At the Existentialist Café (35 page)

Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Freud were not able to answer back to Sartre’s interpretations, but
Genet was. His response was mixed. Sartre enjoyed telling a story that Genet first threw the
manuscript into the fireplace, then pulled it out just before the flames took hold — which may or may not have been true. Genet did comment to Jean Cocteau that it made him nervous to have been turned into a
‘statue’ by Sartre. Sartre must have noticed the irony of writing an interpretive study of how a man refused to accept the interpretive gaze of others. It was particularly awkward for the self-mythologising Genet to become a writer written about; he was more used to being on the other end of the pen, and he felt ‘
disgust’ at being stripped of his artistic disguise.

On the other hand, he was also flattered to be an object of such attention, and it helped that he simply liked Sartre. After the remark about being disgusted, he told the same interviewer, ‘It’s very enjoyable to spend time with a guy who understands everything and laughs rather than judges … He’s an extremely sensitive person. Ten or fifteen years ago I saw him blush a few times. And a blushing Sartre is adorable.’

One major point of disagreement between Sartre and Genet concerned Genet’s homosexuality. Sartre interpreted it as part of Genet’s creative response to being labelled a pariah — thus, a free choice of outsiderhood and contrariness. Instead, for Genet, it was a given fact, like having green or brown eyes. He argued this point with Sartre, but Sartre was adamant. In
Saint Genet
he even had the effrontery to comment, of Genet’s more essentialist opinion, ‘
we cannot follow him in this’.

Many people now favour Genet’s view over Sartre’s, considering that regardless of other factors that may enter the mix, some of us simply
are
gay, or at least have a strong propensity in that direction. Sartre seemed to feel that, if we do not completely choose our
sexuality, we are not free. But, to turn his own words back on him, ‘we cannot follow him in this’ — at least, I can’t. Why should sexual orientation not be like other mostly innate qualities, such as being tall or short — or being extroverted or introverted, adventurous or riskaverse, empathetic or self-centred? Such tendencies seem at least partly inborn, yet even within the terms of Sartre’s philosophy they do not make us unfree. They simply form part of our situation — and existentialism is always a philosophy of freedom
in situation
.

Beauvoir seemed more sensitive than Sartre was to these subtle interzones in human life.
The Second Sex
was almost entirely occupied with the complex territory where free choice, biology and social and cultural factors meet and mingle to create a human being who gradually becomes set in her ways as life goes on. Moreover, she had explored this territory more directly in a short treatise of 1947,
The Ethics of Ambiguity
. There, she argued that the question of the relationship between our physical constraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a ‘problem’ requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition
is
to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it.

She hastens to add that she does not believe we should therefore give up and fall back on a bland Sisyphus-like affirmation of cosmic flux and fate. The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly
trying
to take control of things. 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.

Beauvoir’s brief sketch of these ideas in
The Ethics of Ambiguity
is one of the most interesting attempts I’ve read at describing the bizarre mixture of improbabilities that human beings are. It is here that she
laid out the first foundations of
The Second Sex
and of her entire novelistic vision of life. Yet, disappointingly, she repudiated parts of
The Ethics of Ambiguity
later because it did not fit with her Marxist social theory. ‘
I was in error when I thought I could define a morality independent of social context’, she wrote meekly. But perhaps we need not follow her in this.

10

THE DANCING PHILOSOPHER

In which Merleau-Ponty has a chapter to himself
.

One thinker in Beauvoir’s circle who shared her vision of the ambiguity of the human condition was her old friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the friend who, when they were both nineteen, had irritated her because of his tendency to see different sides of things, at a time when she was given to firm, instant judgements. They had both changed since then. Beauvoir could still be opinionated, but had become more attuned to contradiction and complexity. Merleau-Ponty had spent the war working himself into uncompromising attitudes that went against his grain. He adopted a dogmatic pro-Soviet position, which he maintained for several years after the war before dramatically abandoning it. He often changed his views in this way when his thinking took him in a new direction. But he always remained a phenomenologist at heart, dedicated to the task of describing experience as closely and precisely as he could. He did this in such an interesting way that he deserves a (short) chapter completely to himself in this book.

We have already met him earlier in life, while he was enjoying his happy childhood. After that, he pursued a conventional academic career while Beauvoir and Sartre were becoming media stars. No photographers or American fans chased Merleau-Ponty around the Left Bank. Journalists did not quiz him about his sex life — which is a shame, as they would have dug up some interesting stories if they had. Meanwhile, he quietly turned himself into the most revolutionary thinker of them all, as became clear on publication of his masterwork of 1945,
The Phenomenology of Perception
. He remains an influential
figure in modern philosophy, as well as in related fields such as cognitive psychology. His vision of human life is best summed up by these brief remarks near the end of
The Phenomenology of Perception
:

I am a psychological and historical structure. Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style. All of my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold upon the world, which is all he is. And yet, I am free, not in spite of or beneath these motivations, but rather by their means. For that meaningful life, that particular signification of nature and history that I am, does not restrict my access to the world; it is rather my means of communication with it.

