At the Existentialist Café (30 page)

Jaspers’ inner ‘voice’ calls to mind Heidegger’s authentic voice of Dasein, calling from within and demanding answerability. But
Heidegger was now refusing answerability and keeping his own voice to himself. He had told Marcuse that he did not want to be one of those who jabbered out excuses, while carrying on as though nothing had changed. Jaspers similarly felt that facile or hypocritical excuses were no good. But he would not accept Heidegger’s silence either. The language he considered necessary was not that of ritual disavowal, but that of genuine
communication. Jaspers felt that Germans had forgotten how to communicate during the twelve years of hiding and silence, and had to relearn it.

This cut no ice with Heidegger, for whom communication was a long way down the list of what
language could do. When he wrote back to Jaspers he made no comment on the contents of his
Schuldfrage
, but reciprocated by sending Jaspers some of his own recent writings. Jaspers was repelled. Picking out Heidegger’s pet phrase describing language as the ‘house of Being’, he wrote back, ‘I bristle, because all language seems to be only a bridge to me’ — a bridge
between
people, not a shelter or home. Heidegger’s next letter, in April 1950, made an even worse impression, filled with talk of the need to wait for the ‘
advent’ of something that would take humans over, or appropriate them; the notions of advent and appropriation were also among Heidegger’s post-‘turn’ concepts. This time, it was Jaspers who fell silent in response. When he at last wrote to Heidegger again, in 1952, it was to say that the new writing style reminded him of the mystical nonsense that had made fools of people for so long. It is
‘pure dreaming’, he said. He had already written calling Heidegger a
‘dreaming boy’ in 1950. That had seemed a generous interpretation of Heidegger’s failings, but now he clearly felt it was time for Heidegger to wake up.

Jaspers retained his belief in the power of communication all his life, and put it into effect by doing popular radio talks and writing about current events in a way that would reach the widest audience possible. But Heidegger also addressed non-specialist audiences, especially while he was banned from teaching, since this became his only outlet. In March 1950, he delivered two lectures to residents and locals at the northern Black Forest sanatorium of Bühlerhöhe, as part
of a Wednesday-evening series of talks organised by the physician Gerhard Stroomann, who became a friend. Stroomann wrote afterwards, in enthusiastic Heideggerese, that the lectures were successful, but the Q&A sessions were unpredictable: ‘
when discussion begins, it contains the greatest responsibility and the ultimate danger. Practice is often lacking. One has to stay with the point … even if it is only a question.’

Heidegger kept trying. He presented early versions of his lecture on technology to, of all people, the members of the Bremen Club — mostly businessmen and shipping magnates, based in the Hanseatic town of that name. The lecture series was arranged by his friend Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, whose family lived there, and apparently it went down well. Perhaps Heidegger found it easier to get through to the general public than to philosophers, who would make more fuss if his points seemed to make no sense, rather than letting themselves be swept up in the mood of excitement.

Thus, all the time that Heidegger was obstinately resisting communication, his range of influence was growing. By the time he delivered the polished version of his technology lecture in Munich in 1953, his friend Petzet was able to note that the audience, puzzled though they were, responded to its closing words with an ‘
ovation like a storm breaking from a thousand throats that did not want to cease’. (He does not consider the possibility that they were applauding its being over.)

Even today, Jaspers, the dedicated communicator, is far less widely read than Heidegger, who has influenced architects, social theorists, critics, psychologists, artists, film-makers, environmental activists, and innumerable students and enthusiasts — including the later deconstructionist and post-structuralist schools, which took their starting point from his late thinking. Having spent the late 1940s as an outsider and then been rehabilitated, Heidegger became the overwhelming presence in university philosophy all over the European continent from then on. One Fulbright scholar who arrived in Heidelberg to study philosophy in 1955, Calvin O. Schrag, was surprised to see courses on many other contemporary philosophers, but none on Heidegger.
Later his puzzlement disappeared. As he wrote: ‘
I quickly learned that
all
courses were on Heidegger.’

So who, in the end, was the better communicator?

After their failure of mutual comprehension, Heidegger and
Jaspers never met again. There was no decision to make a final break;
it just happened that way. Once, when Heidegger heard that Jaspers was passing through Freiburg in 1950, he asked for his
train time so he could meet him on the platform, at least to shake hands. Jaspers did not reply.

They did resume a very occasional formal correspondence. When Jaspers turned seventy in 1953, Heidegger sent him greetings. Jaspers responded nostalgically, remembering their conversations back in the 1920s and early 1930s, the sound of Heidegger’s voice, and his gestures. But, he added, if they met now, he would not know what to say. He told Heidegger that he regretted not having been stronger in the past — not having forced him to give a proper account of himself. ‘
I would have taken hold of you, so to speak; I would have relentlessly questioned you and made you take notice.’

Six and a half years later, Heidegger’s own seventieth birthday came around, and Jaspers sent him good wishes. He ended his brief letter with a memory of an afternoon when he was about eighteen, on a winter holiday on the Feldberg, a skiing resort not far from Heidegger’s part of the forest. Being delicate, not a strong skier like Heidegger, he had stayed close to the hotel and moved slowly on his skis, yet had still been amazed by the mountains’ beauty, finding himself ‘
enchanted in a snowstorm at sunset’, watching the changing light and colours on the hills. He closed the letter in the old affectionate way, ‘Your Jaspers.’ Jaspers’ skiing story casts himself as the cautious one, hesitant and sceptical, aware of the attraction of distant vistas but disinclined to venture far towards them. Heidegger, he implies, is more daring, but he may be on the wrong path, in danger and too far gone to call back.

