The Absurd Gustatory Habits of the OG Existentialists

For those of you who had to get real jobs and didn’t have time to worry about the real nature of perceived reality and all its creation, existentialism is the philosophical inquiry into the nature of the human condition divided into seven key themes – philosophy as a way of life, anxiety, freedom, situatedness, existence, absurdity and how it affects the crowd (or humanity in general).

Now, the funny thing is that almost every philosophical conundrum and every philosopher’s thought can be brought under the aegis of existentialism going as far back as Socrates to Kafka to Kerouac. 

In fact, existentialism is rife in Bollywood as well as the seminal classic Main to Raste Se Ja Raha Thaa, which argues that an individual’s right to act with radical freedom is unfettered and manages to wrap it in a deceptively simple question: “Tujhko mirchi lagi to main kya karun?” But let’s not digress because this author can talk about the deep implications of the lyrics from Govinda songs for all eternity.

Clockwise: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Camus, De Beauvoir, Sartre.

Now, the received wisdom is that there are six OG existentialists. They are:

• Søren Kierkegaard
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Martin Heidegger
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Simone De Beauvoir
• Albert Camus

Kierkegaard’s Saccharine Coffee Ritual

Much like movement enthusiast Galileo, Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian, and philosopher, often clashed with the Church over Christianity. Kierkegaard argued that religion shouldn’t be a doctrine and that one shouldn’t look to external proofs of God. A true Christian, he believed, ought to have a personal relationship with God as opposed to the one sanctioned by the Church, which is a strange notion for Abrahamic faiths. He also had a very bizarre coffee routine, oddly reminiscent of what Amitabh Bachchan calls khade chammach ki chai, where one uses so much sugar that the spoon can stand upright and is very popular in Bombay’s Irani Cafes.

The Danish philosopher liked a similar concoction. As his biographer, Joakim Garff writes: “He had his  quite peculiar way of having coffee. Delightedly, he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.” 

While that’d go against the ethos of many black coffee drinkers who believe that there’s a special rung in hell for people who mix sugar with black coffee, it’s clear that when one spends one’s life in ontological pursuits, one picks up an odd habit or two.

Nietzsche’s Perennial Indigestion

There are two basic conditions that define a Bengali, and it has nothing to do with being born in Bangladesh or West Bengal. Firstly, one must be a deep fan of Robindrosongeet, and secondly, one must suffer perennially from indigestion. The affinity for indigestion perhaps explains their deep reverence for Nietzsche (Neeche in Bengali), who famously said, “God is Dead” after one of his frequent bouts of indigestion, an issue he battled with, as much as morality, in his life.

Much like Amitabh Bachchan’s character in Piku – who struggled to have proper bowel movements – Nietzsche spent his entire life trying different diets, including vegetarianism, living on milk and eggs, and even near abstinence. During a particularly low moment, he even tried Liebig’s meat extract, a thick substance made from 34 pounds of South American beef, which sounds downright disgusting and perhaps explains why he was so quick to call time on the big guy’s existence.

Martin Heidegger – the boozy beggar

The words of the prophet are often written on subway walls or found in the lyrics of Monty Python's songs. As the lyrics go in Bruce's Philosophers Song: "Immanuel Kant was a real pissant, who was very rarely stable, Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table."

Like Kant, who would often greet guests with a bottle of red and white at dinner parties, Heidegger was another fan of being well-lubricated. Of course, these days, he gets a very bad rap for being part of the Nazi Party while having affairs with his Jewish students. One would think that the man who inspired the likes of Sartre and De Beauvoir and rejected mind-body dualism, couldn’t have done it without his deep reverence for wine.

Heidegger spent most of his life in Baden, and his wine choices reflect that. According to Tim Atkin, an award-winning wine writer, his choice of wine was Gutedel, which was referred to rather unkindly as “never more than a pleasant thirst-quencher”. Meanwhile, Heidegger’s friend attests that the wine served at his household was always of “exceptional quality”. Heidegger believed that drinking wine raises one’s intellectual level, which in turn, allowed us to access higher thoughts.

Clearly, long before Tyrion Lannister, here was a man who drank and knew things.

The Jean-Paul Sartre (Imaginary) Cookbook

And now we come to the trio that is associated with the movement in modern times. First up, we’ve Jean-Paul Sartre, whose (completely fictitious) lost cookbook was “found” in 1987.

