In Our Time - Existentialism

Episode Date: June 28, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss existentialism. Imagine being back inside the bustling cafes on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1930s, cigarette smoke, strong coffee and the buzz of continental voices philosophising about human responsibility and freedom. This kind of talk gave utterance to Existentialism. A twentieth century philosophy of everyday life concerned with the individual, and his or her place within the world. In novels, plays and philosophy, Existentialists try to work out the nature of our existence. As Roquentin says in Sartre’s novel ‘Nausea’, “To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it”.But where did these ideas come from? What do they really mean? And how have they impacted on our lives? With Dr A. C. Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Christina Howells, Professor of French at the University of Oxford, fellow of Wadham College; Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex and author of A Companion to Continental Philosophy.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, imagine being inside the Clafe floor on the left bank of Paris in the 19thirties. Sartre in the corner, Simone de Beauvoir on the way, Camus strolling up the boulevard Saint-Germain. Cigarette smoke, strong coffee,

the guttrel of Gallic voices philosophising about human responsibility and freedom. Man is condemned to be free, says Sartre, discuss. The serious talk we imagine would be of existentialism, a 20th century philosophy concerned with the individual and his or her place within the world. In novels, plays in philosophy, existentialists try to work out the nature of our existence. As Rokhanton says in Sart's novel, Nausea,

to exist is simply to be there. What exists appears lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it. But where did the existentialists come from? What do they really mean? What impact did they have? With me to discuss existentialism is Dr. A. C. Grayling,

reader in philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London. Dr. Christina Howells, Professor of French at the University of Oxford, fellow of Wadham College Oxford, an author of many books including Sartre at the necessity of freedom, and Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, an author of a companion to continental philosophy. Anthony Grayling, do we look in the 19th century to find the roots of existentialism,

and what do we find when we look there? What happened in the 19th century was there was an emerging sense that science, which had made the world look like a mechanism governed by natural laws, had drained any external or transcendent source of meaning or purpose or value from the universe, at least in the view of some who were sensitive to the fact that people need a reason for living, for choosing the values that they do live. You find a number of significant figures in the 19th century, like Soren Kierkech and Friedrich Nietzsche, being sufficiently impressed by the thought that the world is a place that has no absolutes. You know, Nietzsche put it by saying, God is dead, that they had to think again or look again at what it is to be human and how being human can be made something valuable and pointful.

There was this mechanistic view, which came from Newton, Let's take that as a simple way of putting it. But there's also a growing skepticism about biblical truth led by the German scholars, and that too is a factor, wasn't it? That's exactly right, yes. Scientific history, which was a product of German scholarship in the 19th century, had called very, very many things in question. Yes, that sense also that religious verities and religious sources for morality

were under threat by the view that the whole universe is governed only by natural laws, not by transcendent ones. Then, of course, the development also of Darwinian theory. All that conspired together to give some of the philosophers of the 19th century the sense that they had to look for a different ground for value. Dostoevsky is very interesting because he, through his novels, describes the existential condition rather beautifully. In the underground man, for example.

Especially in the underground man. Yes, indeed. There he gives a portrait of a person who confronts this terrible solitude, this awful lack of value in the universe, this desperate need to find some meaning. It happens that the underground man takes Kikajor's route, but in others of Dostoevsky's writings, particularly Karamatov, you find different alternatives explored.

Simon Critchley, let's say that takes us towards the end of the 19th century, and in the, in 1927, Heidegger published Being in Time, which will take that as the beginning of what we're going to talk about, and among many other things, he said, the essence of what it means to be human lies in an existence. Is that at the core of existentialism? And could you from that extrapolate what you mean by existentialism? It's at the core of Heidegger's understanding of the philosophy of existence.

I mean, He's a relationship to existentialism is a bit more tenuous and difficult. He was very sniffy about Sartre and rather critical of Sartre. But Heidegger says in 27 that the essence of what it means to be human lies in existence, that is that the human being is its existence. The human being first of all exists and then we come to a definition of it afterwards. And what this means for Heidegger is that what it means to be human

is defined in terms of different ways to be, to be or not to be Hamlet's dilemma in a way. And the two different ways to be for Heidegger, the two dominant ways to be are to be oneself, to be authentic or not to be oneself, to be inauthentic. So the choice that faces the human being is the choice as to whether to be an authentic human being or not. So that's the core idea in Heidegger,

that our being, what it means to be human is found in our becoming and our lived everyday existence. And that existence is determined by a choice as to whether we are ourselves and are authentic or are inauthentic and live in self-deception or what Sartre calls Mervais'i.