Jaspers was being modest. In reality, he was the one whose mind ranged widely across cultures and epochs, making connections
and comparisons — while Heidegger never liked going far from his forest home.

Another former friend who turned against Heidegger was the young man who had playfully mocked Ernst Cassirer in Davos in 1929: Emmanuel
Levinas.

Having moved to France before the war and acquired citizenship, Levinas had fought at the front and been captured when France fell. He was imprisoned in a unit reserved for Jewish prisoners of war in Stalag 11B, at Fallingbostel near Magdeburg. A harrowing five years followed, as he and his fellow inmates lived on watery soup and vegetable peelings while being worked to exhaustion chopping wood in the local forest. Their guards taunted them with the possibility that they might be shipped out to death
camps at any moment. In fact, being in a POW camp probably saved
Levinas’ life. It gave him a degree of formal protection that he would not have had as a Jewish civilian at large, although his wife and daughter did also stay alive by hiding in a monastery in France, with help from friends. Back in his native country of Lithuania, the rest of his family did not survive. After Lithuania was occupied by Germany in 1941, all Levinas’ relatives were confined to the ghetto with other Jews in their city, Kaunas. The Nazis assembled a large group one morning, among whom were Levinas’ father, mother and two brothers. They took them into the countryside, and machine-gunned them to death.

Like Sartre during his interlude in the Stalag, Levinas wrote prolifically while he was incarcerated. He was able to receive writing paper and books, so he read Proust, Hegel, Rousseau and Diderot. He kept
notebooks out of which grew his first major work of philosophy,
Existence and Existents
, published in 1947. Here he developed earlier themes, including that of the
‘il y a’
(‘there is’) — the amorphous, undifferentiated, impersonal Being that looms over us in insomnia or exhaustion. This is Heidegger’s Being presented as a terrible affliction, rather than as a mystical gift to be awaited in awe. Levinas had a particular horror for what Heidegger had called the
ontological difference: the distinction between beings and their Being. If you take away
individual beings in order to be left with pure Being, Levinas felt, you end up only with something terrifying and inhuman. This was one reason why, as he wrote, his reflections — although initially inspired by the philosophy of Heidegger — ‘
are also governed by a profound need to leave the climate of that philosophy’.

Levinas turned away from the fog of Being, and went the other way — towards individual, living, human entities. In his best-known work,
Totality and Infinity
, published in 1961, he made the relationship of Self with Other the foundation of his entire philosophy — as central a concept for him as Being was for Heidegger.

He once said that this shift in thinking had its origin in an experience he had in the camp. Like the other prisoners, he had got used to the guards treating them without respect as they worked, as if they were inhuman objects unworthy of fellow feeling. But each evening, as they were marched back behind the barbed-wire fence again, his work group would be greeted by a stray
dog who had somehow found its way inside the camp. The dog would bark and fling itself around with delight at seeing them, as dogs do. Through the dog’s adoring eyes, the men were reminded each day of what it meant to be acknowledged by another being — to receive the basic recognition that one living creature grants to another.

As Levinas reflected on this experience, it helped to lead him to a philosophy that was essentially ethical, rather than ontological like Heidegger’s. He developed his ideas from the work of Jewish theologian Martin
Buber, whose
I and Thou
in 1923 had distinguished between my relationship with an impersonal ‘it’ or ‘them’, and the direct personal encounter I have with a ‘you’. Levinas took it further: when I encounter you, we normally meet
face-to-face, and it is through your face that you, as another person, can make ethical demands on me. This is very different from Heidegger’s
Mitsein
or Being-with, which suggests a group of people standing alongside one another, shoulder to shoulder as if in solidarity — perhaps as a unified nation or
Volk
. For Levinas, we literally face each other, one individual at a time, and that relationship becomes one of communication and moral expectation. We do not merge; we respond to
one another. Instead of being co-opted into playing some role in my personal drama of authenticity, you look me in the eyes — and you remain Other. You remain
you
.

(Illustrations Credit 8.3)

This relationship is more fundamental than the self, more fundamental than consciousness, more fundamental even than Being — and it brings an unavoidable ethical obligation. Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had being trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. Levinas did more: he turned philosophy around entirely so that these relationships were the
foundation
of our existence, not an extension of it.

This adjustment was so radical that Levinas, like Heidegger before him, had to perform contortions with his language to avoid slipping back into old ways of thought. His writing became more and more tortuous over the years, but this priority of the ethical relationship to the Other remained at its centre. As he grew older, his children made a joke of his most famous ideas. When his grandchildren fought over the biggest portions at the dinner table, someone would say of the one
who got the lion’s share, and thus who had obviously not prioritised the demands of others,
‘He doesn’t practise Grandpa’s philosophy!’

It took courage to crack jokes with Levinas. As he went on, he became a formidable figure, prone to
snapping at any Others he encountered at conferences or in classes who asked stupid questions or seemed to misunderstand him. In this, if nothing else, he still had something in common with his former mentor.

Other thinkers took radical ethical turns during the war years. The most extreme was Simone
Weil, who actually tried to live by the principle of putting other people’s ethical demands first. Having returned to France after her travels through Germany in 1932, she had worked in a factory so as to experience the degrading nature of such work for herself. When France fell in 1940, her family fled to Marseilles (against her protests), and later to the US and to Britain. Even in exile, Weil made extraordinary sacrifices. If there were people in the world who could not sleep in a bed, she would not do so either, so she slept on the floor. Some people lacked food, so she stopped eating almost entirely. She wondered in her journal whether one day someone might develop a form of human
chlorophyll, so people could live on sunlight alone.