heidegger used it in Being and Time for Dasein's sense of not being at home in the world, the anxiety that lets the call of conscience break through. In his 1935 lectures he translated the Antigone chorus ("many things are uncanny, but nothing more uncanny than man") so as to make humans the violent, boundary-breaking beings who tear open a path for Being. That reading fitted a regime that liked violence, and Bakewell notes how easily his vocabulary could be bent either way.
| Heidegger concept | Reading towards resistance | Reading towards conformity |
|---|---|---|
| Das Man | Refuse the crowd raising its arm | Replace "the they" with "the Volk" |
| Call of conscience | My own self says no | Destiny calls me to serve |
| Being-towards-death | Courage to risk one's life against tyranny | Readiness to sacrifice for the nation |
| Resoluteness | Decisive dissent | Decisive commitment to the leader |
Jaspers's world history
Jaspers looked outward where Heidegger looked homeward. His idea of an Axial Age, when Confucius, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers all appeared, treats wisdom as a shared human inheritance, not a German possession. When the Nazis came, he reached for comparison: "It is just like 1914," he told Gertrud, recognising the same intoxication. He also prized Marcel's kind of vigilance: the philosopher who stays awake and sounds the alarm. These are the virtues Bakewell will reward at the end of the book: breadth, conversation, openness to the stranger.
The Turn begins
By the mid-1930s Heidegger was shifting from resoluteness towards waiting and listening, the Kehre that Chapter 8 will follow. His refusal of the Berlin chair, framed as obedience to a farmer's silent head-shake, showed both sides at once: real attachment to the forest, and a self-image that made political judgement unnecessary. Arendt's verdict of "no character" sticks because the same man who described Mitsein so precisely could not perform the simplest acts of loyalty to his teacher.
Arendt's escape
Hannah Arendt's own 1933 shows how fast the trap closed. She had been gathering evidence of Nazi anti-Semitism for Zionist contacts when she and her mother were arrested and held for eight days; a sympathetic officer released them. She fled across the Czech border through a house that had a front door in Germany and a back door in Czechoslovakia, then went on to Prague, Geneva and Paris, and finally to New York. Her later concept of the banality of evil grew from watching friends and colleagues adapt to the regime, and from Heidegger's example, which she spent the rest of her life trying to understand.
To Crunch Flowering Almonds
Sartre & Beauvoir catch the method.
Lobsters and contingency
Sartre preached phenomenology to friends while teaching in Le Havre, and finished the intentionality essay and his studies of imagination (L'imagination, 1936; L'imaginaire, 1940). To study hallucination he had his friend Dr Daniel Lagache inject him with mescaline: snakes, vultures and crustaceans appeared, and for months lobster-like beings trailed him just out of sight. The imagery fed "The Room" (1937), The Condemned of Altona (1959) and "Foods" (1938), where a Naples walk reveals that nothing happens by necessity. Everything is contingent.
His notes, begun in a Métro notebook advertising suppositories, became the novel Melancholia. Roquentin, stuck in Bouville researching the Marquis de Rollebon, finds pebbles, doorknobs and beer glasses turning into nauseating lumps. In the park the "boiled leather" of a chestnut tree shows him that it is the tree's Being, its pointless thisness, that disturbs him.
Figure 5.1: A chestnut tree, emblem of raw, contingent Being in Nausea.
Relief comes only when the café plays "Some of These Days": each note follows necessarily, and for three minutes his movements flow. He leaves to write a book "beautiful and hard as steel". Sartre later found that ending too easy, and Beauvoir said the idea came from watching films, perhaps Chaplin or Keaton, not from music.
Figure 5.2: A record of "Some of These Days", the song that lends Roquentin a moment of necessity.
The argument of Nausea.
Slime and sources
Sartre's horror of the viscous (honey pooling, "moist and feminine sucking" in Being and Nothingness, 1943) expresses the horror of contingency and of facticity, whatever drags us down. He admitted in 1972 that he had never felt nausea spontaneously; he worked the feeling up. Nausea echoes Heidegger's "What Is Metaphysics?" and, strikingly, Levinas's 1935 essay "On Escape", with its oppressive il y a ("there is"). Bakewell knows of no claim of copying; both men reacted to Husserl and Heidegger, and Levinas, unlike Heidegger, thought we civilise ourselves by escaping brute Being. Sartre's method, he told Simone Jollivet in 1926, was to fix on an image until "a swelling, like a bubble" appeared. Beauvoir pushed him to add detective-story suspense; the culprit turned out to be contingency. Gallimard rejected Factum on Contingency as a title and proposed Nausea, published April 1938.
| Born | Childhood | Stance toward the bourgeoisie | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sartre | 21 June 1905 | Father dead at one; adored, then "ugly" after a haircut; bullied in La Rochelle | Loud rebel |
| Beauvoir | 9 January 1908 | Strict mother; barred from the ENS | Furious rebel |
| Merleau-Ponty | 14 March 1908 | Father dead 1913; happy, loved | At ease, "why not?" |
Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty
In the 1927 general philosophy exams Simone Weil came first, Beauvoir second and Merleau-Ponty third. "Merloponti" was charming and untroubled: "he is not violent, and the kingdom of God is for violent people," Beauvoir wrote; "his tranquillity offended me." He became a brother figure. Her friend Elisabeth ("Zaza") fell for him, but her mother threatened to expose a secret about his mother's fidelity, so he withdrew. Zaza died at twenty-one, probably of encephalitis, and Beauvoir always blamed bourgeois hypocrisy.
Figure 5.3: Simone de Beauvoir as a child, already rebelling against bourgeois propriety.
Beauvoir's novel L'invitée (She Came to Stay, 1943) fictionalised the trio with Olga Kosakiewicz. It concentrated on desire, jealousy and embodiment, which Merleau-Ponty praised: "this ability of yours to put body and soul into living an idea". She was a virtuoso marveller; Sartre forced himself ("It's a table") to feel what came naturally to her.
The contract
Beauvoir met Sartre's clique in 1929 and became "Castor". On a Tuileries bench, beside a trapped cat, Sartre said: "Let's sign a two-year lease." Their relationship was necessary, others contingent, with full honesty promised (only partly kept); it ceased to be sexual by the late 1930s and lasted until 1980. Bakewell judges it gave Beauvoir what she needed. She wanted to eat the world ("crunch flowering almond trees") and filled her flat with souvenirs. Sartre wanted to leave no trace: he preferred skiing to hiking, dreamed of waterskiing, and gave away books and money "like a hand grenade". Those two styles mirror phenomenology's two sides, gathering phenomena and the discarding epoché. Above all it was a writers' partnership, filmed in 1967 at two desks in rue Bonaparte with only a pen scratching.
Freedom from things, freedom through things
Bakewell's portrait of Sartre and Beauvoir as opposite temperaments runs through the rest of the book. Sartre wants to leave no trace: no possessions, money spent at once, books given away, pipe and pen "exiles in my hands". Beauvoir wants to gather everything: souvenirs, diaries, walks, the taste of the world. In Being and Nothingness Sartre describes trudging uphill behind an unnamed companion, plainly Beauvoir: for him fatigue is an intrusion on freedom and he throws down his knapsack; for her the effort reveals the path afresh with every step. The same hillside, one might say, shows itself differently to each of them.
| Sartre | Beauvoir | |
|---|---|---|
| Possessions | Discard | Collect |
| Movement | Skiing, waterskiing: glide, leave nothing | Hiking, climbing: feel the ground |
| Body | Disgust at the viscous | Appetite: "rainbow nougat of the sunset" |
| Amazement | Forced ("It's a table") | Natural, lifelong |
| Phenomenological side | Epoché: strip away | Description: pore over |
Merleau-Ponty's ease
Merleau-Ponty's calm came, he believed, from a childhood in which he was loved without having to earn it. Sartre later wrote that when love "is present, the dough of the spirits rises". Yet his father died in 1913 and the Zaza affair turned on a threatened scandal about his mother. Bakewell suggests his serenity was partly a practised art of smiling things off. Beauvoir resolved never to let his kind of comfort with tradition into her own life, even as she relied on his gaiety: "He bore so lightly the weight of the whole world that it ceased to weigh upon me too."
The contract in practice
Bakewell resists the common view that Beauvoir was bullied into the open relationship. A bourgeois marriage would not have protected her from jealousy, and the arrangement gave her a full sexual life and, above all, a writers' partnership. Sartre pushed her: "You don't want to become a housewife, do you?" Colette Audry said their closeness was so intense "it made others who saw it sad not to have it". Their private joke about the zoo's sea elephant kept them laughing for fifty years.
I Don't Want to Eat My Manuscripts
Pre-war work under threat.
Anything rather than war?
