After reading Sarah Bakewell’s previous book, How to Live: or, a Life of Montaigne, I was hoping she’d follow up with something in a similar vein before too long. Montaigne had been someone I was curious about, and Bakewell’s book did exactly what I hoped it would do: it told me about who he was, and also about what makes him unique and interesting. One problem with innovators from earlier times is that it’s hard, without the proper guide, to feel the impact they made on their world. Montaigne introduced a way of thinking and writing that has since become familiar; so in reading Montaigne, or reading about him, it can be hard to recognize that he was the first to think and write as he did. I’m always wanting to bring up Elvis Presley regarding this notion: it’s easy for me to hear that Elvis was a good singer (though often of bad songs), but the oft-cited claim that he was “the first white man to sing like a black man” has never resonated with me, perhaps because I grew up in a world where Elvis’s example had already been copied by any number of other singers. I was born too late to hear Elvis as people heard him in 1955 and ’56.
I haven’t been as curious about Sartre and the existentialists as I was about Montaigne, at least not lately. Sartre was a big deal in the third quarter of the 20th century when I was in school; he has largely fallen out of fashion in this century. Back in the day, Sartre was a figure to be reckoned with—a philosopher who became involved in radical politics, a communist sympathizer with intellectual credentials, a real troublemaker. Early in his career, in the 30s and 40s, he’d written quite a bit of fiction—his short novel Nausea was a staple of comparative literature courses in the 70s. I’d read one of his novels and a book of stories, and enjoyed them quite a bit. At one point I purchased his magnum opus, the philosophical tract Being and Nothingness, but never had the fortitude to even open it. It might still be in a box in the basement.
So although I’d not thought about Sartre and existentialism for a while, the fact that Sarah Bakewell had written a book about them was enough to get me interested. It isn’t that hard to see what connects Montaigne to Sartre: they were both philosophers, more or less, but they were both known as much for the lives they led as for the books they wrote. I’m fascinated by philosophers, but intimidated by actual philosophy. As soon as I start reading about inquiries into the nature of being and the like, my eyes start to cross.
Bakewell is unlike me in that she has an appetite for philosophical texts, but I was pleased to read that she also feels that philosophers’ lives illuminate their work and vice versa:
When I first read Sartre and Heidegger, I didn’t think the details of a philosopher’s personality or biography were important. This was the orthodox belief in the field at the time, but it also came from my being too young myself to have much sense of history. I intoxicated myself with concepts, without taking account of their relationship to events and to all the odd data of their inventors’ lives. Never mind lives; ideas were the thing.
Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.
Precisely. Knowing about the person opens me up to wanting to know about their work. Though Sartre is definitely the presiding presence in Bakewell’s book, she name checks seven philosophers on the front cover of her book, and devotes a fair amount of space to each: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Most of these names were familiar to me—all except Merleau-Ponty. Heidegger, Husserl, and Jaspers were German; the rest were French (with the appropriate caveat about Camus being Algerian French, a pied-noir). I get the impression that there can be no formal list of existentialists, any more than there can be any formal definition of existentialism. Bakewell takes this question on in her first chapter, where she provides a nine-point definition of existentialism. But she seems to regard this exercise as something of a chore:
…[H]ere is my attempt at a definition of what existentialists do. I put it here for reference, but by all means skip it and come if the need or want arises.
The notion that arose in my mind as I read the book is that existentialism is the opposite or “fate” or “determinism”: it’s the idea that the world is what we make of it. It’s freedom: the notion that life is a series of often difficult choices and that we are the authors of our own lives. Life is a wave to be surfed.
It’s true, some of us are more constrained in our choices than others; the people that Bakewell writes about certainly lived through times of difficult choices: the primes of these writers’ careers coincided with World War II, so you could say that their various theories about how to live were often put to very challenging tests.
The war was also the time when the philosophers Bakewell considers were most unified. In the late 40s and 50s, as communism became intellectually respectable (or fashionable) in Europe, rifts began to appear. You could either focus on the promise of communism—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” according to Marx—or the reality of Stalinism. Sartre was drawn to radical positions, which aligned him for a time with Stalin, and later with Mao. While others would watch political conflicts carefully, awaiting the verdict of history, Sartre was determined to exercise his freedom of choice to influence and be part of history while it was happening. Near the end of his life he was asked to name his worst failing, and this is how he responded:
Naturally in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another. But at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.
But choices were difficult, and mistakes were inevitable. What was Sartre’s guiding principle? According to Bakewell:
Sartre had sketched the outline of a bold solution: why not decide every situation by asking how it looks to ‘the eyes of the least favoured’, or to ‘those treated the most unjustly’? You just need to work out who is the most oppressed and disadvantaged in the situation, and then adopt their version of events as the right one.
Bakewell connects this notion of looking at the world through the ‘gaze’ of the least favoured to various writers and movements in the intervening decades, from Frantz Fanon to James Baldwin—even Normal Mailer makes an appearance. The notion of “identity politics” is very much at the center of our culture and politics today, and it all leads back to Sartre. He didn’t just anticipate our world—he helped to create it. Is the world better for his efforts? Some would say yes; many would say no. I’m sympathetic to both perspectives. It might depend on where your gaze is situated.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Sartre was Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is considerably less interesting to me precisely because he sought to maintain a barrier between his life and his work. I gather that Heidegger might be the most profound philosopher of the group that Bakewell considers, but I labored through the chapter where she explains his concepts and terminology. As for his life, there are two facts that stick in memory: one, that he had an affair with Hannah Arendt when she was his pupil in the 1920s, and two, that he had an early affiliation with the Nazi party that he terminated but never attempted to justify, excuse, or explain. Of course, these two facts amplify each other, because Arendt was Jewish and later wrote one of the most famous and provocative books about the holocaust: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Arendt and Heidegger resumed their relationship after the war, though only through letters.
Sarah Bakewell’s books always leave me hungry for more. After reading her Montaigne book I plowed through the first volume of his essays. Volumes two and three still await. After reading this book, I went down to the basement and found the book of Sartre stories I'd read a few decades ago—its title is Intimacy—and re-read it. The stories are intriguing psychological portraits of rather extreme characters. The one story I still remembered after all these years, titled “The Childhood of a Leader,” is almost novella length, and describes how a pampered and confused child somehow blossoms into a fascist leader. The portrait is not entirely convincing, but I admire Sartre for at least trying to imagine how such a person comes to exist. What would Hitler have been like as a six-year-old or as a twelve-year-old? It’s relatively easy to point to the usual signposts: lack of empathy, torturing animals, and so forth, but it’s another thing to try to enter into the mind of such an individual. Sartre gives it a good try.
But from the group that Bakewell describes, the one who is most interesting to me as a writer is Simone de Beauvoir. Bakewell writes:
…[a]mong all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the world’s ever-changing substance. It gives us all the fury and vivacity of the existentialist cafés, together with ‘a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert’—and all the rest of the exquisite, phosphorescent bloom of life, which reveals itself to human beings for as long as we are lucky enough to be able to experience it.
That’s how Bakewell ends her book, and that’s how I’ll end this post.
