At the Existentialist Café (49 page)

Of these themes, freedom may prove to be
the
great puzzle for the early twenty-first century. In the previous century, I grew up naively assuming that I’d see a constant, steady increase in this nebulous stuff through my lifetime, both in personal choices and in politics. In some ways, this has come true. On the other hand, unforeseen by anyone, basic ideas about freedom have been assailed and disputed in radical ways, so that we are now unable to agree what it amounts to, what we need it for, how much of it can be allowed, how far it should be interpreted as the right to offend or transgress, and how much of it we are prepared to give away to remote corporate entities in exchange for comfort and convenience. What we cannot do any longer is take it for granted.

Many of our uncertainties about freedom amount to uncertainties about our fundamental being. Science books and magazines bombard us with the news that we are
out of control: that we amount to a mass of irrational but statistically predictable responses, veiled by the mere illusion of a conscious, governing mind. They tell us that, when we decide to sit down, to reach for a glass of water, to vote, or to choose whom we would save in the ‘trolley problem’, we are not really choosing at all but responding to tendencies and associations that are beyond the reach of both reason and will.

Reading such accounts, one gets the impression that we take pleasure in this idea of ourselves as out-of-control mechanical dupes of our
own biology and environment. We claim to find it disturbing, but we might actually be deriving a kind of reassurance from it — for such ideas let us off the hook. They save us from the existential anxiety that comes with considering ourselves free agents who are responsible for what we do. Sartre would call that bad faith. Moreover, recent research suggests that those who have been encouraged to think they are unfree are inclined to behave less ethically, again suggesting that we treat it as an alibi.

So, do we really want to understand our lives and manage our futures as if we had neither real freedom nor a truly human foundation for our existence? Perhaps we need the existentialists more than we thought.

Having argued myself to that point, I must immediately add that I do not think the existentialists offer some simple magic solution for the modern world. As individuals and philosophers, they were hopelessly flawed. Each one’s thought featured some major aspect that should make us uncomfortable. This is partly because they were complex and troubled beings, as most of us are. It is also because their ideas and lives were rooted in a dark, morally compromised century. The political turmoil and wild notions of their times marked them, just as our own twenty-first-century turmoil is now marking us.

But that is one reason why the existentialists demand rereading. They remind us that human existence is difficult and that people often behave appallingly, yet they also show how great our possibilities are. They constantly repeat the questions about freedom and being that we constantly try to forget. We can explore the directions the existentialists indicate without needing to take them as exemplary personalities, or even as exemplary thinkers. They are
interesting
thinkers, which I believe makes them more worth our trouble.

I first found them interesting thirty years ago, and I still do now — but for different reasons. Looking back at them has been a disorienting and stimulating experience, like seeing familiar faces in a fairground mirror. Some features I had barely noticed before have become more prominent, while others, which used to seem beautiful, have acquired
a grotesque cast. Writing this book has brought me surprises all the way, not least with the two colossi of the story,
Heidegger and Sartre.

When I first read Heidegger in my early twenties, I fell under the Messkirch magician’s spell. My whole way of seeing the world was influenced by his raw amazement that there
is
something rather than nothing, by his way of looking at landscapes and buildings, by his notion of humans as a ‘clearing’ in which Being emerges into the light, and more.

Reading Heidegger again, I feel the same gravitational pull. But even while I’m sliding back down into his dimly lit world of forest paths and tolling bells, I find myself struggling to get free, for reasons that have nothing — and everything — to do with his Nazism. There is something of the grave in this vegetative world. Give me the open sea of Jaspers, I now think, or the highways frequented by Marcel’s travellers, filled with human encounter and conversation. Heidegger once wrote that ‘
To think is to confine yourself to a single thought’, but I now feel that this is the very opposite of what thinking ought to be. Thinking should be generous and have a good appetite. I find life far too valuable these days to shut out most of its variety in favour of digging down into the depths — and remaining down there, as Hannah Arendt described the Heideggerian method of inquiry.

I also find myself thinking back to Arendt’s and Sartre’s observations about the uncanny absence in Heidegger where ‘character’ should be. Something is missing from his life and from his work. Iris Murdoch thought the missing thing was goodness, and therefore that his philosophy lacked an ethical centre or
heart
. Indeed, you can never say of Heidegger what Merleau-Ponty said of Sartre: ‘he is good’. One could call this missing element ‘humanity’, in several senses. Heidegger set himself against the philosophy of humanism, and he himself was rarely humane in his behaviour. He set no store by the individuality and detail of anyone’s life, least of all his own. It is no coincidence that, of all the philosophers in this book, Heidegger is the one who refused to see the point of biography. He opened an early lecture series on Aristotle by saying, ‘
He was born at such and such a time, he worked, and he died’ — as though that were all one needed to know about a
life. He insisted that his own life was uninteresting too: a view that would be convenient for him, if true. The result, despite
Heidegger’s mythologising of home, is a philosophy that feels uninhabitable — to return again to Murdoch’s notion of ‘inhabited’ thought. Heidegger’s work is exhilarating, but in the end it is a philosophy in which I cannot find a place to live.

(Illustrations Credit 14.1)

I have been surprised in a different way by the other giant in the field: Sartre — the writer who first tempted me into philosophy with
Nausea
. I knew he would be a powerful presence in my story, but I was surprised at how much I came to respect him, and even to like him.

