Existentialism has a reputation for being anxious and dull, mostly because of its emphasis on thinking about the meaninglessness of existence, but two of the best-known existentialists have known how to have fun in the face of absurdity. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre spent a lot of time partying with their friends: talking, drinking, dancing, laughing, loving and listening to music, and that was an aspect of their philosophical attitude towards life. They weren’t just philosophers who happened to enjoy parties, either – the parties were an expression of their philosophy of seizing life, and for them there were authentic and inauthentic ways to do this.
For de Beauvoir in particular, philosophy was to be lived vivaciously, and partying was bound up with her urge to live fully and freely, not to hold herself back from all that life had to offer. She wrote that sometimes she does ‘everything a little too crazily … But that is my way. I have rather not to do the things at all as doing them mildly.’
Sartre loved the imaginative playfulness that alcohol facilitated: ‘I liked having confused, vaguely questioning ideas that then fell apart.’ Too much seriousness hardens the world, pinning it down with rules, they felt, suffocating freedom and creativity. Too seriously taking parties dissipates their effervescence. They are flattened by seriousness into institutions, hollow shams of gratuitously flaunted wealth and materialism, pathetic pleas for recognition through the gaze of others, or hedonistic indulgences in sordid ephemeral pleasures that serve only to distract participants from their stagnant lives. The underlying virtues of playfulness and generosity that make a party authentic are neglected by a serious party. De Beauvoir tried to smoke joints, but she remained firmly planted to the ground, no matter how hard she inhaled. She and Sartre self-medicated with amphetamines to remedy hangovers, heartbreaks and writers’ blocks. For academic purposes, Sartre tripped on psychedelics: he took mescaline to inform his hallucinations research. But alcohol would always be their drug of choice for partying.
A party isn’t a party without others, of course, and, although Sartre is renowned for his line ‘Hell is – other people!’ in No Exit (1944), that was far from the whole story for him: both he and de Beauvoir discovered themselves in their relations with other people. ‘In songs, laughter, dances, eroticism, and drunkenness,’ de Beauvoir writes in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), ‘one seeks both an exaltation of the moment and a complicity with other men.’ For her, complicity and reciprocity are the foundation of ethical relationships because other people provide the context of our lives. And because our world is infused with the meanings that other people are giving it, our existence can be revealed only in communication with them.
Parties can cultivate our connections to others, bring meaning to one another’s lives, and reveal the world with them. They can also confirm one another’s existences, serving as a reminder to friends that they matter, and that one matters to one’s friends. In addition, the warmth and laughter that authentic party sparks can help people cope with life’s chaos. In occupied Paris, De Beauvoir wrote about her wartime parties: they saved food stamps and then binged on food, fun and alcohol. They were dancing, singing, playing music and improvising. The artist Dora Maar mimed the bullfights, Sartre mimed the conducting of an orchestra in a cupboard, and Albert Camus banged as if in a marching band on the cup lids. De Beauvoir wrote that: ‘We merely wanted to snatch a few nuggets of sheer joy from this confusion and intoxicate ourselves with their brightness, in defiance of the disenchantments that lay ahead.’ These were small acts of rebellion in the face of real fears for the future.
Critics of de Beauvoir and Sartre would try to discredit them with accusations of inspiring orgies, encouraging hedonism, and being what the philosopher Julia Kristeva in 2016 called ‘libertarian terrorists’ who formed a ‘shock commando unit’ to seduce their sexual victims. Nevertheless, they weren’t encouraging all-out hedonism, because they didn’t value personal pleasure over responsibility. For de Beauvoir, there’s nothing philosophically wrong with having orgies, it’s the same as with any other aspect of life: it matters how you approach the situation. If a person, she wrote, ‘brings his entire self to every situation, there can be no such thing as a “base occasion”’. And it’s true that de Beauvoir and Sartre had many lovers, but casual sex wasn’t part of their repertoire. They thought promiscuity was a trivial use of liberty and wanted intense affairs of love and friendships instead. (Nevertheless, people were hurt in these relationships, and although de Beauvoir acknowledged responsibility for this, neither she nor Sartre were ever held morally accountable by others in any meaningful way.)
Rejecting social norms is a process of destruction: refusing to be defined primarily by what others think you should be, how you are supposed to act, and the choices you are supposed to make. Partying may involve a similar act of destroying such expectations as well as spending time, money, food, drink, and cells of the brain. Some may call it a waste, but for what are we saving ourselves? A good life isn’t always a long one, and a long life isn’t necessarily a happy or fulfilled one. Rather, what’s important is to embrace life passionately. Existence is a process of self-spending, and sometimes it requires that we leave our former selves behind in order to re-create ourselves, move forward into the future, reveal our being into new realms. We do this by opening ourselves to, and playing with, possibilities.
Yet partying like an existentialist also calls for caution. While it can be a reprieve from a world full of despair and distractions, it’s bad faith to use it as a means to escape one’s situation. Running away from life or succumbing to peer pressure reduces oneself to what de Beauvoir called an absurd ‘palpitation’. For partying to be authentic, it must be freely and actively chosen, done purposefully, and in a way that reflects one’s values. Moreover, if it siphons off the zest of life and becomes a repetitive and meaningless series of encounters, too much partying can become exhausting and monotonous, which is why existentialist parties tended to be only occasional events. Camus would ask de Beauvoir if it’s possible to party as hard as they did and still work. De Beauvoir answered no. To avoid stagnation, she thought that existence ‘must be immediately engaged in a new undertaking, it must dash off toward the future’.
Authentic existential partying, then, requires a kind of self-mastery: to hold oneself in the tension between freedom and responsibility, playfulness and seriousness, and to nurture our connections without denying our situations. It encourages us to establish, on our own terms, our own connections with the world, carefully detaching ourselves from internal chains, including habits or dependencies such as alcoholism. Such partying also prompts us to challenge external chains, such as institutional constraints, and so the stubborn insistence on living life as one chooses can be an act of revolt in ways that reinforce our bonds with each other. An existential approach to partying recognises that although life can be menacing, it can and should be enjoyable, and being with others in the playful mode of partying can help us bear the darkness through a shared sense of euphoria, harmony and hope.
Both de Beauvoir and Sartre spent their rich lives embracing new undertakings, but took their whiskey and vodka bottles with them. This led to serious health issues, including cirrhosis, but they never regretted their partying or drinking, and there is no reason they should have done through their own philosophy. They freely chose it, did it on their own terms, and assumed responsibility for the consequences. That’s what partying like an existentialist is all about.
