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

by Sarah Bakewell

Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object.

You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.

Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.

There is no God in this picture, because the human beings who invented God have also killed Him. It is now up to us alone. 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.

Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free – context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives – for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense.

‘His death does separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.’