With Mussolini in power since 1922, Stalin's terror and the Spanish Civil War from 1936, France, which had lost about 1.4 million soldiers in 1914-18, leaned pacifist. Roger Martin du Gard wrote "Anything rather than war!... even Fascism in France!" and Beauvoir agreed. Sartre, who had seen the Nazis, did not: "I have no wish to be made to eat my manuscripts. I don't want Nizan to have his eyes gouged out with teaspoons." Sartre's The Reprieve (1945), set during 23-30 September 1938, borrows the stream of consciousness of Dos Passos and Woolf to pan across "a hundred million free consciousnesses". It marks his growing interest in individuals swept up by history. Personally he sought in Heidegger "a wisdom, a heroism, a holiness", as Athenians after Alexander turned to the Stoics and Epicureans.
Sartre's turn towards history
The Reprieve marks the first sign of a shift that defines Sartre's later career. Its panoramic method, cutting from one consciousness to another across France, Germany and Europe while Hitler speaks on the radio, shows individuals each "constructing its destiny on its own responsibility" yet swept along by events none of them controls. Boris, modelled on Bost, counts how many omelettes he will eat before dying. Gascoyne in Paris and Orwell's George Bowling in Coming Up for Air shared the same dread: war reduces the individual to insignificance. Sartre's answer was to look for a philosophy that was "a wisdom, a heroism, a holiness", and he found its first draft in Heidegger.
Three suitcases
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 29 Aug | Father Herman Van Breda sees about 40,000 shorthand pages, 10,000 transcribed pages and 2,700 books |
| 19 Sept | Sister Adelgundis Jägerschmidt takes three suitcases by train to the Lioba convent in Konstanz; her sisters refuse to smuggle them into Switzerland |
| 22 Sept | Van Breda collects them and takes a night train to Berlin |
| 24 Sept | Locked in the Belgian embassy safe |
| Nov | Moved to Louvain by diplomatic channel |
| June 1939 | Malvine arrives with 60 boxes of books, the urn and the Brentano portrait |
Malvine, 78, classed as Jewish despite her Protestant faith, carried on "as if the Nazi regime did not exist". A Prague move had been considered, luckily not made: Brentano's papers in Prague left on the last civilian plane in March 1939 for Harvard's Houghton Library, and those left behind were thrown out of the window. Munich (29-30 September) let the urgency lapse; Daladier reportedly muttered "Les cons!" at the cheering crowd.
Figure 6.1: Father Van Breda with Malvine Husserl, Louvain, 1940.
The archive survived, mostly in Louvain, and has produced the Husserliana edition. Rüdiger Safranski likened the Nachlass to Lem's thinking sea in Solaris. Husserl wrote that "the most important part of my life's work still lies in my manuscripts".
Life-world versus home
Merleau-Ponty spent the first week of April 1939 in Louvain reading unpublished material for Ideas and the Crisis. Late Husserl had turned to the Lebenswelt, the unnoticed social, historical and bodily context of experience, including proprioception. Merleau-Ponty wondered whether Heidegger had influenced this; Uexküll's Umwelt is another candidate.
Two answers to the 1930s crisis.
War
In August 1939 at Juan-les-Pins, with Nizan and Bost, the friends heard of the Nazi-Soviet pact (23 August), a blow to Communist sympathisers. Sartre, half-blind, would serve at a weather station, as Heidegger and Aron did. He reached Paris on 1 September as Germany invaded Poland and left from the Gare de l'Est; war was declared on 3 September. The archive moved to the Institut in January 1940, four months before bombs destroyed the university library for the second time. On 16 September 1940 an Allied raid on Antwerp shredded Malvine's container; Van Breda reports rescuing the urn.
The scale of the archive
The numbers explain why the rescue mattered. Husserl wrote in Gabelsberger shorthand, which few could read; only former assistants such as Eugen Fink and Ludwig Landgrebe could transcribe it. Van Breda's plan was to bring the transcribers and the papers together in Louvain, under the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, and to begin publishing. The result, the Husserliana, now runs to well over a hundred volumes of works, materials, documents and translations, and has kept researchers busy for over seventy-five years.
| Item | Quantity |
|---|---|
| Shorthand manuscript pages | about 40,000 |
| Typed or transcribed pages | about 10,000 |
| Books in the library | about 2,700 |
| Boxes moved to Louvain in 1939 | 60 |
| Husserliana: collected works volumes | 42 |
| Further materials, documents, translations | 56 volumes |
The many rescuers
Bakewell's account is a story of small courage by many people. Malvine Husserl stood her ground in Freiburg. Sister Adelgundis visited Husserl in defiance of rules against associating with Jews, and carried 40,000 pages by train. The Konstanz nuns sheltered the suitcases, though they would not smuggle them. Junior Belgian officials in Berlin agreed to hold the cases without the ambassador. Prague archivists put Brentano's papers on the last civilian plane out. And it was luck that the Antwerp raid destroyed Malvine's furniture rather than the manuscripts.
Merleau-Ponty's week
The week in Louvain shaped a whole philosophy. In the unpublished pages for Ideas II and the Crisis, Merleau-Ponty found Husserl writing about the living body, about others recognised as having "their personal surrounding world, oriented around their living bodies", and about the life-world as the ground of every science. That became the starting point of The Phenomenology of Perception (Chapter 10), which in turn passed Husserl's late thought to cognitive science. One of the book's "tumbling stage sets", a chance encounter that reorders a life, happened in a reading room in Belgium in the last spring of peace.
Occupation, Liberation
War years as furnace.
Phony war, defeat, captivity
During the drôle de guerre Beauvoir taught, blacked out her windows at the Hotel Danemark, and had affairs with students Nathalie Sorokine and Bianca Bienenfeld, which biographers treat as grooming. At a Brumath weather station Sartre wrote up to twelve hours a day: diaries, letters and the notes that became Being and Nothingness. Germany struck in May 1940. Bost was wounded; Nizan was killed near Dunkirk on 23 May; Merleau-Ponty never forgot a German lieutenant dying on the wire. Aron escaped to London; Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were captured.
Beauvoir fled with the refugees, then returned to a Paris full of awkward Germans. She signed the "repugnant" declaration that she was neither Jew nor Freemason, rescued maggoty pork, and read Hegel in the Bibliothèque nationale for comfort, with Kierkegaard as antidote. In Stalag 12D at Trier Sartre read Being and Time, which suited a defeated nation, and on 22 July 1940 wrote "I've begun to write a metaphysical treatise." In March 1941 he left on a medical pass for his eyes and never went back. Camp life had shown him unexpected comfort in physical solidarity; back in a Paris café, "I had rejoined bourgeois society."
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Sept 1939 | Phony war; Sartre at Brumath |
| May-June 1940 | Invasion; Nizan killed; Sartre a POW |
| 1941 | Sartre's release; "Socialisme et liberté" |
| 29 May 1942 | Yellow star decreed |
| 1942 | The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus |
| June 1943 | The Flies; Being and Nothingness |
| Aug 1944 | Liberation of Paris |
| Feb 1945 | Brasillach shot |
| Oct 1945 | Sartre's lecture; Les Temps modernes |
| 1945-7 | Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir tour the USA |
Living with the occupier
Sartre judged Beauvoir's compromises, then ate her black-market stews. His group Socialisme et liberté, merged with Merleau-Ponty's "Sous la botte", mostly wrote manifestos. Jean Pouillon lost a briefcase full of names, and it was handed in to a lost-property office. Small rebellions mattered: Paulhan's poems left on café tables, tricolour outfits on Bastille Day, deliberate rudeness (hard for the courteous Merleau-Ponty, who made his pupils rehang Pétain's portrait for their safety). Then holes opened in the city: a friend's empty flat with "German cigarette ends", and two Czech women missing from the Flore. Their empty places were "precisely, a nothingness".
Camus and the absurd
Figure 7.1: Albert Camus in 1935.
Camus introduced himself in 1943 at rehearsals of The Flies. He was raised in poverty and silence in Algiers; his father died in 1914, in the first months of the war, and Camus had tuberculosis. "A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility." The Stranger (1942) gives us Meursault, who kills an unnamed "Arab" "because of the sun". In The Myth of Sisyphus (its Kafka chapter dropped for the censor) a breakdown in routine raises the question why go on living? The answer is a decision: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Kierkegaard's Abraham lies behind it. Sartre and Beauvoir rejected absurdity: experience arrives already meaningful, as a football match is seen as football, and its collapse is a failure of intentionality, not a deeper truth. Sartre's review accused Camus of a Humean filtering-out of connections.
Being and Nothingness (June 1943)
The 665-page book slipped past the censors; William Barrett called it "a first draft for a good book of 300 pages". Like Being and Time it is unfinished: the promised ethics never came. Being divides into the en-soi and the pour-soi, an active nothingness "that goes out and plays soccer". Pierre's absence fills the café; a short wallet shows "the non-being of 200 francs". The motto: "I am nothing, therefore I am free." Freedom brings anguish, Kierkegaard's vertigo at the cliff; the gambler must renew his resolution at each casino. We build "guard rails against anguish": alarm clocks, blocking software called "Freedom", "I must reply to Simon".
