Jean-Paul Sartre allegedly declared that smoking is "the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world." Most of his conversations and writing were conducted under a cloud of cigarette or pipe smoke in the Deux Magots café where he busied himself with world domination by Gauloises. As an undergraduate at Bristol University in the early 1980s I suspect that much of the passive smoking I had to endure in tutorials was a direct result of the café existentialists' penchant for the smouldering cigarette, balanced casually between fingers with as much affectation as that famous café waiter demonstrated in his bad faith dance with the tray. Roll ups, which were my peers' principal torture instruments, never quite achieved the romantic status of French cigarettes, though - there was always an air of desparation or even addiction rather than freedom and commitment about the way they would roll their skins and carefully place the result behind their ear, like a carpenter's pencil.
Now, as a result of Jacques Chirac's initiative, the Deux Magots is banning smoking. Well, it will be better for those much-observerd café waiters. This has been coming for some time: in a quasi-Stalinist move in 2005, for example, the Bibliotheque Nationale had already airbrushed Sartre's cigarette away from posters celebrating his centenary. Perhaps, like Lascaux ll, they will open a theme-park smoke-filled and badly-heated café for pilgrims next door to the comfortable smokeless one.
Can smoking and French existentialism now be separated? Perhaps. Would-be Sartres always seemed to fall for that correlation/cause confusion, like Wittgenstein's disciples who never managed to separate the mannerisms from the originality. But without those nicotine-fueled long pauses for inhalation, some of Sartre's more koan-like pronouncements, such as 'we are what we are not, and are not what we are' (which can be glossed: it means consciousness is empty, that is what we most fundamentally are; yet we are not the sum of what we have done, or what other people project onto us - or something like that), will seem just a little more mysterious, I think.
I always liked the idea that the ideal place to do philosophy was a café...that seems right. But as a non-smoker who detests the smell of smoke, and hates the arrogance of smokers who seem oblivious to its effects on other people in the room, the result of those deep conversations was the lingering smell of stale tobacco smoke in clothes and hair - often too high a price to pay. But perhaps, like the cleaned-up Times Square area in New York, the smokeless Parisian café will end up seeming anodyne. Is it a symptom of our age that I've seen more philosophers in my local gym than in the café? Perhaps Esporta is poised to become the new Deux Magots ...
The end of smoking is understandable. I think its the end of drinking that would really change the essence of philosophy.
As for the gym, is it for the health or the six-pack abs (vanity)of the modern day philosopher?
Posted by: Beautifulgamer | March 07, 2007 at 12:30 PM