By Sarah Bakewell (whose study of Montaigne I really enjoyed earlier in the year), and enticingly subtitled Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, this was published in 2016.

My audio-version was very capably read by Antonia Beamish, but you really need to make notes on this kind of book, so it's not ideal as listening material. As a back-up, I found a copy to borrow from the Internet Archive.

As she did with Montaigne, Bakewell very expertly combines philosophy, biography, history, and memoir to offer an accessible and lucid account of modern existentialism, a key movement in the history of ideas.

Although I have a growing interest in the subject, I am not a natural reader of philosophy (unless it has a direct bearing on politics...). I often struggle with the tortured language. I'm aware that it's tortured not for the sake of being pretentious, but because words-as-we-commonly-use-them are blunt instruments when it comes to teasing out the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Be that as it may, I find most philosophical texts pretty indigestible.

This is where Bakewell shines. She is a great guide. She gives us lots of examples and glosses, helps us make the right linkages, and leavens it all with a generous dash of humour.

I especially appreciated the overview this book offers. I was familiar, to a greater or lesser degree, with some of the thinkers she examines, but I'd never put them all together under quite such a useful and coherent umbrella, or seen their connections quite so clearly. Others, on the other hand, I hardly knew at all, and so it was a good, context-rich introduction.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) -- "the king and queen of existentialism" -- are the two who take up the lion's share of the pages. My knowledge of them was only generic, despite having read material that is clearly influenced by them.

Up there too, is Albert Camus (1913-60). Back in the 1980s/90s, I'd read L'etranger, La peste, and La chute, but -- as I so often note in relation to my younger reading self -- I had little idea of the context from which his work emerged. (Much more recently, I read L'hote.)

Also prominent in Bakewell's narrative is Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a formative though controversial figure. What I knew of him had mostly come from reading work by and about Hannah Arendt (who also wrote a couple of essays on existentialism).


Paris (these are photos from 1988) is where it all began. The TGV service between the capital and Lyon started in 1981, only a little over a year after Sartre's death. I'm not sure why, but this juxtaposition surprises me

Of Bakewell's other three stalwarts -- Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) -- I confess to having known next to nothing before I started.

Among the more peripheral figures in this busy book, I'll note just a few. There's Emmanuel Levinas, the political implications of whose "big idea" -- "that... ethics is understood as a relation of infinite responsibility to the other person" -- I'd come across via a colleague at Melbourne Uni who worked on border regimes and asylum-seekers. Very briefly, we encounter Simone Weil (whose work I dipped a toe into as a very young person, again without any context to help me understand it). Irvin Yalom gets a brief mention (he worked "in an overtly existentialist framework", apparently). And I'd forgotten that Sartre wrote a foreword to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnes de la terre), a text I used to use in class with my Master's students.

With such a large cast of customers inhabiting the buzzy, conversation-filled existentialist cafe that Bakewell imagines, it follows that it's not possible to cover them all in depth. At some points, I found myself digging around for supplementary sources, when I found the explanations of key terms just a little too condensed. That's not a flaw, just an inevitability. You can't do broad AND deep.

Conversely, the massive sweep of time Bakewell covers (from the early 1930s through to the late 1970s) enables us to watch in fascination as the evolving movement of existentialism grapples with the rise of Hitler, the occupation of France, the dawn of the nuclear age, the Cold War, the evolution of communism, the rise of anti-colonialism and feminism, and the convulsions of the 1960s. These are challenges that require existentialism to be active, relevant, and practical. And many of its practitioners prided themselves on being all those things.

Of course, they often found themselves parting company over the implications of these challenges. There were some memorable disagreements, which Bakewell sketches very adroitly.

On a more prosaic note, I liked the way the book has all the paraphernalia of an academic work (a detailed source-list, bibliography, and index), while still remaining approachable.

And, as I've often commented on this blog, I love a book that comes with a reading list. This one offers enough suggestions to feed my newly acquired philosophy habit for many a long year...



While acknowledging that existentialism as a "mood" has roots that go way back in time, Bakewell locates the "moment" that saw the birth of its modern manifestation at the Bec-de-Gaz bar, rue Montparnasse, Paris, as 1932 was turning into 1933.

There, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Raymond Aron were discussing philosophy, and Aron introduced his friends to a new way of thinking: A philosophy not of abstracts, but of real life as we experience it. As Aron famously says, "You can make philosophy out of this cocktail!"

