Speaking of Being

In an earlier post on the subject of Karl Rahner I observed that existentialism hasn't kept the edginess  it still had in my college days.  Its various proponents (express and otherwise) have retained their roles as significant thinkers, but, like the Hegelians before them, their successors and disciples are now less scruffy revolutionaries than safely-tenured seniors.

So the experience of reading Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe was in some ways a nostalgic return to those dangerous days of the existentialists.  The book is a narrative of a twentieth century movement; pre-1900 precursors are duly noted and largely ignored.  The genre is collective biography, with a greater cast characters than those featured at the top of the cover above.  Yes, we have Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers and Merleau-Ponty.  But we also have Arendt, Weil, Levinas, Brentano, Marcel and many lesser known figures.  Ms. Bakewell not only takes us chronologically through these tangled lives (and loves) but interweaves the crises they faced with the kernal of their ideas.  So it's an intellectual history of existentialism plus celebrity gossip.

Now Ms. Bakewell is a serious scholar.  She teaches at Oxford's Kellogg College and is the author of an award-winng biography of Montaigne.  She begins her account with Sartre's decision in 1933 to attend Husserl's lectures on phenomenology in Berlin.  In some ways Husserl's phenomenology is the source of the whole movement, the exhortation to go "Zu den Sachen selbst" ("to the things themselves"), to bracket out one's theories and systems and confront the bare phenomena of existence.  ( I remember that for decades I owned one of those impossibly thick paperbacks, cover blazened only with the words:  HUSSERL PHENOMENOLOGY, and never really cracked it between purchase and eventual re-sale.)

And from there we're off.  But despite the large cast of characters, the focus keeps returning to the two around whom the others, to some extent, revolve:  Heidegger in Germany and Sartre in France.  Each is a charismatic figure, drawing disciples to the cafes of Saint-Germaine-du-Pres or the rural fastness of the Black Forest.  Each exemplifies what might be considered the fundamental ethical scandal of existentialism, that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party, and that Sartre for too long defended the most violent excesses of Stalinism.  They met once:  after Sartre had defined existentialism as  a "humanism" in which "existence precedes essence," Heidegger disclaimed any intent to respond to such superceded "metaphysical" categories--and denied being an existentialist.  When finally brought face to face in 1952, their private meeting was apparently awkward and fruitless for both.

In a book like this there must obviously be a lot of simplification in summarizing the thought of a dozen or so difficult and nuanced thinkers.  I was a little surprised, myself, to realize about halfway through that, though I felt I was familiar with most of these characters and their characteristic assertions, I had really actually read the work of only a few:  Heidegger's Being and Time and a couple essays, a pair of novels by Camus and his "Myth of Sysiphus," Sartre's essay on existentialism referenced above, and a book-length essay by Merleau-Ponty on Arthur Koestler's Darkeness at Noon and the Communist problem.  It was good to get a broader overview, but at the same time I was more dissatisfied with the summations that covered ideas I thought myself most familiar with.  It's not that I imagine that I could do a better job.  It's more perhaps that the topic of existentialism well-illustrates the general limitations of reducing complexities to slogans, summaries, abstracts or maxims.

And that of course leads me to wonder about the value of this very blog, or of any blogs, or of applications like Twitter.  When I was growing up, the Reader's Digest company sold these things called "Condensed Books."  They took mostly best-selling books, abridged them to about a quarter of their original size, and would publish four or five in a volume, on the assumption that writing required compression if it was to keep relevant to the frantic pace of modern life in the mid-sixties.  We had rows and rows of the things, and I even had a twelve-volume set of condensed classics for young people.  They were scorned, for good reason, and I rarely find them in used-book stores.  But we modern  readers are still impelled by that same impulse to epitomize.

So I can certainly recommend the book as a page-turner, as something even of a pot-boiler, a portrait of an important part of the age, and an introduction to an increasingly remote climate of thought.  But as Richard Bentley said of Alexander Pope's Iliad, "It is a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer."  And one might, in the same vein, with Husserl insist, regarding the existentialists, that one there also go (however reluctantly and deliberately) "zu den Sachen selbst":