When I was a boy of nineteen, I met a woman of twenty-one, a gorgeous woman, who informed me she was existentialist. My family’s old Encyclopedia Britannica, with its long erudite articles, failed to enlighten on the topic me later that night and it was a decade or so before I had any competence to speak of existentialism. But once I did, I liked it, admired it and learned from it. I learned about a respect and passion for ideas, a belief that ideas matter, that thoughts should be put into action, that not all thought that matters is technical or superficially practical, and I learned about personal, as distinct from political or economic, freedom. 

In Sarah Bakewell’s wonderfully informal and informative book, she notes an experience with similar consequences. It was at age sixteen that she read Sartre’s 1939 blockbuster novel, Nausea, “I bonded at once with the gloomy protagonist, … [who drifts] … disconsolately around the seaside town of Bouville … sits in café’s and listens to jazz … I was intrigued to learn that this story was Sartre’s way of communicating a philosophy called, existentialism.” And she notes that existentialism later went out of fashion, but that what came after (post-structuralism, post-modernism perhaps – she doesn’t say) have not aged well. It’s Bakewell’s conviction that existentialism has aged well. I agree.

The story of existentialism is often told in three parts like this. In the beginning were two, brilliant eccentric thinkers, Soren Kierkegaard in Demark (1813-1855) and Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany (1844-1900). Before this pair, philosophers were concerned to understand the things “outside” the mind and outside of how individuals experience their lives. And they attempted to create great, logical systems of thought to do this; Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. As different as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were, both placed the focus upon the individual human being and how he or she should live, the struggles and paradoxes and anxieties that make up human life. “Nietzsche writes, “What is happiness … not contentment … [but] … the feeling that power is growing … that resistance is overcome”. Kierkegaard writes, “For if I have ventured amiss … life helps me with its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all – who helps me then?” Both were outsiders, neither married, both were critical of values and ideas that others took as matters of simple fact. Both wrote in multiple genres and neither created systematic bodies of thought. Both asked, “What does it mean to live properly as a human being?” Nietzsche, in The Antichrist has a madman declare the death of God and then ask, “What sacred games shall we now have to invent?” How to live an authentic life in the absence of a planning and commanding God became a key question for the later existentialists.

The next chapter in the story begins with Edmund Husserl (1859 -1938), who attempted systematically to shift the object of philosophic thinking from the “outside” reality, that which thinking is about, to the “inside” reality of thought itself. The philosophic use of the term “phenomena” refers to what appears to us, in our human consciousness. And so, Husserl’s invention, Phenomenology, becomes the analysis of appearances, while ignoring or “bracketing”, what is otherwise conceived as outside reality. Husserl’s concerns were not with the struggles to be fully human, yet his ideas appealed to later existentialists, whose interests were so focused upon the “lived world” of the individual, rather than, say, the abstract world of the scientists. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was Husserl’s student for many years. He focused, in quite dense philosophical terms and ideas, upon how human beings had over centuries drifted from seeing the world as an amazing mystery of which each is a part, to seeing it as an object to be mastered, a move from wisdom to technique and from technique to technology. For Heidegger, this change was a vast emptying out of the human spirit, a shrinking of what it meant to be human.

The third phase of the story now shifts from the Germany of Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger to the streets and cafés of WWII Paris, the Café de Flore or Les Deux Maggot. At the core of this story are Jean-Paul Sartre, his life companion Simone de Beauvoir and the Algerian/French writer, Albert Camus. In these cafés, they talked incessantly, fought intensely, smoked, drank coffee and wrote. Sartre, for one, loved to write in a crowd. Others dropped by; Jean Genet, Arthur Koestler, Olga Kosakiewicz, Gabriel Marcel, Richard Wright and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Others interacted with the existentialists through their work and lives; Franz Fanon, Simone Weil, Edith Stein, Karl Jaspers, Paul Nizan.

This three-stage approach is a legitimate take on the existentialists, but it ignores the raging events taking place at the time and how deeply they affected the characters and their thought. Sarah Bakewell weaves a marvelous story around these characters during the rise of Nazism and the occupation of France. Heidegger was for a time the Nazi rector of Freiberg, who applied some of the anti-Jewish regulations to his own friend and mentor, Edmund Husserl. Sartre was a German prisoner of war and later a resistance journalist, joining de Beauvoir and Camus. Sartre’s hatred of Nazism/Fascism, and recognition of the heroic Russian fight against it, led him to admire and defend the Soviet system. Camus turned against the Soviet Union early, as Stalin’s purges became known. It was a rift between the two that was never healed. Existentialists take their ideas seriously, as any individual should. For them, thought and action were the same; thinking and writing were a form of action. Sartre understood Camus’s rejection of the Soviet system as a betrayal of the workers and the communist struggle to liberate them. Camus saw Sartre’s defense of Soviet communism as an approval of authoritarianism, as practiced by Stalin and his successors.

Bakewell’s telling of these rifts and arguments is masterful. Her research and its range is impressive. And she is a terrific writer. Of de Beauvoir, she writes, “She had a kind of genius for being amazed by the world and by herself; all her life she remained a virtuoso marveller at things.” She writes of Sartre’s fascination with Jean Genet, an abused child, a thief and prostitute and a poet, “Sartre loved Genet’s contrariness, as well as his way of poeticizing reality.” For Sartre, “Genet’s books turn shit into flowers, prison cells into sacred temples … Where a saint transfigures suffering into sanctity, Genet transfigures oppression into freedom.”

Bakewell admires Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist break-through, The Second Sex, as one of the most important books of the century. It is, “… one of the great re-evaluations of modern times…” She argues that it should be set alongside those of Darwin, Marx and Freud in influence. Yet it was never elevated to the pantheon. Of course, Bakewell finds sexism here, but notes as well how poor was the first translation of the work, in many ways reversing the meaning of its ideas. And, for European women at least, the relationship of de Beauvoir and Sartre, a friendship of equals, created an exciting new model of how men and women could love each other.

A persistent theme running through the existentialists is how to maintain one’s individual identity, an identity that one has created for oneself and never inherited, in the face of mass society. Bakewell argues that this force in existentialist thought, from Heidegger’s rejection of technical thinking to Sartre idea of radical freedom to create oneself, renders existentialist thought as relevant today, in the age of super-mass communication, as in the era of European Fascism.

This work’s good writing provides not only factual information about a group of thinkers, but a feeling for a time when ideas were respected, taken seriously, fought over and recognized for their importance to human lives. I had a sense of loss while reading about the passion of these women and men; Simon Weil, the spiritual leftist who died of TB in 1943 in England because she would eat only what prisoners of war were given. Edith Stein, a student of Husserl’s, a Jewish woman who became a Carmelite nun and died with her sister in Auschwitz. Karl Jaspers, follower of Heidegger’s who could never understand or perhaps believe his hero’s turn to Nazism and anti-Semitism, and who would go on to write about the issue of the collective guilt of Germany. Albert Camus, who agonized over the choice of sides during the Algerian war of independence from France, perhaps depicting his own hypocrisy in his great novel, The Fall. And a wonderful story of how Herman Leo van Breda, A Franciscan monk, in a campaign of great danger and heroism, saved the manuscripts of Husserl from destruction in the Nazi era and went on to found and curate the forty-two volume Husserliana archives at the Louvain.

There is so much more. I highly recommend this book to the general audience as well as to students of twentieth century thought.

 

© 2017 John Mullen

 

John Mullen is the author of the recent novel, The Woman Who Hated Philosophers, Swallow Tail Press, 2017. He has also written the widely read, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy: Self-Deception and Cowardice in the Present Age, University Press of America, 1995.