At the Existentialist Café
Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
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Average rating4.2
Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2016 by the New York Times, a spirited account of a major intellectual movement of the twentieth century and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it, by the best-selling author of How to Live Sarah Bakewell. Paris, 1933: three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called Phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!" It was this simple phrase that would ignite a movement, inspiring Sartre to integrate Phenomenology into his own French, humanistic sensibility, thereby creating an entirely new philosophical approach inspired by themes of radical freedom, authentic being, and political activism. This movement would sweep through the jazz clubs and cafés of the Left Bank before making its way across the world as Existentialism. Featuring not only philosophers, but also playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries, At the Existentialist Café follows the existentialists' story, from the first rebellious spark through the Second World War, to its role in postwar liberation movements such as anti-colonialism, feminism, and gay rights. Interweaving biography and philosophy, it is the epic account of passionate encounters--fights, love affairs, mentorships, rebellions, and long partnerships--and a vital investigation into what the existentialists have to offer us today, at a moment when we are once again confronting the major questions of freedom, global responsibility, and human authenticity in a fractious and technology-driven world.
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An excellent book that ignited my appreciation for biographical works. Bakewell was able to give an enthralling presentation of the philosophies and lives of many thinkers. History has never been a subject my brain is willing to engage with, yet through this book I felt connected with so many lives that no longer walk this earth. While they had ceased to experience the bloom of life, the world around them had come to life in my mind, through their eyes and through the words of Sarah Bakewell. Bakewell was not afraid of using the first personal pronoun and relating her own thoughts and experiences. Impressively, this did not impede the light of “neutrality” shone on the biographees. Everything was presented such that you are invited to judge for yourself whatever opinions they held. You also leave the book with a dozens more on your to-read list. Unfortunately I do not find the same impartiality with regard to the presentation of Communism in this otherwise exceptional book. Meticulously placed quotation marks, superficial degradation of Marxism as a mere “ideology”, portrayal of the biographees' communist involvement as simple mistakes, etc. Maybe this is an invariable crust imposed on the author by a modern neoliberal view of the world, one that we will dig through one day as the people under her pen have.
I always thought I would time travel to paris in 1920 if I had a time machine. I now think I would make a pit stop in 1948, too. This book is a nice easy primer for tough ideas. It focuses more on humans than ideas, even if the ideas were the most important thing to the humans.
I think I have to read BEING AND NOTHINGNESS now.
In conclusion:
‘Mais enfin, qu'est-ce que l'existentialisme?' (I'm still not sure)
Heidegger — what a dick!
Sartre — too cool for everything
Simone de Beauvoir — all kinds of awesome
Husserl — the OG
Marleau-Ponty — an emotionally stable male philosopher (!!!)
Camus - my problematic fave - did not get as much book space as I hoped for. There were some weird shifts in chronology and a couple of repetitions that made the whole thing feel like more of a collection of essays than a coherent book. Really great insights into the mentality of the French immediately pre- and post-WW2 though.