So the world has no meaning and we have to bring meaning to it and the world is vaguely hostile and every choice we make we are responsible for and those choices have to be authentic and that goes on from there. Nausea, which was published in 1938 Sartre was one of the

Sartre's novel, was one of the first existentialist novels. Can we see the direct influence of Heidegger on Nause? Because I want to turn to Christina Howes in a minute and talk about the influence of the philosophy on literature, because they intertwined very closely from the beginning. Can we see that directly, Simon, the Heidegger 1927, a few years later, Sartre's novel, Nausea. Has he picked up that, and is he working that through already?

Yes, yes, he is. I mean, it's more explicit in Sartre's philosophy, and a classic text here would be Sartre's existentialism as a humanism, which is used by many as the defining text of existentialism. It's where Sartre embraces that. notion of existentialism, given as a lecture after the liberation in France in 46. In that lecture, Sartre says what defines existentialism is existence precedes essence, that we first of all exist, we surge up into existence and then we only define ourselves afterwards.

So there isn't a world of meaning waiting for us? No, the world of meaning has to be created by us. It's our responsibility. And Sartra's fiction, not just Sartre's fiction, Camus fiction as well, and maybe you can go back to Dostoevsky here, some of the underground man, is exploring those themes. Which reads me to Christine Howells, who specialised in this area of, you are the great authority on Sartre, but can you explain why existentialism as a philosophy is so suited to literature at the time, Christina? Yes, it's a very interesting question. I think that the first reaction one would have to it would be to look at it thematically, as indeed Simon was just doing.

It's looking at it thematically, I think, that makes us look at other authors like Dostoyeski and say that they're also concerned with choice, freedom, identity, death perhaps, deep existential themes. But it seems to me that there's more to it than that, that the connection between existentialism and literature is not, I was going to say not primarily, but it's certainly not solely a thematic connection. I think that it's more fundamental and it's concerned with the way in which for the existentialist, abstraction, definition, conceptualisation doesn't somehow get to the root of what existentialism is all about. It's not simply that language is a distortion of existence. Thinking itself, certainly conceptual thinking, tends to pattern existence,

to give existence more meaning than it has for us as we live it. And of course in literature, particularly in the novel, because I think there's a big difference between the novel and drama, which we could talk about in a moment if you want. But in the novel in particular, the specificity of lived experience, the individual experience of the human condition, can be expressed, suggested, made, as it were, present to the reason. rather than analysed and defined.

Can we talk about the view of the tram seat, as it were, well, it's useful. You talk about specificity, which brought that to mind with me. Can you just explain what that is, and if you do agree with this, why you think that might be a very useful instance of existentialism in literature? Yes.

Well, the tram seat episode, of course, comes from La Nozé. And it's the moment when Roconte is sitting in the tram, and he's suddenly terrified by the bench he's sitting on. and he's not sure what it is anymore. And he says, I murmur, it's a bench, but the word won't stick to the thing. And from there, from this feeling of the arbitrary nature of language, if you like,

he moves on to lose faith in language. Of course, we know from Socio that language is arbitrary, but that doesn't mean that at any moment, the tram seat might become something other than it is, As for Rocontein, having lost faith in the word tramsete, Le Bonn in French, he moves into a meditation on how the tram seat might as well be a dead donkey, how the plush velour on the tram seat might be dead donkey's skin. Now, I think what's happening here is not at all Sartre presenting to as his view on language,

his view that actually the world is a seething chaos of mobile, unfixed objects. That would be nonsense. That isn't Saltsry at all. It's a rock on town who's lost faith momentarily, or at least for the length of Lanosa, really, in language. He's seen through language. He's seen that it's language that organises. And he comes to feel, I think, Search doesn't agree with him, that the world is in no way ordered. The world is the chaos that it appears to him momentarily. And by language not having any fixed value, that is the biggest, as it were, metaphor you could possibly have.

