Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café (2016) — a book review

05 October 2016

Worthily entertaining and occasionally intriguing — but philosophically simplistic — which happily doesn't matter at all

Sarah Bakewell's— At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others (Other Press, 2016) — is worth reading for its protagonists' "character" development. Descriptions of their tumultuous times are also admirably done.

Philosophically, however, Sarah Bakewell's overview takes too abbreviated and too superficial an approach to have much philosophy-tutoring merit. I came away with the impression that analytically organized thinking and consistently probing subtlety are not prominently among the author's immense strengths.

Had I not been familiar with existentialism before reading Existentialist Café, I would not have grasped deeply much about it after finishing. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary surpasses Bakewell by providing a usefully succinct overview in just one sentence. And Wikipedia's brief article pretty much thrashes hers with its more accurately thorough and perspective-providing details.

We get an early clue as to Bakewell's arguably too intellectually casual approach. She begins her account with phenomenology. But she makes little effort to clearly demonstrate how, or conceptually why, phenomenology is necessarily logically related to existentialism.

In fairness, neither philosophical branch is notably coherent. I can see why the author might have elected to jump over unnecessary (and easily disputable) work.

Nevertheless, from an informational/teaching point of view — because Café is clearly aimed at beginners — it would have made more sense to concisely (and very generally) define phenomenology and existentialism early on. Afterward, having oriented her readers, the author could have moved on to illustrate how her protagonists created and played with those concepts. Instead, Bakewell abruptly begins with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and makes a disconnected, too opaque jumble of their admittedly abstruse thinking.

I will not try to prove this assertion. Demonstrating a deficiency of omission is not possible (in this context) without (a) quoting the whole book and then (b) depending upon readers' presumably adequate background knowledge to detect its absences and superficial glosses.

Just consider yourself warned. This is one area where Wikipedia outdoes Bakewell by providing good summaries of both lines of thought. If phenomenology and existentialism are new to you, I would read Wikipedia's overviews before opening Café.

That said — Café's positives very much outweigh its negatives

Four notable pluses are:

Café is fun to read. Like a gossip column about famous people that one has never met.

Bakewell also does a superior job of putting her "characters" into the psychologically upsetting context of their (mostly) first half 20^th Century times.

Her citations to source material are valuable.

And, seemingly almost accidentally, she makes a good case for the application of "creating oneself" philosophy to humanitarian political endeavors. (This interpretation is perhaps more an indicator of my concerns than Bakewell's.)

Café serves exceedingly well as an inviting preface to further reading. It is somewhat surprisingly, given its analytical negatives, an admirable achievement.

An introductory disclaimer — perhaps I cannot be trusted to adequately review books about philosophy

Three character traits may make me an unsuitable reviewer of philosophy-related writings.

First, it has been evident to me since childhood that much of Reality is very obviously unknowable.

This attribute immediately tosses me from the mental self-diddling bin.

Despite having read a significant amount of ancient to modern philosophy, I consider most of it to be flailing bullshit.

With that judgmental comment, I am not dismissing Ethics, which is an "existentially" distinguishable field.

Second, perhaps as a consequence of the first attribute, I am scientifically minded.

This is not to say that science has pertinent answers to many philosophical questions. But It is to hint that one cannot define or assess Reality, without first acknowledging the radical shortcomings of the "mind tool" that we use to do both.

And that's without even addressing relativistic (perspective) questions raised by one's location (and pertinent descriptive attributes) in the Universe.

Scientifically thoughtful readers will understand what I am getting at. A flawed tool has trouble comprehending both (a) its distortions and (b) those often unknown and unimaginable areas which it cannot see at all.

Third, to my (certainly confused) mind, Buddhism does a more succinctly accurate job addressing Life's existential ambiguity than the Western philosophy does.

Zen's emphasis on non-conceptual mindfulness, for example, approaches some of the topics that Bakewell's protagonists do in an arguably more efficient fashion. This is especially so with regard to phenomenology, where Bakewell's book begins.

Zen, in addressing the nature of human existence, would bypass the following (representative) super-blithering from one of existentialism's retroactively established founders, Søren Kierkegaard.