Of course, he was monstrous. He was self-indulgent, demanding, bad-tempered. He was a sex addict who didn’t even enjoy sex, a man who would walk away from friendships saying he felt no regret. He gave free rein to his obsessions with viscosity and gloopiness, and with the feeling that other people were looking at him and making judgements; he never seemed to worry that some readers might not share
these idiosyncrasies. He defended a range of odious regimes, and made a cult of violence. He maintained that literature for its own sake is a bourgeois luxury, that writers
must
engage with the world, and that revising one’s writing is a waste of time — all of which I disagree with. I disagree with quite a lot in Sartre.

But then there is that question of ‘character’ — and Sartre is full of character. He bursts out on all sides with energy, peculiarity, generosity and communicativeness. All of this is captured in an anecdote by the German historian Joachim Fest, who met him at a party in Berlin in the late 1940s. He describes how Sartre held court amid some thirty people who grilled him about his philosophy; in response, he rambled on about jazz and cinema and the novels of John Dos Passos. Someone who was present said afterwards that Sartre put him in mind of a South American peasant hacking through a jungle of phenomena, sending brightly coloured parrots flying up with their wings flashing in all directions. Fest remarked, ‘
Everything that he said seemed to me to be noticeably well informed and yet disordered, in part also muddled, but always touching on our sense of the times. Everyone was impressed. If I sum up my responses, I learned through Sartre that a degree of muddle-headedness can be quite fascinating.’

This is what fascinates me in Sartre too. Whereas Heidegger circled around his home territory, Sartre moved ever forwards, always working out new (often bizarre) responses to things, or finding ways of reconciling old ideas with fresh input. Heidegger intoned that one must think, but Sartre actually thought. Heidegger had his big
Kehre
— his ‘turn’ — but Sartre turned and turned and turned again. He was always thinking
‘against himself’, as he once said, and he followed Husserl’s phenomenological command by exploring whatever topic seemed most difficult at each moment.

All this was true in his life as well as in his writing. He laboured tirelessly for his chosen causes, risking his own safety. He took his ‘engagements’ seriously — and for every unwise and damaging commitment, there was a worthwhile one, such as his campaign against the government’s abuses in Algeria. He was never able successfully to toe a
party line on anything, however hard he tried. Perhaps Sartre’s politics are best summed up in a remark he made in 1968: ‘
If one rereads all my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist.’ He was anarchic because he would not stop using his brain. Moreover, to quote Merleau-Ponty again, he was good — or at least he
wanted
to do good. He was driven to it.

I am also more impressed now than ever by his radical atheism, so different to that professed by Heidegger, who abandoned his faith only in order to pursue a more intense form of mysticism. Sartre was a profound atheist, and a humanist to his bones. He outdid even Nietzsche in his ability to live courageously and thoughtfully in the conviction that nothing lies beyond, and that no divine compensations will ever make up for anything on this earth. For him,
this
life is what we have, and we must make of it what we can.

In one of his transcribed conversations with Beauvoir, he said to her, ‘
It seems to me that a great atheist, truly atheist philosophy was something philosophy lacked. And that it was in this direction that one should now endeavour to work.’ Beauvoir replied, ‘To put it briefly, you wanted to make a philosophy of man.’

When she then asked him whether he wanted to add any final remarks to their dialogues, he said that, on the whole, the two of them had lived without paying much attention to God. She agreed. Then he said, ‘
And yet we’ve lived; we feel that we’ve taken an interest in our world and that we’ve tried to see and understand it.’ To do this freshly and (mostly) intelligently for seven decades is an achievement more than worthy of celebration.

One aspect of Heidegger’s engagement with the world that really merits attention from the twenty-first-century reader is his double interest in technology and ecology. In his 1953 lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, he argued that our technology is not merely an aggregation of clever devices: it reveals something fundamental about our existence. It therefore needs thinking through in a philosophical way rather than just in a technical one. We cannot understand
our lives if we ask only what our machines can do, or how best to manage them, or what we should use them for. The essence of technology, he said, is
‘nothing technological’. To investigate it properly is to be taken to much deeper questions about how we work, how we occupy Earth, and how we
are
in relation to Being.

Of course, Heidegger was thinking here of typewriters, celluloid movie projectors, big old automobiles and combine harvesters. Very few existentialists (or anyone else) foresaw the role computer technology would come to play in our lives, although in his 1954 book
Existentialism and the Modern Predicament
, the German author Friedrich Heinemann warned that the coming
‘ultra-rapid computing machine’ would raise a ‘truly existential question’, namely that of how human beings could remain free.

Heinemann could not have been more right. Later Heideggerians, notably Hubert Dreyfus, have written about the
Internet as the technological innovation that most clearly reveals what technology is. Its infinite connectivity promises to make the entire world storeable and available, but, in doing so, it also removes privacy and depth from things. Everything, above all ourselves, becomes a resource, precisely as Heidegger warned. In being made a resource, we are handed over, not just to other individuals like ourselves, but to an impersonal ‘they’ whom we never meet and cannot locate. Dreyfus was writing in 2001: since then, the internet has become even more intrusive and so ubiquitous that we can hardly find an angle from which to think it through: it is the very atmosphere many of us breathe all day. Yet surely we ought to be thinking about it — about what sort of beings we are or want to be in our online lives, and what sort of Being we have, or want to have.

Perhaps fortunately, so far, our computer technology just as frequently reminds us of what it
cannot
do, or at least cannot do yet. Computer systems perform poorly at navigating the rich texture of lived reality: that complex web of perceptions, movements, interactions and expectations that make up the most ordinary human experience, such as entering a café and looking around for your friend Pierre. They are not even good at distinguishing foreground shapes in
a visual image. In other words, as Dreyfus and others have long recognised, computers are bad phenomenologists.