Sartre's ontology of freedom in one picture.
| Work | Parable | Lesson |
|---|---|---|
| Sartre, The Flies (1943) | Orestes frees Argos and takes on guilt | Act freely and alone |
| Beauvoir, Useless Mouths | Besieged city keeps its "useless" people | Solidarity |
| Beauvoir, "Pyrrhus and Cineas" | "Why not rest now?" | Transcendence over immanence |
| Camus, The Plague (1947) | Dr Rieux does his job | Modest, realistic heroism |
Liberation and its accounts
On 23 August 1944, crossing a bridge to meet Camus at Combat, Sartre and Beauvoir ran from gunfire. Then came bells, bonfires and de Gaulle's parade: "the world and the future had been handed back to us."
Figure 7.2: Combat, 25 August 1944: the Resistance paper Camus edited.
Beauvoir refused to sign the clemency petition for Brasillach (sentenced 19 January, shot 6 February 1945); Camus opposed the death penalty outright. This set the lasting pattern: Camus's firm limits against Sartre and Beauvoir's means-ends calculations. "The war really divided my life in two," Sartre said; he moved towards Marxism and abandoned the ethics. Merleau-Ponty's "The War Has Taken Place" declared that everyone has dirty hands. Then came What Is Literature? and littérature engagée, Les Temps modernes (1945), The Blood of Others and Roads of Freedom.
Year of marvels, and America
Boris Vian spoofed "Jean-Sol Partre" arriving on an elephant. Cellar clubs, Juliette Gréco, Merleau-Ponty dancing, plaid shirts before black turtlenecks, American noir and Dos Passos: the culture was half American.
Figure 7.3: Boris Vian, trumpeter, novelist and chronicler of Saint-Germain.
Sartre toured in early 1945 (meeting Dolorès Vanetti), Camus in 1946 (finding no tragedy in America), and Beauvoir in 1947 (meeting Nelson Algren). All three were horrified by racial segregation. Richard Wright befriended them and moved to Paris. Americans recast existentialism as gloomy old Europe, an image that stuck; Arendt's 1946 essays tried to restore its German roots, which were awkward because of Heidegger.
Bad faith in everyday life
Bakewell takes care to block a cruel misreading. Sartre does not say class, race or gender are unreal; he says that for me, being in good faith means not using them as excuses. In "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (1945) he lists the excuses: my mother made me this way, my circumstances prevented it. Beauvoir would add gender to his list of powerful forces. Sartre's sympathy, Bakewell stresses, always lay with the oppressed side of any encounter, and "taking responsibility" was never a sermon for the poor.
| Term | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Nothingness | Consciousness as pure "aboutness" | Pierre's absence in the café |
| Anguish | Awareness of total freedom | Vertigo at the cliff edge |
| Bad faith | Pretending to be a thing | The waiter, Lucien the anti-Semite |
| Facticity | The given situation | Body, past, place, era |
| Transcendence | Going beyond the given by choice | The project |
| Situation | Facticity plus freedom | Even prison frames a choice |
The censors and the classics
How did a 665-page treatise on freedom, and plays about tyranny, pass German censorship? Bakewell suggests the forbidding title of Being and Nothingness discouraged inspection, and that classical settings (Orestes in Argos, a medieval siege, Pyrrhus) let writers speak in parable. The audience understood: in The Flies the plague of flies is the shame of a humiliated people, and Orestes accepts guilt in place of their shame. Jacques Berland's complaint in Paris-Soir was only that Sartre was "too much of an essayist".
Why America mattered
The trips changed the existentialists as much as they changed America. Sartre studied automation and workers; Camus saw funeral parlours and Times Square's smoking GI and found no tragedy anywhere; Beauvoir marvelled at mail chutes and slot machines, and met Nelson Algren. Above all, segregation horrified them, and the black writers they met (Wright first) found a philosophy that spoke to them. Meanwhile the American image of the existentialist as a gloomy figure over an espresso, a creation of the Partisan Review and the press, outlived the facts: the real Saint-Germain crowd wore plaid shirts and danced.
Small heroisms and the "humbug" regime
Bakewell suggests the Occupation taught Sartre and Beauvoir a lasting suspicion. Vichy's homilies about God, family and traditional virtue echoed the bourgeois talk Beauvoir had hated as a child, but now "backed by a threat of violence". Perhaps, she wondered, such talk was always secretly backed by force. From then on, fine-sounding bourgeois values were never to be taken at face value. Daily life demanded constant calibration: Beauvoir signed the declaration; Merleau-Ponty made his students rehang Pétain's portrait; Guéhenno gave Germans rude directions. Bakewell lists cycling trips into the "free" zone, crossing at night with a guide, sending bikes ahead, and coming back thin and accident-prone.
Camus and Kierkegaard
The deeper root of The Myth of Sisyphus is Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1843). Abraham is commanded to sacrifice Isaac and goes without complaint, and then, reprieved, returns with his son to ordinary life. What astonishes Kierkegaard is that return: having left all ordinary ethics, Abraham is still confident in his love. For Kierkegaard the story demands a leap of faith; Camus keeps the structure and drops the faith. One must go on, without ultimate meaning, and imagine Sisyphus happy. The third of Camus's "absurds", the play Caligula, pushes freedom and meaninglessness to their limit in a depraved emperor.
Engagement and its literature
What Is Literature? (1947-8) argued that writers hold real power and must use it: a littérature engagée. Les Temps modernes, launched in 1945 with Sartre as figurehead and Merleau-Ponty doing much of the editorial work, became the movement's voice. The Roads of Freedom novels show Mathieu moving from a naive do-as-you-like freedom towards one that faces history; in the third volume (1949) he defends a bell tower as France falls. The planned fourth volume, in which he would find freedom in Resistance solidarity, was never finished, another of Sartre's dangling second parts.
Devastation
Postwar devastation and Heidegger.
Ruins and a forest dialogue
Germany in 1945 held 14-15 million homeless Germans, over 12 million expellees on the roads, and missing soldiers, among them Heidegger's sons Jörg and Hermann, prisoners in Russia. Heidegger had dug trenches in late 1944 and hidden his manuscripts in a Messkirch bank vault and a church tower in Bietingen. He kept only work on Hölderlin (and loved Trakl). When the Allies reached Freiburg he led about forty refugees to Wildenstein castle, owned by the princess of Sachsen-Meiningen, his former lover; they made hay and gave recitals.
Figure 8.1: Burg Wildenstein above the Danube, refuge of Freiburg's philosophers in spring 1945.
His "Evening Conversation" in a Russian POW camp, dated 8 May 1945, has two prisoners healed by the forest's expanse and speaking of Verwüstung (devastation), a centuries-long desertification led by the Soviet "workers' paradise" and an over-calculated America. It is "Blood and Soil" mutterings mixed with real beauty. In November, with Frédéric de Towarnicki, he made a stormy night drive with failing headlights to collect the manuscripts, wagging a finger at the ill-fitting spare wheel: "Technik." Then came the waiting: a breakdown in February 1946 and treatment at Haus Baden, then the hut. He was ruled a Mitläufer in March 1949 and taught again from 1950.
The turn: technology, letting-be, clearing
Late Heidegger's two ways of relating to Being.
The Kehre was gradual, from resoluteness to waiting and receptiveness. Machenschaft or Technik challenges the earth to surrender energy, which is then stored as standing-reserve, whereas the old farmer "places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth". Man becomes deinos, the terrible one. The danger is ontological, not just bombs; yet "where danger is, grows / the saving power also" (Hölderlin). "The Question Concerning Technology" was delivered in Munich in 1953 with Heisenberg in the audience.
Heidegger's Van Gogh "peasant shoes" were, as Meyer Schapiro noted in 1968, probably Van Gogh's own; the Greek temple passage, making "visible the invisible space of air", still moves Bakewell.
Figure 8.2: The temple at Sounion: the kind of building Heidegger said "first makes the storm itself manifest".
No account given
Arendt called the Nietzsche lectures "babbling" and said nobody would "climb 1,200 metres to make a scene". Marcuse did, in April 1947, and got no apology. Heidegger's last letter equated the Holocaust with the expulsion of Germans, and Marcuse placed him "outside the dimension in which a conversation between men is even possible". Derrida (1988) argued that the silence obliges us to keep thinking.
| Jaspers | Heidegger | |
|---|---|---|
| War | Survived in Heidelberg; on a deportation list for April 1945 | Rector, then quiet professor |
| 1945 report | Called H. "unfree, dictatorial and uncommunicative"; no teaching yet | Banned until 1950 |
| Language | "Only a bridge" between people | "The house of Being" |
| On guilt | The Question of German Guilt (1946): acknowledge and communicate | Silence |
| Audience | Radio talks, wide public | Bühlerhöhe, Bremen Club, Munich ovation |
| Legacy | Little read | Dominant on the Continent |
Two friends after 1945. They never met again; Jaspers wished he had "relentlessly questioned you".
The ethical turn
Figure 8.3: Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the face of the Other comes before Being.
Levinas spent five years in a Jewish POW unit in Stalag 11B, where a stray dog greeting the men each evening restored their sense of being recognised. Existence and Existents (1947) recasts Being as the oppressive il y a; Totality and Infinity (1961), building on Buber, makes the face of the Other the source of ethical demand, more basic than Being. That is face-to-face, not Heidegger's shoulder-to-shoulder Mitsein. Simone Weil refused beds and food that others lacked and wrote The Need for Roots (no rights, only near-infinite duties); Marcel, shaped by answering families about missing soldiers in 1914-18, made our bond a "mystery". All three were believers. Heidegger, with no interest in ethics, was a mystic of another kind.