Bakewell, thankfully, refuses to be diverted down his semantically silly road:

The subjective thinker’s form, the form of his communication, is his style. His form must be just as manifold as are the opposites that he holds together. The systematic eins, zwei, drei is an abstract form that also must inevitably run into trouble whenever it is to be applied to the concrete.

To the same degree as the subjective thinker is concrete, to the same degree his form must also be concretely dialectical. But just as he himself is not a poet, not an ethicist, not a dialectician, so also his form is none of these directly. His form must first and last be related to existence, and in this regard he must have at his disposal the poetic, the ethical, the dialectical, the religious.

Subordinate character, setting, etc., which belong to the well balanced character of the esthetic production, are in themselves breadth; the subjective thinker has only one setting—existence—and has nothing to do with localities and such things.

The setting is not the fairyland of the imagination, where poetry produces consummation, nor is the setting laid in England, and historical accuracy is not a concern.

The setting is inwardness in existing as a human being; the concretion is the relation of the existence-categories to one another. Historical accuracy and historical actuality are breadth."

© 2016 Wikipedia, Existentialism (visited 04 October 2016) (quoting Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, as translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong — presumably from the Hongs' 1992 Volume I — or Volume II — book of the same name , at [according to Wikipedia] p. 357–358) (paragraph spit)

A necessary aside — Kierkegaard was not always this obtuse

Bakewell quotes him in a moment of useful clarity:

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it.

© 2016 Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café (Other Press, 2016) (at page 259) (quoting Kierkegaard, Notebook IV A 164: 1843 (D) — in Roger Poole and Henrik Stangerup (editors), A Kierkegaard Reader (1989)) (paragraph split)

This thought somewhat parallels Zen's insight that the present moment defines our only (or perhaps most) meaningful form of Reality.

Instead of leaping ahead to look backward, or backwards to look forwards — as we Westerners are prone to do — Zen advises anchoring oneself in (what Western phenomenologists would probably agree is) the immediacy of the present.

Is Café too glib? — in places, yes

Reviewer Drew Odom, writing at Amazon, said this:

Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café is, like its title, entertaining and glib. It consists largely of anecdotes about and shallow intellectual histories of its major figures.

Her heroes are Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, roughly in that order. Her summaries of the various philosophical positions rarely dig any deeper than the familiar commonplaces of each of them . . .

About the famous disagreements between and falling out of Camus and Sartre she says too little. Camus, it seems to me, she discusses shabbily.

[M]any readers and thinkers have come to see Camus, like Raymond Aron, another thinker Bakewell treats unfairly, as more significant writers than either Beauvoir or Sartre, in part because they remained at least in part true to that other French tradition of the humanist enlightenment.

Odom's apparently knowledgeable impression matches my less fluent one

For example, I am considerably older than Sarah Bakewell. Her protagonists' lives considerably overlapped mine. I stumblingly read bits of Sartre, when he was still alive, in high school French class. I did not consider him to be Camus' — whom we also "read" — intellectually soulful equal:

[T]hough she rightly denounces Sartre for his support of some "odious" regimes, she nearly forgives him for that since his support was motivated by a wish for human freedom.

A man who talked a lot about freedom and yet supported Stalin, Mao, and even Pol Pot shouldn't be forgiven for his sins quite so easily.

To Bakewell's credit, she provides enough details about the Sartre-Camus falling out for us to intuit which way we ourselves might have divided over the same issues. Key to the disagreement was Camus' refusal to consider blowing up good guys to achieve unknowably "better" ends.

Pertinent to this "whom to kill" observation — Café's second half is much more coherently delivered than its first

With regard to Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophically extreme nonsense, Bakewell writes:

If a lot of people with incompatible interests all claim that right is on their side, how do you decide between them?

In a paragraph of the final part of The Communists and Peace, 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 most oppressed and disadvantaged in the situation, and then adopt their version of events as the right one. Their view can be considered the criterion for truth itself: the way of establishing 'man and society as they truly are'.

If something is not true in the eyes of the least favoured, says Sartre, the it is not true.

