Hanging About With Existentialists
Many readers might be understandably turned off by any book title that contains words like “existential” or “post-modern” or “post-structural.” After all these terms summon certain stereotypical images: of smoky cafes filled with garrulous intellectuals, who claim to speak for or represent the “marginalized” or the “oppressed” or the “subaltern”, but whose jargon-filled talk feels inaccessible not just to shuffling waiters and sunbaked peasants, but even to sincere, middling scholars or eager students. There is a perception – perhaps, partly justified – about philosophy feeling like mere wrangles with words, with each academic trying to outwit the other, and few caring about being understood by lay readers. Or with engaging with what many of us would consider the “real world.”
A Bit About Sarah Bakewell
So it was with a certain trepidation that I picked up Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café”. Despite stumbling on reviews that declared that Bakewell wasn’t going to tie us up in knots. That she led readers on a rather clear-eyed romp through what might feel like impossibly murky terrain.
Besides, I was intrigued that Bakewell, herself, had led a rather offbeat life. At first, there was her unusually itinerant childhood: being borne at the back of a car, by seemingly carefree parents who traipsed across countries and continents. From Bournemouth in England, to Switzerland and Russia. From Australia (to which they had emigrated) to India, whose bumpy roads they explored in a Volkswagen van.
Bakewell seems to have ferried this sense of life as an abiding adventure into her education and career. Opting to study Philosophy at the University of Essex, she “became enthralled by the work of Heidegger and embarked on a PhD.” But with equal alacrity, she dropped her doctoral pursuit to join a tea-bag factory as an assembly-line worker. From there to working at bookshops, then picking up a post-graduate degree in Artificial Intelligence, and thereafter spending ten years as a cataloguer at a Library.
Eventually inspired by medical history that she encountered at her last stint, she turned to writing. In “At the Existentialist Café,” she revisits her doctoral interest, but with all the accumulated experience she had gathered from life. Because she is no longer merely satisfied by the thinking of these thinkers (and yes, it doesn’t escape her that they’re mostly men), but also by the minutiae of their lives. She returns to existentialism with a more alluring practical bent, trying to dredge out why she – at first, as an ingenuous 16-year-old, and later as a PhD student – was drawn to this lot to begin with.
Interest in the Real World
Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were undergoing a similar disenchantment with impenetrable theories that they were encountering in their philosophy courses and texts. The year was 1932/33 and they were seated at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, with a friend, Raymond Aron.
They felt, like many contemporaries might, that nothing about their classroom lectures seemed applicable to the world around them. At this morose juncture in their life, Aron introduced them to an exciting new field of study – “phenomenology” – that seemed to incorporate the very texture of experience or consciousness as a legitimate source of inquiry.
The field, Aron told the duo, was founded by a German philosopher called Martin Heidegger, who was already gathering a devoted coterie of students around him. To emphasize his point that this wasn’t just reading of obscure textbooks, Aron made what would be considered a life-changing statement: “You can make philosophy out of this cocktail.”
Later, while Sartre was to imbue existentialism with his own distinct, literary take, he too stressed its applicability to all aspects of life: to jazz bars and music, to films and foods and cocktails, to sex and love and night clubs, to disgust and hatred and anger, and most significantly to human notions of freedom.
Takes on Freedom
While other topics might be deemed frivolous or serious, based on the context, freedom to this group, was incontestable. Existentialists suggested that human beings differed from other conscious creatures – animals, birds et al – by their ability to make choices. While acknowledging that we all operate under social, cultural and biological constraints, we also have the ability to decide what we are going to do in the next moment. And these moment-to-moment decisions stitch up our lives. Such decision-making power comes with certain ethical responsibilities. In general, Sartre empathized with those who were the weakest in societies, though he was to support, in later life, some problematic political regimes. Martin Heidegger, who had been considered the originator of many existential concepts, became bizarrely enough, a Nazi supporter.
Despite all this, Bakewell herself acknowledges, that the existentialists might have struggled to explain what “existentialism” is. Some might be tempted to dismiss it as one of those teenagey trends – after all this crowd was also known for a particular style of dressing, of which black turtlenecks were the most memorable. But Sartre’s writings inspired folks like Martin Luther King and many participants in the 1960s movements for women’s and civil rights. The group, however, was disliked by Conservatives and Marxists, for promoting independent thought.
Questioning Gender Roles
Simone de Beauvoir was Jean Paul Sartre’s partner, although both also engaged in relationships with many others. But Beauvoir also had her own point of view and pioneered the notion of a distinct female subjectivity in The Second Sex. She urged women to seek freedom, individuality and authenticity. In particular, she brought up the self-doubting that many women suffer from (termed the “imposter syndrome” among contemporaries), and observed that this was foisted by social hierarchies that ought to be questioned.
Both Sartre and Beauvoir also propagated LGBT rights, though Sartre might have mistakenly assumed that one’s sexual orientation was “chosen” rather than ingrained.
Making The Most of Life
They also acknowledged the many difficulties that are inherent to being human. For instance, since death looms upon everyone, anxiety, to a certain degree, is a shared emotion. All of us who are alive, are moving towards a definitive end. Their point then was to make the most of one’s time on the planet, in ways that are personally meaningful rather than blindly subscribing to stifling norms.
Striving for Authenticity
Existentialists championed “authenticity” – a quality you might dismiss with a cynical eye-roll since it’s overly promoted by new-age movements and is hard to pin down. In general, you might consider it as being comfortable with your singular take on life, without being brow-beaten into points of view that do not resonate with your personal experience. To access your “authenticity” – they seemed to recommend “describing” your own subjective world in words – as precisely as possible, and with as few external judgments. This might be close to the modern notion of journaling (and perhaps it is, because the existentialists spent many indulgent hours, writing memoirs and biographies).
While many of these thinkers were not flawless by any means, they seemed to live life on their own terms. Their constant questioning of norms – of their own and of others – might be an attitude worth imbibing for all life stages. After all, the problem often is not with having too much knowledge, but with having too many know-it-alls.
References
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails, Vintage (Penguin Random House), 2017