Language as house or bridge
The quarrel between Heidegger and Jaspers after the war turns on what language is for. For Heidegger, language is "the house of Being", the place where beings come to presence, and poetry its highest form; communication is a minor function. For Jaspers, language is a bridge between people, and a philosopher who cannot communicate shows the untruth of his thought. Heidegger's April 1950 letter, full of talk of waiting for an "advent", repelled Jaspers further. Bakewell asks who was the better communicator: Jaspers wrote radio talks for the widest public, yet Heidegger, by refusing to explain himself, drew a following among architects, ecologists, critics and deconstructionists that Jaspers never had.
Reading late Heidegger
Bakewell is honest about her divided response. Late Heidegger demands a "letting-go" of critical habits, the kind we grant to Wagner or Proust but rarely to philosophers. The temple passage changed how she sees buildings; the Van Gogh shoes leave her cold. Gadamer recalled that Heidegger could not talk until the other person "came onto the way of thinking he had prepared", though a glass of local wine helped. The deeper worry is that Dasein, recast as a clearing, has become "a forestry feature", too impersonal to act in the world just when Sartre was turning to action.
Weil and Marcel
Simone Weil's commitment was total: she slept on the floor because others had no beds and ate almost nothing because others were hungry. The Need for Roots argues that obligations come before rights. Gabriel Marcel's work answering families about missing soldiers in 1914-18 made him immune to war rhetoric and convinced him that our bond with others is a "mystery" beyond calculation. Bakewell notes that these ethical thinkers were religious, and that Heidegger, who left his faith, kept the mysticism and dropped the ethics.
Berlin, 1948
The Berlin Flies debate deserves attention because it tested existentialism's central claim. Christian and Marxist critics argued that a play urging Germans to shake off remorse came too soon after Nuremberg, while many perpetrators remained unpunished; it could be misused as a licence to forget. Sartre answered that existentialist freedom offers no excuses: freedom means total responsibility. Gert Theunissen countered that God gives humans an essence, to "loud approval ... several whistles, hilarity", and Alfons Steininger called the play nihilism. Bakewell concedes that the critics had a point: a doctrine that forbids excuses can still be twisted into one.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Germans made homeless | 14-15 million |
| Ethnic Germans expelled from the East | over 12 million |
| Price of a Berlin Flies ticket | 500 marks or two geese |
| Berlin winter, 1947-8 | down to -18°C for weeks |
| Airlift peak | about one plane a minute |
Heidegger's influence grows
While he refused to explain himself, Heidegger's reach widened. Banned from teaching until 1950, he lectured at the Bühlerhöhe sanatorium and the Bremen Club of shipping magnates, and his 1953 Munich lecture ended in an "ovation like a storm" (Bakewell wonders whether the audience was applauding its end). Calvin Schrag, arriving in Heidelberg in 1955, found Heidegger everywhere in the curriculum. The paradox Bakewell highlights is that the communicator, Jaspers, is little read, while the man who scorned communication shaped architecture, ecology, psychology and post-structuralism.
Life Studies
Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity.
"Write anything"
Giacometti's advice, Leiris's memoirs and Sartre's prodding launched what became The Second Sex: serialised in 1948, published in 1949, and shocking for its candour about sexuality. Camus thought it made the French male look ridiculous. Translated in 1953, earlier than Being and Nothingness or Being and Time, it became arguably the most influential existentialist book.
Figure 9.1: Simone de Beauvoir in 1947, as The Second Sex took shape.
French women had only just won the vote, and a wife could not open a bank account alone until 1965. Beauvoir treats "femininity" as myths, encrusted theories to be scraped off as in Husserl. The second half traces a life: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
| Stage | What is learned |
|---|---|
| Childhood | Fairy tales of princes and imprisoned princesses; boys grab the world, girls guard their dresses |
| Girlhood | Being "positioned in space" (Iris Marion Young, "Throwing Like a Girl", 1980) |
| Adolescence | Self-consciousness, unspoken genitals, fear of pregnancy |
| Marriage | Housework that accomplishes nothing, no real "action" |
| Adulthood | The world is fate and caprice, not a toolkit; few women feel "responsible for the universe" |
The battle of looks
Beauvoir read Hegel's master-slave dialectic, in which the slave adopts the master's viewpoint even on herself, until labour wakes her up. Sartre turned the same idea into scenes. In the park, a stranger crossing the lawn makes my world "drain off" towards him. At the keyhole, footsteps turn my look into "a look-looked-at", and I pretend to tie my shoelace. In No Exit (1944), "Hell is other people" means that the dead are frozen in others' gaze. Love becomes, in Iris Murdoch's words, a "battle between two hypnotists in a closed room".
Beauvoir's asymmetry: woman is Other for man, but not the reverse.
Bakewell ranks the book with Darwin, Marx and Freud as a re-evaluation of humanity, yet it never entered the pantheon. Reasons include sexism; Howard Parshley's 1953 translation, which cut much and rendered pour-soi as "her true nature in itself" (an exact reversal) and L'expérience vécue as "Woman's Life Today"; soft-focus nude paperback covers; and the bias against "applied" work. "All existentialism is applied existentialism."
Sartre's biographies
| Subject | Work | Crux |
|---|---|---|
| Baudelaire | 1947 study | Bullied schoolboy turns misery into verse |
| Genet | Saint Genet (1952), 700 pages | "You're a thief!" accepted and inverted |
| Himself | Words (begun 1953) | Stolen coins buy pastries for bullies; the "neurosis of literature" |
| Freud | Huston screenplay (1958-9) | Seven, then eight hours; uncredited |
| Flaubert | The Family Idiot (1971-2), 2,800 pages | The "idiot" child; consciousness at "the barrier of dreams" |
Life-writing as a search for the moment existence turns into essence.
Sartre ignores chronology and seeks primal scenes of freedom rather than sex, unlike Freud. Genet, a foundling caught at a drawer, takes the label "thief" and inverts it; his books turn degradation into the sublime, hence "saint". Sartre was really thinking of his own La Rochelle trick, after which he was "no longer someone who could be persecuted". Words became his ironic "farewell to literature", which in practice meant ending revision. The Family Idiot is nearly unreadable, though Beauvoir loved it; it has flashes, such as the dog confused by people's attention, which hint that Sartre now granted animals some consciousness. Huston found Sartre an overwhelming guest, and Sartre found Huston kept disappearing.
Myth, gaze and history
The first half of The Second Sex surveys biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, history and myth, showing how each has cast woman as the Other. The second half, "Lived Experience", follows the individual. Bakewell stresses that Beauvoir's analysis is not determinist: choices, influences and habits build up into a structure that is hard to break, but we remain existentially free within it. Sartre's "fundamental project" says something similar, but Beauvoir gives the weight of situation its full due: body, history and the expectations of others.
Translation and reception
The English history of the book is a cautionary tale. Parshley, a zoologist, cut about a tenth of the text, much of it the philosophy and the history of women; Toril Moi later documented how his choices obscured Beauvoir's existentialist vocabulary. Paperback covers of the 1960s and 1970s with soft-focus nudes made the book look like erotica, something that never happened to Sartre's books. A new full translation appeared only in 2009. Bakewell treats this as one reason the book never joined the canon of great re-evaluations beside Darwin, Marx and Freud.
Childhood as crux
What unites Beauvoir's study and Sartre's biographies is attention to childhood: the moment a situation is taken up and turned. Bakewell notes that Sartre's analysis is visibly marked by Beauvoir, and that his reluctance to accept anything as simply given, including sexual orientation, is where his theory of freedom overreaches. The Flaubert book's notion of le vécu, the lived but not fully transparent, shows Sartre himself drifting towards the ambiguity he had once resisted.
The Huston episode
The Freud screenplay shows Sartre's method colliding with Hollywood. He took the 1958 commission partly to pay a tax bill, then produced enough for a seven-hour film. Invited to Huston's house in Ireland to cut it down, he talked without pause in rapid French; Huston would leave the room and hear him still going. Sartre, for his part, complained that his host vanished mid-discussion until lunch. Asked to shorten the script, he cut some scenes and added others, delivering an eight-hour version. Huston fired him and made a conventional film (1962) with Montgomery Clift; Sartre asked not to be credited. Bakewell notes the attraction for Sartre: Freud, like himself, was a monumental thinker who kept revising his ideas, though Sartre never accepted the layered unconscious or the primacy of sex.
The Dancing Philosopher
Merleau-Ponty as embodied alternative.
Between psychology and philosophy
His career moved between the two disciplines: a thesis on behaviour (1938), a chair of philosophy at Lyons (1945), child psychology at the Sorbonne (1949), and the Collège de France (1952). He drew on gestalt theory and on neurological cases. His questions were deceptively simple: what happens when we pick up a cup, write with a pen, or walk through a door?