What Aron is referring to is Edmund Husserl's "phenomenology" (and every time I write that word, I have to check I've not inserted extra syllables...). Husserl maintained that the task of philosophers is to look at whatever is presenting itself to them, and describe it. All the attention should be on the THINGS themselves, rather than abstract concepts.

Sartre was enthralled by these ideas, and dashed off to study in Berlin (in 1933, too -- a less than propitious year). What he brought back was a new blend unique to him, encompassing phenomenology, the thought of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), and his own literary leanings. Armed with this new product, he led a philosophical movement that would have international impact.



Sartre's key problematique was what it means to be free. "Existence precedes essence," he insisted. That is, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own essence. You can't label or define me; I'm always a work in progress. I am my own freedom -- no more, no less. Which sounds wonderful. But it is actually not easy. Decision-making causes anxiety, and taking responsibility for our freely-chosen actions is a heavy burden. The need for humans to constantly invent their own path is both an exhilarating prospect and a frightening one. Nevertheless, it IS possible, says Sartre, to be authentic and free.

Bakewell concludes her opening chapter -- which is a tour d'horizon of the ideas and thinkers that make up existentialism, on which she will expand during the rest of the book -- with a corporate character sketch:

"Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete, human existence. They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are. But as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free. And therefore I am responsible for everything I do. A dizzying fact which causes an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself. On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical, and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown. Despite the limitations I always want more. I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. Human existence is thus ambiguous, at once boxed in by borders, and yet transcendent and exhilarating. An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself. By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence, and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives."

I won't summarize the book in detail, as that would make for a really long post. Rather, I'll highlight areas that particularly caught my attention.



1.

Husserl's ideas, it seems to me, have abiding relevance. As we've said, when we are contemplating phenomena, what we should be interested in is what we are experiencing. We need to set aside abstract suppositions and intrusive emotional associations (setting aside or bracketing out is known as epoche, a term borrowed from the Sceptics, and meaning a suspension of judgement). That is the path to liberation. What matters is description. If we keep coming back to the things themselves, we get to the heart of the experience. Such a process should free us of ideologies, which need to be set aside. In that sense, it's quite a revolutionary idea.

"All consciousness is consciousness of something," as Husserl famously noted. Sartre expands like this: "This necessity for consciousness to exist as consciousness of something other than itself is what Husserl calls 'intentionality.'.. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans."

2.

Bakewell glosses Heidegger beautifully (although, as she admits, it's hard to actually like the man...). On consciousness, she explains: "Enabling things to unhide themselves is what humans do: it is our distinctive contribution. We are a 'clearing', a Lichtung, a sort of open, bright forest glade into which beings can shyly step forward like a deer from the trees... We help things to emerge into the light by being conscious of them, and we are conscious of them poetically, which means that we pay respectful attention and allow them to show themselves as they are, rather than bending them to our will... We remain in the forest, but we provide a relatively open spot where other beings can bask for a moment. If we did not do this, everything would remain in the thickets, hidden even to itself."



3.

I loved the contrast evoked here:

Jaspers, in a radio talk in the 1960s, describes an early encounter with the sea and the beach -- the huge kind of beach you get at low tide in the Frisian islands, with the massive expanse of the ocean beyond: "All that is solid," he said, "all that is gloriously ordered, having a home, being sheltered: absolutely necessary! But the fact that there is this other, the infinity of the ocean -- that liberates us." Philosophy, for him, Bakewell explains, meant forging on towards that larger seascape where everything was in flux.

Heidegger, on the other hand, said to an interviewer in 1966: "According to our human experience and history, at least as far as I see it, I know that everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition." Heidegger once travelled to Greece, and didn't like it. It didn't fit his preconceptions.

No prizes for guessing which one appeals to me more.

4.

Of all the interesting-sounding things on the reading-list that emerges from this book, Simone de Beauvoir's are perhaps the most intriguing. She was always acutely aware of the tussle between our inherent freedom and the forces that seek to impinge on it, and built on G.W.F. Hegel's idea of human relationships as a battle of unequal gazes or perspectives.

As Bakewell explains: "We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir's view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment."

