At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

"This is the best philosophy book that I’ve read this year. It is exceptional. Sarah Bakewell wrote a brilliant book about Montaigne , several years ago, which won a number of prizes. I think, in some ways, this book is even better. She explains the philosophy and situates it in the time, but she does this with a very light touch. What she’s managed to do is combine the story of predominantly French existentialism (focusing on Sartre and de Beauvoir as well as Merleau-Ponty) with digressions about Heidegger and others. She’s combined that with some autobiographical elements and a real passion for the subject. “Existentialism puts individual freedom and choice at the heart of what it is to be human.” She is a very skilful writer, and draws you in through anecdote and small glimpses of the lives of these philosophers, blending it all together in a way that makes it seem very easy. But I know, as a writer, just how difficult that is to pull off, and only a truly exceptional writer could combine that many biographies, that many different, sometimes quite complex, philosophical positions, and still tell a plausible and engaging story. She’s done that, which is quite remarkable. In doing this she is resurrecting Sartre and the existentialism of the 1940s, which, in some ways, is considered passé, particularly in France. The result is empowering for people to read. So I think this is a superb book. Everyone should read it. There’s a particular kind of novelistic touch that she has when she observes things. The start of the book is the famous story about Sartre being inspired by the idea that he could philosophise about an apricot cocktail. This was part of the phenomenological movement—as he understood it—coming from Husserl: the idea that part of what it is to do philosophy is to describe accurately your perceptions and experiences, and that will somehow reveal the essence of things. Accurate description is as at the heart of philosophy and you can set aside any question of what exists and big metaphysical questions like that. That idea also inspired some of Sartre’s most brilliant passages in his book, Being and Nothingness . Sarah Bakewell has picked that up quietly and is herself very adept at this sort of description. That was a really interesting interview to do. I hadn’t read the book at that point, because she was still writing it, and in a sense, that’s some of the working of the book revealed there. But the book is much more complex than that interview as it weaves together the various elements. “Accurate description is as at the heart of philosophy and you can set aside any question of what exists and big metaphysical questions like that. ” In the book, she deals seriously with the dark story of Heidegger’s Nazism, and particularly what’s emerged in his Black Notebooks , which reveal him as even more anti-Semitic and anti-humanistic than we’d imagined. Sarah Bakewell manages to acknowledge that with appropriate disgust, and yet recognise the good qualities that some of Heidegger’s philosophy has, something I find hard to do myself. Sarah started a PhD on Heidegger, so she does know a lot about him, but she wears her scholarship very lightly. I know, because I’ve spoken to her about a number of the figures in this book, that what’s in the book is the surface. The research beneath it goes very, very deep, and she is completely on top of her subject. Existentialism puts individual freedom and choice at the heart of what it is to be human. You have to acknowledge your responsibility and recognise that a lot of us are in what Sartre called “bad faith” most of the time — pretending we’re less free than we actually are. So we assume that we have to take on particular social roles, or behave in certain ways, because we’re expected to. So we think of ourselves as in chains. But Sartre says that that is still a choice. “The book exemplifies the power of philosophy to influence people to live in a certain way” This is an interesting position today — partly because it’s very much under threat from neuroscience. The dominant view in neuroscience is that we are far less free than we think we are, at least when it comes to conscious decision-making: the opposite of Sartre’s message. He argued that we are more free than we think we are. Speaking personally—as Sarah does in her book—it’s a philosophy that has influenced how I live and shaped some of the decisions I’ve made in my life. I was very inspired by reading Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism when I was 18. Sarah talks about how existentialist writing inspired her, much as she talked about how finding the book of Montaigne’s Essays inspired her when she wrote that book. There’s a sense in which the book exemplifies the power of philosophy to influence people to live in a certain way because she tells you about her life through it. She does it in such a sympathetic way that it is hard not to be drawn in and feel that, yes, philosophy—analytic philosophy as practised in most British, American and Australian universities—is slightly dry and misses the point quite often; whereas existentialism may have been flamboyant and quite technical in its worse forms, but it did ask the big questions. It did focus on the real issues about how we should live, and made individual experience very relevant, and encourage precise reflection on our own conscious experience and what it means, where we sit in the world, and where we are in relation to other people and to our own deaths. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So existentialism can’t be faulted for the themes it chooses. It goes to the heart of the human condition, and doesn’t get caught up in games with language or sidetracked by nitpicking. In its worst forms, it can be very technical and austere, and some of its exponents go on a bit; but at its best, it is a sincere attempt to make sense of the world we find ourselves in. I’m very drawn to the atheistic strand of existentialism. It starts from the position that there is no God, and asks what we are to do. How can we make sense of what we find around us? Nothing is closed off by Divine Law, and we see evil all around us. How should we think about that? How should we act? Another aspect of existentialism that Sarah brings out is its commitment to action. It is not a philosophy of simple reflection and description. Most existentialist philosophers were active in the world politically and ethically in various ways and through the way they lived their lives. They tried to live their philosophy, much as the ancient Greek philosophers were trying to live their philosophy."