The diary has rib-tickling entries like the time Sartre realised that a traditional omelette was too bourgeois and decided to make one with a cigarette, coffee, and four tiny stones. Later, in an attempt to “understand the bourgeoisie,” he walked around the streets of Paris with two fried eggs taped over his eyes, which led Camus to label him a “pathetic dork”.

Imaginary cookbooks aside, Sartre found crabs and lobsters creepy, because they reminded him of insects, but loved cakes and pastries, because “the appearance, putting together and even the taste has been thought out by men on purpose”. Strangely, he also preferred canned fruits and vegetables to fresh produce.

Now, Sartre is most associated with existentialism even though he rejected the term. His open relationship with the great feminist Simone De Beauvoir was also quite scandalous, even in the free post-war Parisian air.

But the most endearing bit about Sartre is his sweet tooth for halva, which incidentally, is also the same dish that we revere back home whether it's gajar ka halwa or suji ka halwa. In fact, he’d sometimes chide De Beauvoir for forgetting to send it to him. He wrote in 1939: “I was in an excellent mood today, and then I got your books but no halva. Is there another package?” The kind Sartre liked is popular in the Mediterranean, which came in big blocks coated with a sprinkling of almonds. He wrote further: “It’s scrumptious, and the almonds seem to add a certain something.”

Clearly, Being and Nothingness and Nausea would be very different books, if Sartre had halva while writing them.

Simone De Beauvoir’s love for pig-intestine sausage

Simeone De Beauvoir’s open relationship with Sartre has often been a subject of much consternation, with many wondering why the mother of modern feminism would be with a man like Sartre. Now, De Beauvoir – the author of The Second Sex – went out of her way to argue that a woman’s place wasn’t in the kitchen, but she did appreciate great food. She writes in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter: “… I wanted to crunch flowering almonds trees and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset. Against the night sky of New York, the neon signs appeared to me like giant sweetmeats and made me feel frustrated.”

She was wont to discuss philosophy over a meal and was particularly partial to a French sausage called andouillette. The French coarse-grained sausage is made from the intestine of pork, pepper, wine, onions, and seasonings. The dish, which isn’t very popular outside France, has a distinct odour from the colon, and to call it an acquired taste wouldn’t be an exaggeration. Much like a lifelong relationship with Jean Paul-Sartre.

Camus’ Absurd Eggs

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus argued that there was only one fundamental problem, and that was suicide. He was obviously wrong because the only real problem is how can a philosopher be this handsome. Talked in the same tone as Humphrey Bogart, he has been described as the Don Draper of existentialism. His trip to New York was such a hit that he wrote to his publisher: “You know, I can get a film contract anytime I want.”

Also, like his novels, he was something of a rebel, even among the OG existentialists. For starters, Camus refused to go by the term existentialist, arguing that the movement was catatonic to change and gave a bleak diagnosis of the human condition. He believed that existentialists ought to embrace the human condition, warts and all. Much like Sisyphus, he imagined humans to be happy.

No wonder he clashed with Sartre throughout his life, who just couldn’t get over how much easier it was for the dashing Camus to charm the members of the opposite sex.  Also, it didn’t help that Camus – in his innings as a journalist argued that Sartre had written a book (Nausea), in which, “remarkable fictional gifts and the play of the toughest and the most lucid mind are both lavished and squandered”.

This led Sartre to give a backhanded compliment to The Myth of Sisyphus, writing: “Camus has the affectation of quoting the works of Jaspers, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, without, however, fully understanding them.”

Camus was also the subject of some remarkable urban myths. My personal favourite is the one in that he was George Orwell’s long-lost twin, which is absolutely ridiculous because while Camus saw hope, Orwell only so despair. Like others of that era in Paris, the tuberculosis-riddled Camus drank and smoked like there was no tomorrow, but it’s rather hard to find something peculiar about his eating habits. So, we leave with you the one-ingredient breakfast from his novel The Outsider, where the anti-hero Mersault says: “Je me suis fait cuire des œufs et je les ai mangés à même le plat (I cooked some eggs and ate them out of the pan).”

Clearly, radical freedom – to have one’s eggs without bowing to societal structures – couldn’t take a backseat to even utility.