Bakewell loves Beauvoir's genius for being amazed by the world; she was an inveterate marveller at things, and that's a trait I always find attractive, too.



5.

The way Beauvoir anticipates death is also very resonant: "I think with sadness of all the books I've read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more... That unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and randomness ... there is no place where it will all live again."

It is obviously a challenge for a school of thought concerned with existence to comes to terms with the lack of that existence. Bakewell sums it up like this: "As [philosopher Richard] Wollheim says, '[Death] deprives us of phenomenology, and, having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up.' Having had experience of the world, having had intentionality, we want to continue it forever, because that experience of the world is WHAT WE ARE. Unfortunately, this is the deal we get. We can taste phenomenology only because, one day, it will be taken from us. We clear our space, then the forest reclaims it again. The only consolation is to have had the beauty of seeing light through the leaves at all: to have had something, rather than nothing."

For Heidegger, meanwhile, in Bakewell's words, "all philosophising is about homecoming, and the greatest journey home is the journey to death... Death meant above a return to the soil of home."

6.

Another fascinating element the book brings out is the open relationship that Sartre and Beauvoir enjoyed over the space of half a century. They were famously non-exclusive, but remained the bedrock of each other's lives. They share a grave in Paris's Montparnasse cemetery. The two of them, posits Bakewell, represented the two sides of phenomenological existentialism: The part that collects and pores over (Beauvoir), and the part that discards things to be free (Sartre).



7.

Merleau-Ponty, Bakewell shows us, also pays attention to the freedom/limitation conundrum: "The aspects of our existence that limit us... are the very same ones that bind us to the world and give us scope for action and perception. They make us what we are... Merleau-Ponty... saw quite calmly that we exist only through compromise with the world -- and that this is fine. The point is not to fight that fact, or to inflate it into too great a significance, but to observe and understand exactly how that compromise works."

Merleau-Ponty -- who, incidentally, was a really nifty dancer -- emphasizes the "lived body". Bakewell explains like this: "In general, Merleau-Ponty thinks human experience only makes sense if we abandon philosophy's time-honoured habit of starting with a solitary, capsule-like, immobile adult self, isolated from its body and world, which must then be connected up again... Instead, for him, we slide from the womb to the birth canal to an equally close and total immersion in the world. That immersion continues as long as we live."

As she points out, it's Merleau-Ponty who, of all these philosophers, has the most resonant idea of consciousness. It is not a nothingness (as it was for Sartre) or a clearing (as it was for Heidegger). Rather, it's a fold in the fabric of the world, which makes a little nest or hollow: "It stays for a while, before eventually being unfolded and smoothed away." If the conscious self is "an improvised pouch in the cloth of the world", then the self is private and tucked away, but is always part of the fabric without which it would not exist.

Bakewell admits: "If I had to choose an intellectual hero in this story, it would be Merleau-Ponty, the happy philosopher of things as they are."



*_*_*

Heidegger died in 1976, Sartre in 1980, Aron in 1983, Beauvoir in 1986, Levinas in 1995. I'm shocked that I recall not a single one of these passings. I obviously wasn't tuned into this particular corpus of ideas at that stage.

And clearly, the philosophical world did not stop turning. Pushback came from the "structuralists", and then from the movements that I had much more to do with in my political studies: The post-structuralists, deconstructionists, and post-modernists. "Although," says Bakewell, "each of these movements disagreed with each other, most were united in considering existentialism and phenomenology the quintessence of what they were NOT." And yet, because the existentialists tackled issues that still feel very contemporary, they continue to have important things to say to us. We've never stopped grappling with questions of authenticity, identity, purpose, and freedom.

Existentialist ideas and attitudes also live on, though perhaps unrecognized: "[They] have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all." As Bakewell points out: "By feeding feminism, gay rights, the breaking down of class barriers, and the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, [existentialism] helped to change the basis of our existence today in fundamental ways."

I was very struck by the testimony of Robert D. Zaretsky, both to his own sense of the challenge of the existentialists, and to the moving ways his students reacted to some of their texts: "I do not know how Sartre and Camus would have responded to such unexpectedly personal professions of existentialist faith. I still don’t know what to think of them myself. But they brought me back to [Bob] Moses’s existentialist credo that 'you try to eke out some corner of love or some glimpse of happiness within.' You struggle not just on behalf of others, but also on behalf of your own self."