Figure 10.1: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenologist of the body and best dancer on the Left Bank.
The perceiving body
| Theme | Claim | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Embodiment | Even abstract thought uses sensory metaphor | "weighty" ideas, "heated" discussions |
| Gestalt | We perceive wholes already interpreted | A bag of sweets, not angles and shadows; optical illusions |
| Childhood | Perception is learned with appetite and reaching | Beauvoir's wish to crunch almond trees |
| Synaesthesia | The senses work together | "In the movement of the branch from which a bird has just left, we read its flexibility" |
| Proprioception | My body is me, not an object | I hunt for needles, not fingers; my arm is not "next to the ashtray" |
| Extension | Tools and clothes join the body schema | A car's width; the hat feather |
| Breakdown | Damage reveals the normal | The brain-injured Schneider; phantom limbs; Sacks's leg |
| Sociality | Others form us before we can doubt them | A baby mirrors a pretend bite |
The main themes of The Phenomenology of Perception.
Before him only Rousseau, among philosophers, took childhood seriously: we are partly "overgrown babies". Leaning on a desk, "my whole body trails behind [my hands] like a comet's tail." Solipsism is absurd: "I think, therefore other people exist," as Descartes could have said. Philosophy has always begun with a sealed adult self and then dressed it, doll-like, in body and world. Merleau-Ponty instead has us slide from womb to world in total immersion.
Consciousness as a vacuum, a clearing, or a crumpled pouch in the world's cloth.
Philosophy, for him, should neither reduce the mystery nor gaze at it in silence, but "put into words what is not ordinarily put into words", as Cézanne made the world new ("the continual rebirth of existence") and Montaigne put "a consciousness astonished at itself" at the centre.
The man
L'aurore sneered in 1952 that existentialism was "a cerebral way of dancing the boogie-woogie", and he was in fact the best dancer. He wore English suits, came late to morning coffee, and was a devoted father: he signed books to "Marianne, his favourite philosopher". He also flirted, "just too hasty" after drinks, and from Boxing Day 1947 had an affair with Sonia Brownell. It ended with a polite note from his wife Suzanne; Sonia married the dying Orwell on 13 October 1949. He practised English with the eccentric quiz book Meet Yourself.
Why perception is hard
Bakewell emphasises how strange Merleau-Ponty's starting point is. The great tradition from Descartes treated perception as a problem of how inner representations match an outer world. Merleau-Ponty asks how a body moving among things comes to grasp them: eyes that dart and converge, fingers that rub a cloth with a practised motion, a hand that knows where the pipe is before it knows where the arm is. The sense we have of a whole object, a bag of sweets or a pane of glass, depends on years of reaching, tasting and handling. Perception is a skill learned in infancy and never unlearned.
| Case | What fails | What it reveals |
|---|---|---|
| Schneider (brain injury) | Cannot locate touches or limbs without looking | Normal action relies on an unreflective body schema |
| Phantom limbs | Feeling persists after amputation | The body image is lived, not inferred |
| Sacks's leg | Proprioception lost after injury | Without it the self feels "abstract, Cartesian" |
| Mirror therapy, rubber hands | The senses can be tricked | Embodiment is constructed from integrated senses |
Philosophy at the edges
Merleau-Ponty welcomed exactly what Heidegger dismissed as "ontical": child development, neurology, gestalt psychology, animal behaviour. That openness explains why his influence reaches embodied cognition, robotics and psychiatry today, where Heidegger's reaches mostly into the humanities. Bakewell notes a further contrast with Sartre: where Sartre's examples serve an argument about freedom or bad faith, Merleau-Ponty's examples are the argument. The woman with the feather in her hat, the man watching the branch, the child mirroring a bite are not illustrations; they are the phenomena to be understood.
The art of describing
He compared philosophy to the painting of Cézanne, who looked at apples and mountains until they became strange again, and to Montaigne, whose essays put a self-astonished consciousness at the centre. In his inaugural lecture he urged philosophers to stay vigilant about public affairs while holding on to ambiguity. Bakewell reads his move away from Communism, after Korea and the news of the camps, as the same temperament at work: no doctrine could be forced onto the texture of life. He called it waking up.
The English connection
Merleau-Ponty considered a move to England and asked A. J. Ayer about a post at University College London. He wrote good English and practised with Meet Yourself (1936), a branching self-analysis quiz by Prince Leopold Loewenstein and the novelist William Gerhardie. It asked, for instance, whether Mickey Mouse films frightened the reader, and whether the world had ever felt suddenly unreal and dreamlike. Bakewell notes the irony: such attacks of uncanniness were exactly what Merleau-Ponty, almost alone in the milieu, did not suffer. His late erotic descriptions in The Visible and the Invisible, a body "floating in Being with another life", are as un-Sartrean as anything in the canon.
Croisés comme ça
Friendships crack under politics.
Three futures
Hiroshima meant humanity must "decide every single day that it wanted to live" (Sartre), choosing "between hell and reason" (Camus). People feared chain reactions and suitcases of radioactive dust. There were three hopes: world government (Camus), the American way (the Marshall Plan), or the Soviet ideal, the most ambitious attempt ever made to change the human condition. Bakewell asks us not to dismiss its believers as fools, while listing the show trials, the camps and the 1949 Kravchenko libel case. American McCarthyism and the Rosenberg executions (1953) tarnished the alternative.
Koestler's Darkness at Noon (based on Bukharin) and "The Yogi and the Commissar" drew Merleau-Ponty's "what-aboutery" in "The Yogi and the Proletarian". Camus stormed out of Vian's party.
Friendship and the sugar lump
| When | Scene |
|---|---|
| c.1946 | Vodka night: Camus and Beauvoir say yes, Koestler "Impossible!"; Sartre then lectures on "The Writer's Responsibility" |
| 1947 | Koestler throws a glass at Sartre, hits Camus; Camus weeps at the wheel: "He was my friend! And he hit me!" |
| 1950 | Beauvoir crosses her arms: "We are croisés comme ça about everything"; each sees a different morceau de sucre |
Bakewell calls the sugar-lump argument "a strange distortion of the phenomenological theme", a nasty twist on Merleau-Ponty's chiasm that ends, like Marcuse and Heidegger, in silence.
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty crossed paths and parted: another X.
Sartre's conversion
| Year | Break or event |
|---|---|
| 1947 | Aron chairs a radio debate and lets Gaullists maul Sartre; silence for years. Sartre receives threats |
| 1948 | Joins the RDR (leaves after 18 months); Dirty Hands; Fadeyev: "a hyena with a fountain pen" |
| 1949-50 | Soviet bomb, Mao, H-bomb, Korea; plans to flee; Camus warns he would die in a camp |
| 28 May 1952 | Duclos's "carrier pigeons": Sartre's "conversion"; The Communists and Peace |
| 1952 | Jeanson savages The Rebel; Sartre's tirade ends the friendship with Camus |
| 1953 | Cold words at Merleau-Ponty's inaugural; a cut editorial note; "Alors, c'est fini" |
| 1954 | USSR trip articles (later blamed on Jean Cau) |
| 1955 | Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic ("Sartre and Ultrabolshevism"); Aron's Opium of the Intellectuals |
| 1956 | Hungary; special issue of Les Temps modernes in January 1957 |
The breakups, in order.
Camus's The Rebel (1951) denies that history has a destination or that perfection exists. Rebellion is the slave's "so far but no further", a limit endlessly renewed. Bakewell rejects the myth of the dreaming Sartre against the cool hero Camus. Sartre, like Heidegger in Being and Time, chose resoluteness, renouncing personal feeling. Camus's The Fall (1956) offers the "judge-penitent". Both felt "the masked men who will succeed us" watching, which recalls E. P. Thompson's "enormous condescension of posterity". Kierkegaard: life is understood backwards but lived forwards.
Overproduction and goodness
Beauvoir won the Goncourt for The Mandarins (1954) and lived with Claude Lanzmann. Sartre averaged twenty finished pages a day, gave up cinema and novels, and swallowed a whole tube of Corydrane daily with alcohol and downers. "Il est bon," said Merleau-Ponty: his goodness drove the impossible project of reconciling existentialism with Marxism. Asked late in life who had died with the pro-Soviet Sartre, he said: "a person who's not bad". After Budapest (4 November 1956: "Vive l'Europe! Vive la Hongrie!") came the Critique of Dialectical Reason (vol. 1, 1960, nearly 400,000 words), "a Marxist work written against the Communists", whose second volume was never finished.
