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

Around the time she was working on it, she decided to abandon a philosophical book called ‘Heidegger: the pursuit of Being’, on which she’d been engaged for six years. Typescript and manuscript versions remain, as disconnected assemblies of chapters of which just a few parts have been published posthumously.

She was particularly taken by the Heideggerian image of the mind as a clearing in the forest, which she found beautiful (as do I).

this last novel, Murdoch gives us a glimpse into what it is like to be a mind (or a Dasein) that is losing coherence and connection, yet retains both the ability to put its experience into words and the fierce desire to do so — to the limits of human capability. It is the phenomenological desire shared by Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and everyone in this book, including even Heidegger himself.