At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails
by Sarah Bakewell (2016)
2024 reads, 7/22
“The philosopher’s task is neither to reduce the mysterious to a neat set of concepts nor to gaze at it in awed silence. It is to follow the first phenomenological imperative: to go to the things themselves in order to describe them, attempting ‘rigorously to put into words what is not ordinarily put into words, what is sometimes considered inexpressible’.”
In At the Existentialist Café, Bakewell presents a very digestible recount of the events surrounding Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the lives of other philosophers in the twentieth century. The first few chapters are dedicated to Husserl and Heidegger, the phenomenologists who paved the way for the existentialists. The chapters then follow a pseudo-chronological order, exploring other philosophers such as Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and Arendt, although mostly in the context of Sartre and Beauvoir’s lives.
I read this book mostly to get the historical context surrounding Camus and Sartre, after reading some of their works. I still want to read a biography solely focused on Camus, but this book was great at providing a much larger picture of philosophy at the time, and how it still influences humanity into the twenty-first century. While a bit dry at times, especially in some of the early chapters, Bakewell expertly breaks down the dense writings of each philosopher so that us non-philosophers can understand.
“Sartre argues that freedom terrifies us, yet we cannot escape it, because we are it.”
If you are interested in this book, I would recommend first reading The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus, and Nausea by Sartre – these books are “spoiled” (depending how you define the word) and analyzed by Bakewell, and her discussion felt more “complete” having already read some of these works.
“The way to live is to throw ourselves, not into faith, but into our own lives, conducting them in affirmation of every moment, exactly as it is, without wishing that anything was different, and without harbouring peevish resentment against others or against our fate.”