The logic of the quarrels
Bakewell shows that each break follows the same pattern: an abstract future good is weighed against the person in front of you. The baby in Ivan Karamazov's question, the unjustly imprisoned writer in Spender's, the friend who has become a "counter-revolutionary" in Sartre's letter to Camus: in each case Sartre and Beauvoir chose the abstraction, and Camus chose the person. Bakewell does not mock them. People who had lived through the 1930s and the war could see Communism as a practical goal, and she reminds us that today's democracies also justify torture and surveillance by appeal to unnamed future victims.
| Camus, The Rebel | Sartre (and Jeanson) | |
|---|---|---|
| History | No single destination | Moves towards socialism |
| Perfection | Impossible; revolt is endless | A goal that justifies costs |
| Rebellion | A limit: "so far but no further" | A total transformation |
| State violence | Never | Sometimes necessary |
| Friendship | Can survive disagreement | Politics trumps it |
Reading Sartre fairly
Bakewell resists the legend of Sartre the deluded dreamer humbled by the clear-eyed Camus. Sartre had been taunted as a decadent bourgeois for years; the Duclos affair made him feel that neutrality was complicity. It led to foolish moments, such as the 1954 Soviet articles claiming Soviet citizens did not travel because they did not wish to. But it came from what Merleau-Ponty called his goodness, and he paid in exhaustion, threats and drugs.
Merleau-Ponty's waking
For Merleau-Ponty the lesson of Korea was to stop issuing instant verdicts and to look at history over the longer run; to "become engaged on every event, as if it were a test of morality" was itself bad faith. Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) brought Communist denunciation down on him at a meeting on 29 November 1955. Their accidental reunion at the Venice conference, where Merleau-Ponty tiptoed in and touched Sartre's shoulder, shows how much affection survived the break.
The Cold War mood
Bakewell reconstructs how near catastrophe felt. After the Soviet bomb (29 August 1949), Mao's victory (1 October 1949), the H-bomb programme and the Korean War, the French imagined a Russian occupation as vividly as the German one they remembered. Sartre and Beauvoir discussed escape routes over dinner with Bost, Olga and Wright; Algren offered America, but they wanted a neutral country, perhaps Brazil, where Stefan Zweig had killed himself in exile. Merleau-Ponty joked that he would become a New York lift boy. American children practised diving under their desks.
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Sartre's lifetime average output | 20 finished pages a day |
| Corydrane dose recommended | 1-2 pills a day |
| Sartre's dose | a whole tube |
| Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 | nearly 400,000 words |
| The Family Idiot | 2,800 pages, unfinished |
Aron and posterity
Raymond Aron, the schoolfriend who had first brought phenomenology to the cocktail table, became Sartre's most lasting opponent. His Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) accused the left of being merciless towards democracies' failings but tolerant of crimes committed in the name of the right doctrine. In May 1968 Sartre called Aron unfit to teach. In 1976 Bernard-Henri Lévy asked whether it was better to be "Sartre the mistaken victor, or Aron defeated but correct", and the question hardened into the maxim that it is better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron. Bakewell treats it as sentimental, but notes how much the 1950s still shape such loyalties.
The Eyes of the Least Favoured
Ethics under the gaze of the oppressed.
A criterion of truth
In The Communists and Peace Sartre proposed judging every situation through the eyes of "those treated the most unjustly": if it is not true for them, it is not true. It sweeps away the excuses of the advantaged and resembles the Genet Principle that the underdog is always right. But who counts as least favoured? Underdogs become overdogs, and Sartre ignored the eyes in Stalin's prisons. Like Levinas's or Weil's infinite demands, it inspires even though no one can keep to it, and no Communist party could accept it.
| Year | Act |
|---|---|
| 1948 | "Black Orpheus", preface to Senghor's anthology: "these black men are looking at us" |
| 1957 | Introduces Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized |
| 1958 | Preface to Alleg's The Question: "victim or executioner" |
| 1960 | Veterans chant "Shoot Sartre!"; de Gaulle: "One does not imprison Voltaire" |
| 1961 | Foreword to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth |
| 7 Jan 1962 | Bomb at 42 rue Bonaparte |
| 1964 | Refuses the Nobel Prize |
Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique, studied in Lyons (cool to Merleau-Ponty) and wrote Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Expelled from Algeria in 1956 and ill with leukaemia, he met Sartre in Rome in 1961 and talked until 2 a.m.: "I don't like people who hoard their resources." He died in Bethesda on 6 December 1961, aged 36. Sartre's foreword fetishises violence, "at once most odious and most admirable". Olivier Todd said Sartre's beliefs changed but his extremism never did. Josie Fanon broke with him over his support for Zionism: two least-favoured claims colliding. Sartre traced his taste for violence to the bullies of La Rochelle.
Race and the gaze
Du Bois's double-consciousness (1903) came first. Baldwin was gawped at in a Swiss village. Richard Wright wrote The Outsider (1953), whose philosophy his editors trimmed, as Parshley did Beauvoir's, just as Ellison's Invisible Man arrived. Critics said Paris had cost Wright his edge; Bakewell suspects the real offence was that he wrote about French ideas. At the 1956 Sorbonne congress he alone noted that women were missing.
Figure 12.1: Richard Wright, who applied Sartre and Camus to black American life.
Beauvoir's readers, collected in Daughters of de Beauvoir (1989), included Angie Pegg reading until 4 a.m. in Essex, Kate Millett in "Podunk", and Joyce Goodfellow, who left her marriage: "What you read really does influence your life." Existential therapy followed, including Binswanger and Boss's Daseinsanalysis.
Authenticity dramas
| Work | Year | Theme |
|---|---|---|
| The Catcher in the Rye | 1951 | Phoniness |
| Karp, One | 1953 | Soft re-education into conformity |
| The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit | 1955 | Corporate meaninglessness |
| Rebel Without a Cause | 1955 | Generational disaffection |
| Goffman, Whyte, Goodman | 1956 | Self-presentation, the organisation man, growing up absurd |
| The Incredible Shrinking Man | 1957 | Technology and insignificance |
| Mailer, "The White Negro" | 1957 | "Encourage the psychopath in oneself" |
| Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem | 1963 | Thoughtless evil |
The 1950s search for authenticity, in fiction and non-fiction.
Figure 12.2: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit; executives later wore identical sports clothes to prove they were individuals.
Mailer's existentialism ("kinda playing things by ear") ended his 1960 mayoral bid when he stabbed his wife. Kaufmann's anthology (1956) and Barrett's Irrational Man brought the texts, and Being and Nothingness appeared in English in 1956. Carnap's 1932 mockery of "the nothing nothings" had already split analytic from Continental philosophy.
Figure 12.3: Iris Murdoch, author of the first book on Sartre (1953).
Figure 12.4: Colin Wilson in 1956, the year of The Outsider.
J. Glenn Gray's "Salvation on the Campus" (1965) traced existentialism feeding the counterculture. By 1968 Paris treated Sartre as a relic. Robbe-Grillet found him too "human"; Foucault foresaw man "erased, like a face drawn in sand".
Prague: phenomenology as dissent
In Czechoslovakia, by contrast, Sartre mattered: The Flies and Dirty Hands ran after the 1968 invasion. Philip Roth summed it up: in the West "everything goes and nothing matters"; in Prague "nothing goes and everything matters".
Figure 12.5: Jan Patočka, Husserl's heir and Charter 77 spokesman.
Patočka heard Husserl in Paris in 1929 and inherited Masaryk's lectern. Barred from teaching in 1972, he ran home seminars and taught actors and writers, Havel among them, about the "solidarity of the shaken". Phenomenology's refusal of dogma ran from Brentano (who rejected papal infallibility) through Husserl to Patočka. He signed Charter 77, almost a "Philosophers' Charter" (12 of 38 spokespeople). After an eleven-hour interrogation he died on 13 March 1977, his funeral drowned out by motorcycles and helicopters; his papers were smuggled to Vienna.
The paradoxes of the principle
Bakewell spells out the problems with Sartre's criterion. Who decides who is least favoured? What happens when two oppressed groups make incompatible claims, as with Algerians and Zionists? And who is less favoured than the victim of any violent attack, whatever its cause? Sartre's foreword to Fanon praises violence as a means by which the colonised shake off paralysis; Bakewell finds this both odious and admirable, a measure of how far he would go to adopt another's gaze, even one directed against himself. Beauvoir felt a visceral elation at news of anti-colonial attacks, and also observed her own disquiet when the Algerian War began.
Wright's freedom
Bakewell defends Wright against the charge that Paris ruined him. Baldwin lived in France; Ellison went to Rome; white writers moved abroad freely. Wright said, "I need to live free if I am to expand." His later books, The Color Curtain on the Bandung conference (1955) and White Man, Listen! (1957), carried his sympathy for "lonely outsiders" on the margins of cultures into reportage. What critics resented, Bakewell suspects, was a black American writing seriously about French philosophy.
The archive again
Patočka's papers repeated the Husserl story. Students and colleagues, led by Klaus Nellen, Ivan Chvatík and Krzysztof Michałski, had Western visitors carry copies out of Prague a few at a time until a duplicate archive stood in Vienna. Paul Ricœur said the persecution of Patočka proved that the regime feared philosophy. Bakewell draws the line from Brentano's refusal of papal infallibility to Patočka's refusal of party infallibility: phenomenology's demand to look at the things themselves, setting dogma aside, is a standing invitation to dissent.