after that? Certainly. If language has no fixed value, how do we ever pin down meaning? Yeah. Anthony, Anthony Griding. There is an allied point there too, isn't there? I mean, there's another scene in which Rock Antin is walking in a park, I think, or is at the seaside or somewhere, and everything begins to melt into its numinal form. Can you just explain that? What things are in themselves behind their appearances to us? They appear to us to be individual and solid and the rest of it, in La Norseille, the real reality behind that is a sort of a plastic mess. And Rockinandau, in this moment of psychological crisis, sees the world in that way. And the parallel point is, well, the additional point is that it gives a sense of how

the world in itself, as he calls it, is very different from the world as it is for itself, for consciousness. And this sense of being in a relationship of tension or struggle with something which is very different, from oneself underlies in part that existential view. Anthony, can I put a very simplistic question, probably a crude question to you, but given what was going on in the Second World War, is the idea of we are looking for meaning in a meaningless world, does not not seem inoccupied France where they haven't yet faced up

and therefore they never will face up to the extent of their collaboration, actually? Given that, doesn't this seem to be a rather frivolous, far too distant risk, response, self-protective, cocooned response to what's going on. I'm emphasising to get a response. No, I really don't think it does in a way. And I agree with very much for Simon that it's the First World War of which the crises of the 20s and 30s and the Second World War just sequelae, they're just consequences of it in a way.

But the Second World War did tremendously focus attention. For example, in the case of Sartre, on the kind of moral dilemma that you're faced with if you don't have any absolutes to rest on. There's a character in Sartre who is very worried about whether he should stay with his ailing mother or go and fight with the free French. And so, you know, the circumstances at the time provide that kind of dramatic sort of choice. And it may very well be that there were plenty of people in France then, as now, as you suggest, who were looking for a way of not thinking about certain crucial questions.

But in the case of Sartre, as you see from his trilogy of novels, the Roads to Freedom, that there were people who genuinely felt that the war presented them with a sharper form of the dilemmas that are perennial. So, I mean, you know, it's a good dramatization of the point sake. One of the books that came out that I think it was Simon who said in some remarks, rather, it might have been an article that was a great philosophy of adolescence, but one of the books that hit adolescence of my generation was come use the myth of Sisyphus. So Simon, can you tell us why you think that was sort of carried existentialism so widely,

which it did. It's published in 1942, so it's during the occupation. I mean, Camus is, and it is a, adolescence is something we can come back to. I think it's an important thing, because adolescence is an important thing. But Camus, the question is, for Camus, is there's one serious philosophical question

that's the question of whether life is worth living or not. All other philosophical questions are just details, this is the issue we have to decide. and the context for Camus is a context of absurdity. Absurdity for Camus is a universe without God. And in a universe without God, we have to find meaning we have to be able to answer the question whether life is worth living or not. He illustrates that with this myth of Cicinus.

Cicephas was condemned by the gods to the underworld to pushing a rock, enormous, a big rock, up a hill, endlessly with enormous effort and he pushed the rock to the top of the hill and then it got to the top the rock rolled back down and Sisyphus would return rejoin his rock and then the whole thing would continue over again

Camus says this is a Sisyphus is the absurd hero and what interests Camus is the moment when Sisypus returns back down the slope to rejoin his rock he says this is the hour of consciousness this is when Sisyphus can reflect on his condition. And at this point,

the Sisyphus is stronger than his rock. And what this illustrates for Camus is the following point, that fate, for example, the fate of Sisyphus, which seems to his condemnation by the gods, is finally a human

matter. He has to assume that the fate is a human matter to be settled amongst human beings. So even if he were condemned by the gods to this awful fate, he has to act as if it were his own fate and assume that freely. So it's the free assumption of fate.

It's a theme you also find in Sartre, so I should be condemned to be free. Condemned to be free. I was going to come precisely to Christina on that. Sartre, does Sartre go along with this idea and that the valuable things in life to make it worth living our freedom, creativity, human dignity and love? I'm not sure.

I think that the idea of the absurd that was Camus' major theme is not in fact shared by Sarch. Sarch says, in fact, the world isn't absurd. The world is meaningless. We give it meaning. And there isn't really nothing absurd in that. In a sense, I suppose you could say Rokontat, paradoxically, was a kind of Camusian hero.

Because for Rokontan, the world is absurd. But it's not absurd for Sarch. It's just meaningless. Anthony Grayling, Sartre's view that human beings should be radically free, which seems to have been confirmed by him managing to get to liberty in his hierarchy. What does that mean in practice? What does that mean in practice to most people, given that existentialism was supposed to be for everybody, as it were?

Well, first, it isn't entirely clear. As Christine has just suggested, what it meant to search himself. Very, very late in his life in notes on ethics, or he was working with somebody just at the time he died on a thing called an ethics for the we, for us for community, because, of course, have to remember that after the war, he adopted Marxism and tried to reconcile existentialism. And became an apologist for Stalin for a while as well.

He did, and he was also pushed in the war. direction of trying to think more in social than in individual terms because the early sartre is tremendously an individualist and liberty meant that the radical freedom of the individual, indeed the agony, the necessity of accepting responsibility for that freedom. But I'd suggest that later on, if those notes of anything to go by, he was trying to develop a slightly more mutual view. He says to oppress others is to oppress yourself that there's a kind of mutual interoperable play of freedoms. You're not really free yourself unless you help other people to be free.

So that idea of being generous and open to other people does become an important theme for him. But as Christina says, there is a quite important difference. It may be of nuance, but it's still an important one between Camus and Sartre. And I think Camus, from early on really in the development of his thought was much more socially minded than Sartre was earlier, more interested in a way in the possibilities of relationships. than Sartre was earlier. And therefore, in the popularization of existentialism, which really is the significant thing in a way

for what happened in the 50s and 60s and the youth generation and the wider diffusion of existentialism, which we'll come back to later. Camus is, in a sense, the more immediate figure. Simon, you wanted to get into. Yeah, just to emphasize that freedom for the existentialist is not an idea, it's an experience.

It's an experience which is described in terms of nausea, in terms of vertigo, dizziness, there's this idea of freedom overcomes us in a way. Anxiety is the greatest stimulus. Yes, anxiety is the stimulus to our freedom. What that means, the payoff of that for Sartre, on my view, is commitment.

As well, what freedom leads to is an absolutely, an absolute impassionate commitment to something. so that freedom is not just as it were an abstraction, it's something which is felt and then which leads to a certain course of action. So as it were, the proof of freedom for an existentialist is action in the world. And that kind of... Well, action in the world brings us two things.

So I wanted to bring in Simone de Beauvoir, partly because... I want to bring Sima de Beauvoir, all sorts of reasons. Christina, first of all, what do you think she contributed? And was there a feminist aspect of this? and if that's too corny a question, just ignore it. And secondly, when she and Sartre tried to work out some of the ideas of existentialism in the real world of their personal relationship,

what happened then? Right. Well, Simand de Beauvoir, I think, was less worried than Sartch about the publication of her reflections on ethics. And so, in a sense, until Sarch's notebooks were published posthumously, we didn't have much evidence of what existential ethics would be for Sartch, although we do for Simon de Beauvoir. And I think from that point of view she was particularly important before the posthumous writings of Sartch were published.

Her contribution is very difficult to determine, partly because it's not often debated calmly. Sauch scholars tend, unfortunately, perhaps, not to be able. be enormously interested in Simonde de Beauvoir. Seamonde de Beauvoir scholars very frequently wish to show all the elements of Sart's philosophy that he might have derived from Beauvoir in often quite strange ways. I think myself that it will be impossible at this stage to reconstruct who had what particular idea first. I mean, we have the written works, and I think that that's what we should go on. Simone de Beauvoir develops much more, obviously, the question of the role of women and feminism.

It didn't interest Sartre for a long time, at the end of his life, rather like the interviews with Beni Levy that Anthony was talking about. Sartre moves around, he seems to have become open to all sorts of ideas that, in fact, he was a little bit bored by before, and feminism is one of them. And he does go so far in an interview with Simon de Beauvoir. She's asking him about what has priority the socialist struggle for. liberation of the workers or the feminist struggle. And he says, of course, the feminist struggle. And this was a very popular response, but it seemed to me that it was no more...

Mid-late in the day. Absolutely, and probably rather circumstantial as well. Let's talk about how it worked out. I'm sorry to brush you on it. I've worked out in practice. They had a great love affair, a strong intellectual relationship. It was an open relationship. It distressed her, it seems, quite a lot of times.

I'm not looking for gossip, honestly. But I am looking, no, I'm not. I've said all the is to say, really, but what about the... They try to work out the ideas, as I understand it, they try to work out the ideas in this most crucial little furnace called being together two people. Now, what happened that was interesting there? It's a little bit shocking as well, I think, to us,

because it wasn't one of their most successful experiments. They did have an open relationship. They saw their relationship, sexual relationship, with each other as the primary one, and they allowed each other and they encouraged each other to have other relationships. Indeed, if you look at the history of it, Simone de Beauvoir seems very frequently to have taken on the lovers, the female lovers that Sartch took the young girls after him in what looks rather sadly like an attempt to remain united with Sarch,

even when Sarch had other partners. But it did seem to cause her distress. We have less evidence of it causing such distress. The letters they write to each other recount in some great detail the physical encounters they have with other people. I remember Siamonde-Bovois talking about the nausea, she felt when that was the word when she had slept with some particular person, which she said she had done out of kindness.

I think nowadays this seems to be very intrusive and undignified, but I think that it was a genuine attempt to get beyond socially imposed norms and try to, again, this idea of being open, being open to other people, not being exclusive, and allowing other. relationships to be not simply emotional, but also physical. Anthony Negrarly, can I ask you, one of the ways in which Sartre got the material for his philosophy, and particularly for that aspect where he talked about living an authentic life, was to look at people around him.

And there's things famous, he did a lot of writing in cafes, the cafe floor, as we know, and he looked at waiters and said this waiter was leading an inauthentic life. Can you tell us what's going on there and what righted he to say a waiter was leading in an authentic life anyway, but still, can you discuss that? Well, as I understand him, the contrast he draws between an authentic life or a life lived in bad faith is the contrast between a life which is autonomous chosen by the one who lives it, in which the person is actually making or creating himself, making him the person he is by his choices and decisions.

And people who have a kind of mass, or, as he put it, heard, consciousness, who just do the conventional things without reflecting, just accepting what social norms are, are living in inauthentic kind of existence. But isn't this to say a mal patronizing exclusivity that we've had for many centuries? That I, the watcher, the philosopher, the in the no person, know how to live, and you, the rest of you don't because you don't live like I live. I mean, is it much more than that?

Well, it might be a little bit patronising. Simon's aching to come in there. But I'm going to point out that there might be a grain of truth in it, however. But just before I let Sam come back on that point, if I pick up a point that he makes, because it applies here also. I mean, I do think that there are plenty of things in existentialism which are worth carrying on, not just the question of commitment, but also the insights that it provides about this necessity,

this deep responsibility that we have to be self-creating and to look for and find value and to pursue them, to have what Sartre following Heidegger called a fundamental project, which is what gives your life a kind of coherence and shape, and that does seem to be important. And that's one of the reasons why, really not adolescents in the sense of teenagers, with young people in the 50, 60s, 70s, were so influenced by it,

not as it happens immediately by the novels and other writings as Sartre and Camus, but by a series of popularizations of existentialism, which were tremendously widely read and very influential, books by John McQuarrie and Olson and Blackman and Kaufman. I mean, these are names that were made Simon and Christina nod their heads because they were recognized them. I mean, they were read by all students. And they distilled and expressed the essence of the existence,

existentialist outlook, which emerged, despite differences from Sartre and Kammu, had this great impact on that generation, had a great impact on what happened in 1968, for example. Is there an inherent selfishness in this? Is it very difficult to think of, good, right? Is it? To think of what you do about others, the community, political commitment and so on, because we'd be talking about self-self, choice, choice, choice, imposing one's self-her, but you say no, Simon. Sartre is clear about this and it becomes as clear as it goes on. He tried to match Marxism, didn't they? Yeah, but commitment is co-commitment. It's my freedom is reciprocal.

There's a reciprocal, mutual notion of freedom is Sartra. And in that sense, it's not just a question of me choosing freely to follow my projects. It's a question of choosing those projects in the light of their general worth for all of humanity. So in that sense, it's a mutual reciprocal. of freedom in Sartre? Absolutely. I think that it's not individual freedom

that would be the prime concern for Sarch, but the freedom of humanity. I mean, that's why if you like, contemporary debates about democracy often bring this to the fore, don't they? We fail to be authentic, we fail to have democracy, but they can still be ideals for us, authentic life, free choice,

freedom for other people. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you to Christina Hulls, back to Waterham College. Thanks to Anthony Groning, and thanks to Simon critically. Next week we'll be talking about geology and thank you all very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.