Sartre's proposition makes political (but not philosophical) sense, given his willingness to actively support the downtrodden.

On the other hand, as a premise about the nature of overarching Truth (whatever that might be), Sartre's formulation is obviously lacking:

Disagreements inevitably ensue about who exactly is least favoured at any moment. Each time an underdog becomes an overdog, everything has to be recalculated. Constant monitoring of roles is required — and who is to do the monitoring?

A genuinely thoughtful and precisely cogent philosopher would almost certainly not have published such an idiotic premise. Its falsity is instantly apparent. Ergo, my youthful dismissal of Sartre as a figure of great intellectual clout.

Yet . . .

Existentially derived moral complexity

Pertinent to Sartre's perspective about the Underdog nature of Truth, history consistently does favor the violently greedy. Bakewell introduces anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon's prescribed antidote:

Sartre certainly embraced Fanon's militant arguments, which . . . included the notion that anti-imperial revolution must inevitably be violent, not just because violence was effective . . . but because it helped the colonised to shake off the paralysis of oppression and forge a new shared identity.

Without glorifying violence, Fanon considered it essential to political change; he had little sympathy for Gandhi's idea of non-violent resistance as a source of power.

Sartre endorsed Fanon's view so enthusiastically that he outdid the original, shifting the emphasis so as to praise violence for its own sake. Sartre seemed to see the violence of the oppressed as a Nietzschean act of self-creation. Like Fanon, he also contrasted it with the hidden brutality of colonialism.

Why might Fanon's perspective be relevant today?

This is not in Bakewell's book, but — White Pomposity's characteristic question for African-American activists is whether they are advocating violence.

The unspoken presumption always is that violence is the Tool of the Devil. Predictably, the racially oppressed dance away from this question, dutifully advocating peaceful protest instead. We cannot, it appears, risk losing credibility in the White Man's dominating eyes.

Fanon's comment about oppressed people's paralysis is pertinent.

Part of the attraction of this book — are Bakewell's retrospective reexaminations

She provides both youthful and middle-aged impressions of her protagonists' writings. Her then and now opinions often do not agree. Philosophy's meaning tends to change with experience. Some of what she found interesting and motivating, while young, turned out to be refuse.

As an example of her changed perspective — there is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's increased importance

Bakewell began her story by making Merleau-Ponty look like a delightfully pleasant and thoughtful, but intellectually boring, fellow. She ends by acknowledging that he may have turned out to be the most influential of her protagonists (at Café pages 325-326).

Footnotes

Bakewell's source notes appear at the back of the book, listed by relevant page numbers. There are, unfortunately, no numbers directly linking the notes to the text's sentences.

Usually, this practice irritates me because one has to guess what the author might have footnoted — and then flip to the end of the book to see if one was correct.

Fortunately, Bakewell seems to have anticipated what people might want to investigate. Not once, as I recall, did she lack a citation that I thought she should have. And her cited material seems precise enough to track.

Well done.

At the Existentialist Café is recommended — perhaps much more highly than my review makes apparent

Here is an example of Bakewell's kindly disposed intellectual utility:

I also find myself thinking back to [Hannah] 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.

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.

The result . . . is a philosophy that feels uninhabitable . . . .

I have been surprised in a different way by the other giant in the field: Sartre . . . .

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 would walk away from friendships saying he felt no regret.

He defended a range of odious regimes, and made a cult of violence. . . . 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.

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 new ideas with fresh input. Heidegger intoned that one must think, but Sartre actually thought.

Those assessments (I suspect) come more from a person interested in human beings, than they do from someone intrigued by philosophy's pretended rigor.

Maybe that is Bakewell's point. Philosophy divorced from humanly experienced Reality has none.

That is why Bakewell's sympathetic portrayal of Simone de Beauvoir is compelling. Beauvoir shines with a combination of penetrating intelligence and strong-willed eccentricity. Even in high school, I knew of her. To have penetrated the consciousness of an ignorant male teen is testament to her cross-generational influence.

Sarah Bakewell's cast of characters and her take on them will remain on my bookshelf. I look forward to more from her.

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Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café (2016) — a book review