Translation and the American boom
The texts arrived late in English, which let the image run ahead of the ideas. William Barrett's Irrational Man (1958) and Walter Kaufmann's anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956), which defined the movement as a series of "revolts against traditional philosophy" sharing a "perfervid individualism", were both bestsellers. Translations followed: The Second Sex (1953), The Myth of Sisyphus (1955), Hazel Barnes's Being and Nothingness (1956) and Being and Time (1962). In Britain, Iris Murdoch, thrilled by Sartre's 1945 Brussels lecture ("nothing like it since ... Keats and Shelley and Coleridge"), wrote the first book on him in 1953 and put existentialist touches into Under the Net. Her Oxford manner limited her appeal in the age of the Angry Young Men, which left room for Wilson.
Having Once Tasted Phenomenology
After phenomenology, no return.
Death and phenomenology
Heidegger made authenticity a matter of Being-towards-death. Sartre called death an outrage from outside, "the possibility that there are for me no longer any possibilities". Beauvoir (All Men Are Mortal; A Very Easy Death, 1964) saw it as "strange and inhuman". Richard Wollheim gave the chapter its title: death "deprives us of phenomenology, and, having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up." We clear our space, and the forest reclaims it.
| Date | Who | How |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Jun 1959 | Boris Vian, 39 | Heart attack while protesting at a preview of I Spit on Your Graves |
| 4 Jan 1960 | Albert Camus, 46 | Car crash with Michel Gallimard; The First Man in the mud |
| 28 Nov 1960 | Richard Wright, 52 | Heart attack (CIA rumours; bismuth poisoning) |
| 3 May 1961 | Merleau-Ponty, 53 | Heart attack while preparing a lecture on Descartes |
| 26 Feb 1969 | Karl Jaspers, 86 | On Gertrud's birthday |
| 8 Oct 1973 | Gabriel Marcel | Homo viator |
| 4 Dec 1975 | Hannah Arendt, 69 | Heart attack; The Life of the Mind unfinished |
| 26 May 1976 | Martin Heidegger, 86 | In his sleep; buried at Messkirch |
| 15 Apr 1980 | Jean-Paul Sartre, 74 | After collapse on 19 March |
| 26 Jun 1980 | Fritz Heidegger | The "anti-Martin" |
| 17 Oct 1983 | Raymond Aron | Collapsed leaving court after defending de Jouvenel |
| 14 Apr 1986 | Simone de Beauvoir, 78 | Cirrhosis complications |
| 25 Dec 1995 | Emmanuel Levinas, 89 | Longest-lived of the main cast |
| 8 Feb 1999 | Iris Murdoch | After Alzheimer's |
| 5 Dec 2013 | Colin Wilson | "Angry to the end" |
The early losses
Beauvoir heard of Camus's death from Lanzmann and mourned "the young freedom fighter", not the man of 46. Sartre's obituary named him heir to the French moralistes. Wright's late haiku include a cocklebur caught in a black boy's hair. Merleau-Ponty had recently met Sartre after a talk, and Sartre, slowed by flu, saw his face sadden: "Everything will begin anew," he told himself. Days later Merleau-Ponty was dead. He lies in a quiet corner of Père-Lachaise.
Heidegger's homecoming
Arendt's "Martin Heidegger at Eighty" (1969, published 1971) excused him with the image of Thales falling into a well while watching the stars. He knew what people wanted to hear and refused it. In July 1967 he had bookshops display Paul Celan's books and took him to the hut, where Celan wrote the wary poem "Todtnauberg". It is the one documented kindness Bakewell found. He cancelled a Greek trip in 1955; on a 1962 cruise he disliked Olympia's tourist hotels and stayed aboard reading Heraclitus, until Sounion showed him "the invisible nearness of the divine". Even dolphins off Dubrovnik led him back to the language of enclosure. Asked by Der Spiegel in 1966 about leaving Earth, he answered that everything great came from man having a home.
Two images of a life's journey.
His grave, marked with a star and flanked by two crosses, recalls a Calvary, and a stone cherub, "a dreaming boy", sits beside it. His brother Fritz stayed home, typed his manuscripts, joked about "Da-da-dasein", and predicted the work would make sense only once there was a supermarket on the moon.
Sartre's last years
Nearly blind and suffering strokes, Sartre told Beauvoir: "Nothing. I'm not here." He was tended by Beauvoir, Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre and Michelle Vian. With Benny Lévy he produced Hope Now (1980), apologetic and gentler. Beauvoir thought Lévy was steering him, and Aron said the views were so reasonable he could agree with them. Bakewell wonders whether she is doing to Sartre what Sartre did to Camus. He never let himself solidify into a statue: he kept changing until the end.
Arendt and the puzzle of Heidegger
Arendt never resolved her feelings. She condemned him at times, at others helped him find readers and tried to sell the Being and Time manuscript in America for the Heideggers. Her 1969 tribute recalled the excitement of his teaching in the "foggy hole" of Marburg in the 1920s and asked how he could have failed to think in 1933, but she had no answer. The Thales image, the genius too busy with the stars to see the well, repeats Jaspers's old excuse of the "dreaming boy". Bakewell finds both too generous.
| Survivor | Last role |
|---|---|
| Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre | Adopted daughter and heir to Sartre |
| Benny Lévy | Sartre's assistant; co-author of Hope Now |
| Sylvie Le Bon Beauvoir | Adopted daughter and heir to Beauvoir |
| Claude Lanzmann | Read Force of Circumstance at Beauvoir's grave |
| Kate Millett | Visited Beauvoir yearly; praised her "moral authority" |
| Elfride Heidegger | Died 1992; shares Martin's grave |
Levinas and Sartre, one last crossing
Levinas outlived everyone and took his thought into Jewish scholarship and ever more difficult ethics. Bakewell notices a final sidelong contact: Benny Lévy was influenced by Levinas, so Hope Now sounds Levinasian. Half a century after Sartre bought Levinas's book on Husserl after the cocktail conversation, and after their parallel writing on nausea and the il y a in the 1930s, their ideas met once more through a third person, perhaps unacknowledged by either.
Murdoch's last book
Iris Murdoch abandoned her Heidegger book after six years, and her final novel, Jackson's Dilemma, written as Alzheimer's began, gives its character Benet the same struggle. He is attracted and repelled: by the Nazism, the appropriation of Hölderlin, and the "poeticisation of philosophy, discarding truth, goodness, freedom, love, the individual". Bakewell, who had avoided the book, found it an uncannily exact picture of her own feelings. Its last scene, Jackson helping a spider back to its web before crossing the bridge, closes the chapter on a mind losing coherence yet still trying to describe its experience. That is the phenomenological desire shared by everyone in the book.
Sartre's decline as Beauvoir's proof
Bakewell reads Sartre's final decade as evidence for Beauvoir's view of life as an unresolved drama of freedom and contingency. A sheet in his papers, perhaps written after the 1969 moon landing, records five months without writing and lists unfinished projects: Flaubert, Tintoretto, the Critique. He could still watch television as moving shadows, and in 1976 watched Sartre par lui-même, telling Michel Contat that being unable to write had taken away his reason for living. Strokes, memory lapses and dental trouble followed. The man who called consciousness a nothingness had in fact always been crammed with words; now the energy to push them out was gone. He collapsed on the night of 19 March 1980, was pursued by photographers with zoom lenses and journalists dressed as nurses, and died on 15 April.
The Imponderable Bloom
Final verdict.
Everywhere and unnoticed
Smartphone-free retreats, the longing for the "real", and films from Blade Runner, The Matrix and The Truman Show to Ex Machina, Locke, I Heart Huckabees and Terrence Malick (who translated Heidegger) all circle identity, purpose and freedom. Freedom is no longer taken for granted: we dispute how much is allowed and how much to trade to corporations for convenience. Popular science tells us we are predictable dupes, and Bakewell suspects we enjoy the alibi. Sartre would call that bad faith. "Perhaps we need the existentialists more than we thought."
Heidegger reconsidered
Figure 14.1: Heidegger walking: forest paths, and "something of the grave in this vegetative world".
The pull remains, but "give me the open sea of Jaspers". Against Heidegger's "To think is to confine yourself to a single thought", Bakewell holds that thinking should be generous and have a good appetite. Murdoch named what was missing as goodness. Heidegger dismissed biography ("He was born ... he worked, and he died"), and the result is a philosophy in which "I cannot find a place to live".
Sartre reconsidered
| Against Sartre | For Sartre |
|---|---|
| Self-indulgent, bad-tempered, a joyless "sex addict" | Bursting with energy, generosity and communicativeness |
| Dropped friends without regret | Risked his life for causes, Algeria above all |
| Defended odious regimes, cult of violence | Never toed a party line: "I have always remained an anarchist" |
| Scorned revision and art for art's sake | Kept "thinking against himself", turning and turning again |
| Obsessed with slime and the gaze | A thoroughgoing atheist and humanist "to his bones" |
Bakewell's ledger on Sartre.
Joachim Fest saw him at a Berlin party "hacking through a jungle of phenomena" and scattering parrots: "a degree of muddle-headedness can be quite fascinating." Heidegger said one must think; Sartre actually thought. "And yet we've lived ... we've tried to see and understand it."
Figure 14.2: Sartre and Beauvoir in 1959.
