At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

by Sarah Bakewell

You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.

Even if the situation is unbearable — perhaps you are facing execution, or sitting in a Gestapo prison, or about to fall off a cliff — you are still free to decide what to make of it in mind and deed. Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.

Søren Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen in 1813, set the tone by using ‘existential’ in a new way to denote thought concerning the problems of human existence. He included it in the unwieldy title of a work of 1846: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation: an existential contribution.

Sartre read Kierkegaard, and was fascinated by his contrarian spirit and by his rebellion against the grand philosophical systems of the past. He also borrowed Kierkegaard’s specific use of the word ‘existence’ to denote the human way of being, in which we mould ourselves by making ‘either/or’ choices at every step.

‘Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’, wrote Kierkegaard. Our whole lives are lived on the edge of that precipice, in his view and also in Sartre’s.

There were other aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought that Sartre would never accept, however. Kierkegaard thought that the answer to ‘anguish’ was to take a leap of faith into the arms of God, whether or not you could feel sure that He was there. This was a plunge into the ‘Absurd’ — into what cannot be rationally proved or justified. Sartre did not care for this. He had lost his own religious beliefs early in life: apparently it happened when he was about eleven years old and standing at a bus stop. He just knew, suddenly, that God did not exist.

they take on the two biggest human questions: what are we? and what should we do?

A discussion is not an exchange or a confrontation of ideas, as if each formed his own, showed them to the others, looked at theirs, and returned to correct them with his own … Whether he speaks up or hardly whispers, each one speaks with all that he is, with his ‘ideas’, but also with his obsessions, his secret history.

What is existentialism anyway?

Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence.

They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free —

and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzyin...

an anxiety inseparable from human exi...

On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variable...

Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in person...

Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transc...

An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing...

By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of...

So what exactly is phenomenology? It is essentially a method rather than a set of theories, and — at the risk of wildly oversimplifying — its basic approach can be conveyed through a two-word command: DESCRIBE PHENOMENA.

The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist’s job is to describe.

It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ‘things themselves’. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly a...

The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality.

Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.

There is a part of everything that remains unexplored, for we have fallen into the habit of remembering, whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the slightest thing contains a little that is unknown. We must find it. To describe a blazing fire or a tree in a plain, we must remain before that fire or that tree until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire.

As the English surrealist poet David Gascoyne, then living in Paris in a delicate state of mind, wrote in his journal during that week, ‘What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance.’

Sartre argues that freedom terrifies us, yet we cannot escape it, because we are it.

In a reversal of Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am,’ Sartre argues, in effect, ‘I am nothing, therefore I am free.’

Heidegger once wrote that ‘To think is to confine yourself to a single thought’, but I now feel that this is the very opposite of what thinking ought to be.

Thinking should be generous and have a good appetite. I find life far too valuable these days to shut out most of its variety in favour of digging down into the depths — and remaining down there,

For him, this life is what we have, and we must make of it what we can.