This bears reading twice. The aspects of our existence that limit us, Merleau-Ponty says, 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. Sartre acknowledged the need for this trade-off, but he found it more painful to accept. Everything in him longed to be free of bonds, of impediments and limitations and viscous clinging things. Heidegger recognised limitation too, but then sought something like divinity in his mythologising of Being. Merleau-Ponty instead 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.

His own career was a case study in the art of compromise too, being balanced neatly between two disciplines that were often considered rivals: psychology and philosophy. Merleau-Ponty worked to bring them together for the benefit of both. Thus his doctoral thesis in 1938 was on behavioural psychology, but he then became professor of philosophy at the University of Lyons in 1945. In 1949, he took over as professor of psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne, succeeding Jean Piaget — but next became head of philosophy at the Collège de France in 1952. Throughout these changes of role, he made his psychological
studies intensely philosophical, while building his philosophy on psychological and neurological case studies, including studies of effects of brain injuries and other traumas. He was influenced especially by gestalt theory, a school of psychology which explores how experience comes to us as a whole rather than as separate bits of input.

(Illustrations Credit 10.1)

What excited Merleau-Ponty in all of this was not existentialist talk of anguish and authenticity. It was a simpler set of questions — which turn out not to be simple at all. What happens when we pick up a cup in a café, or sip our cocktail while listening to the hubbub around us? What does it mean to write with a pen, or to walk through a door? These actions are almost impossible to describe or understand fully — yet most of us perform them with the greatest of ease, day after day. This is the real mystery of existence.

In
The Phenomenology of Perception
, Merleau-Ponty starts with Husserl’s notion that we must philosophise from our own experience of
phenomena, but he adds the obvious point that this experience comes to us through our sensitive, moving, perceptive bodies. Even when we think of a thing that is not there, our minds construct that imaginary thing with colours, shapes, tastes, smells, noises and tactile qualities. In abstract thought, we similarly draw on physical
metaphors or images — as when we talk of ideas as weighty, or discussions as heated. We are sensual even when we are being most philosophical.

But Merleau-Ponty also followed Husserl and the gestalt psychologists in reminding us that we rarely have these sense experiences ‘raw’. Phenomena come to us already shaped by the interpretations, meanings and expectations with which we are going to grasp them, based on previous experience and the general context of the encounter. We perceive a multicoloured blob on a table directly
as
a bag of sweets, not as a collection of angles, colours and shadows that must be decoded and identified. The people we see running around in a field
are
a soccer team. This is why we fall for optical illusions: we have already seen a diagram as some expected shape, before looking again to realise that we have been fooled. It is also why a Rorschach blot comes to us as a picture of something, rather than as a meaningless design.

Of course we have to learn this skill of interpreting and anticipating the world, and this happens in early childhood, which is why Merleau-Ponty thought child psychology was essential to philosophy. This is an extraordinary insight. Apart from Rousseau, very few philosophers before him had taken childhood seriously; most wrote as though all human experience were that of a fully conscious, rational, verbal adult who has been dropped into this world from the sky — perhaps by a stork. Childhood looms large in Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
and in Sartre’s biographies; Sartre wrote in his Flaubert book that ‘
all of us are constantly discussing the child we were, and are’. But his strictly philosophical treatises do not prioritise childhood as Merleau-Ponty’s do.

For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot understand our experience if we don’t think of ourselves in part as overgrown babies. We fall for optical illusions because we once
learned
to see the world in terms of shapes,
objects and things relevant to our own interests. Our first perceptions came to us in tandem with our first active experiments in observing the world and reaching out to explore it, and are still linked with those experiences. We learned to recognise a bag of sweets at the same time as we learned how good it is to devour its contents. After a few years of life, the sight of sweets, the impulse to reach out for them, the anticipatory salivation, the eagerness and the frustration if told to stop, the joy of the crackling wrappers and the bright colours of the candied concoctions catching the light all form part of the whole. When the infant Simone de Beauvoir wanted to ‘crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset’, it was because her growing mind was already a synaesthetic swirl of appetite and experience. Perception remains this way, with all the senses working together holistically. We ‘see’ the fragility and smoothness of a pane of
glass, or the softness of a woollen blanket. As Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘In the movement of the branch from which a bird has just left, we read its flexibility and its elasticity.’

At the same time, perception is bound up with our own movements around the world: we touch and grasp and interact with things in order to understand them. To discover the texture of a cloth, we rub it between our fingers with a practised motion. Even our eyes move constantly, rarely taking anything in with a single fixed stare. And, unless we have lost vision in one eye, like Sartre, we judge distance by
seeing stereoscopically. The eyes work together, calibrating angles — but we don’t ‘see’ these calculations. What we see is the object out there: the thing itself. We rarely stop to think that it is partly constituted by our own shifting gaze and our way of paying attention or reaching out to things.