Technology and the bloom
Heidegger's "the essence of technology is nothing technological" still applies. Friedrich Heinemann (1954) warned that "ultra-rapid computing machines" would raise "a truly existential question". Hubert Dreyfus (2001) saw the Internet turning everything, ourselves included, into a resource handed to an impersonal "they". Yet computers have struggled with lived texture, such as entering a café to look for Pierre: they have been "bad phenomenologists".
The "imponderable bloom" at the centre, with the thinkers who described it best.
Heroes
Merleau-Ponty left perhaps the most lasting legacy, in embodied cognition; he is "the happy philosopher of things as they are" and Bakewell's intellectual hero. Beauvoir is a great chronicler and a diligent phenomenologist. Bakewell's own turn: young, she thought "ideas were the thing"; thirty years on, "ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so". The book ends with Beauvoir's "phosphorescent bloom of life".
What each thinker leaves
Bakewell's closing judgements can be gathered into a single scorecard. She insists none of the thinkers is a model to imitate; each is worth reading for a different reason, and each carries a warning.
| Thinker | Worth keeping | Warning |
|---|---|---|
| Husserl | Return to the things themselves; cosmopolitan reason | Inward idealism, piles of unfinished work |
| Heidegger | Wonder at Being; technology as revealing; the clearing | No character, no ethics; a philosophy one cannot live in |
| Sartre | Freedom, bad faith, engagement, atheist humanism | Cult of violence; defence of odious regimes; refusal to revise |
| Beauvoir | Ambiguity; becoming a woman; chronicle of an era | Disowned her best ethics for a theory |
| Merleau-Ponty | Embodied perception; evidence with ambiguity | Elusive; smiled off conflict |
| Camus | Limits on violence; modest heroism | The note of resignation |
| Jaspers | Communication; the open sea | Little read today |
Bakewell's final ledger, assembled from Chapter 14.
Thinking with appetite
Bakewell's personal turn matters to the argument. Young, she found biography irrelevant to philosophy; older, she sees ideas as inseparable from the lives and centuries that produced them. That is why she values Beauvoir's memoirs most of all, with their record of quarrels, journeys and moods, and why she cannot follow Heidegger into "digging down into the depths and remaining down there", as Arendt described his method. Thinking, for her, should range widely, enjoy variety and stay in conversation.
What the Café Adds Up To
Main Points
- Phenomenology starts from experience: bracket theories (the epoché) and describe things as they appear.
- Consciousness is intentional: it is always "of" something, never a sealed container.
- Heidegger's question of Being reopened philosophy, but his thought proved hard to inhabit and morally empty.
- Existence precedes essence: humans have no fixed nature and make themselves by acting.
- Freedom brings anguish, and we flee it through guard rails and bad faith.
- Freedom needs a situation: facticity enables action as well as limiting it.
- The look of the Other shapes the self; Beauvoir showed it is asymmetric between the sexes.
- "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman": the most influential existentialist idea.
- Ambiguity is our condition, not a problem to solve (Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty).
- The body is the subject of perception: fold, chiasm, flesh.
- Character matters: Heidegger's silence after 1945 is a philosophical failure, not just a personal one.
- Communication is a philosophical duty (Jaspers): language as a bridge, not a house.
- Means-ends reasoning about lives is dangerous: Camus's limits aged better than Sartre's calculations.
- Friendship can founder on politics, and each side believes the other betrayed the past.
- The ethical turn (Levinas, Weil, Marcel) put the Other before Being.
- Phenomenology is quietly subversive: from Brentano to Patočka and Havel's greengrocer.
- Existentialism was always applied: to women, colonised peoples, outsiders, lives.
- Technology reveals how we stand towards Being; the Internet makes us a resource for "the they".
- Determinist alibis are bad faith in modern dress.
- Read the existentialists as interesting, not exemplary: flawed people asking necessary questions.
Frameworks at a glance
| Framework | Thinker | Core idea | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Epoché and intentionality | Husserl | Bracket assumptions; consciousness is "of" | 2 |
| Dasein, das Man, the call | Heidegger | Being-in-the-world; the "they"; authenticity | 3-4 |
| Limit situations | Jaspers | Experiences at the edge, lived not solved | 4 |
| Availability vs crispation | Marcel | Stay open to the stranger's appeal | 4, 6 |
| Life-world; home/alien world | Late Husserl | Encounter wakes cultures up | 6 |
| En-soi / pour-soi; bad faith | Sartre | I am nothing, therefore free | 7 |
| The absurd; rebellion | Camus | Imagine Sisyphus happy; "so far, no further" | 7, 11 |
| Standing-reserve; Gelassenheit | Later Heidegger | Technology vs letting-be | 8 |
| Face of the Other | Levinas | Ethics before ontology | 8 |
| Woman as Other; ambiguity | Beauvoir | Becoming a woman; freedom in constraint | 9 |
| Fold, chiasm, flesh | Merleau-Ponty | Embodied, intertwined perception | 10 |
| Eyes of the least favoured | Sartre | Truth judged from below | 12 |
| Solidarity of the shaken | Patočka, Havel | Dissent as epoché | 12 |
An interpretive plot of Bakewell's judgements: Heidegger is most influential but least habitable; Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir rank highest for habitability.
Who's who
| Person | Dates | Role in the story |
|---|---|---|
| Franz Brentano | 1838-1917 | Intentionality; teacher of Husserl; anti-dogmatic rebel |
| Edmund Husserl | 1859-1938 | Founder of phenomenology |
| Karl Jaspers | 1883-1969 | Limit situations; communicator; Heidegger's estranged friend |
| Martin Heidegger | 1889-1976 | Being and Time; Nazi rector; the turn |
| Gabriel Marcel | 1889-1973 | Christian existentialist; availability; Homo viator |
| Edith Stein | 1891-1942 | Husserl's assistant; Carmelite; murdered at Auschwitz |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | 1905-1980 | Nausea, Being and Nothingness; engagement |
| Raymond Aron | 1905-1983 | Brought phenomenology to Sartre; later liberal opponent |
| Emmanuel Levinas | 1906-1995 | Il y a; ethics of the face |
| Hannah Arendt | 1906-1975 | Heidegger's student and lover; banality of evil |
| Jan Patočka | 1907-1977 | Czech phenomenologist; Charter 77 |
| Simone de Beauvoir | 1908-1986 | The Second Sex; ambiguity; memoirist |
| Maurice Merleau-Ponty | 1908-1961 | Phenomenology of perception and body |
| Richard Wright | 1908-1960 | American novelist in Paris; The Outsider |
| Simone Weil | 1909-1943 | Radical ethics of obligation |
| Albert Camus | 1913-1960 | The absurd; The Rebel; quarrel with Sartre |
| Boris Vian | 1920-1959 | Jazz, satire, Saint-Germain nightlife |
| Frantz Fanon | 1925-1961 | The Wretched of the Earth |
| Colin Wilson | 1931-2013 | The Outsider; "new existentialism" |
Cast list, drawn from Bakewell's own "Cast of Characters" and the chapters.
Three tensions that run through the book
| Tension | One pole | Other pole | Bakewell's lean |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home and journey | Heidegger's rooted homecoming | Jaspers's open sea, Marcel's traveller, Husserl's alien-world | Journey |
| Abstraction and person | Sartre's calculation for the future | Camus's and Alyosha's refusal | Person |
| Freedom and situation | Sartre's radical freedom | Beauvoir's and Merleau-Ponty's ambiguity | Ambiguity |
Each tension is argued through lives rather than syllogisms, which is both the book's strength and its limit. Bakewell's answer to all three is the same: keep the conversation going, look at what is actually in front of you, and distrust any thought that requires you to stop noticing other people.
Whole-book arc restated.
Portable practice list.
What to carry forward.
Transmission line to the reader.
Bakewell's difficult fairness.
Synthesis: what lasts
Bakewell's closing image, the imponderable bloom, is not soft decoration. It names the job phenomenology trained: notice the texture of experience before theories flatten it. After wars, betrayals, and editorial blood feuds, that practice of attention is what she wants surviving.
Synthesis: who fails the inhabitability test
Heidegger remains the sharpest diagnostician of everyday fallenness and the least trustworthy guide for a life. Sartre remains excessive, sometimes monstrous in politics and private arrangements, and still a writer who made freedom feel urgent. Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty survive as the pair you can live with.
Synthesis: how to use the Café today
- Describe first before you moralise a situation.
- Name bad faith in yourself, not only in opponents.
- Keep ambiguity when politics wants slogans.
- Prefer the eyes of the least favoured as an ethical check.
- Refuse uninhabitable brilliance even when the sentences seduce.
Cross-chapter map
| Stretch | Chapters | Payoff |
|---|---|---|
| Method | 2-4 | Husserl to Heidegger |
| French ignition | 5-6 | Cocktails to manuscripts |
| Furnace | 7-8 | Occupation to devastation |
| Alternatives | 9-10 | Beauvoir and Merleau |
| Breaks | 11-12 | Cold War and the look |
| Aftertaste | 13-14 | Deaths, bloom, verdict |
About this book
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell, 2016. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions