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

They also asked what a human being is, given the last century’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of brain physiology and body chemistry.

looked back on the Sartre of the 1960s as someone who had given him and his generation ‘a sense of freedom that directed our lives’, but he immediately added that it was a topic few took much interest in any more.

As Maurice Merleau-Ponty summed up this relationship, ‘Life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life.’

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.

Phenomenology was first developed in the years before and during the First World War.

proto-existentialists Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

Many of them never met. Still, I like to imagine them in a big, busy café of the mind, probably a Parisian one, full of life and movement, noisy with talk and thought, and definitely an inhabited café.

Some of the main thinkers in this book were phenomenologists but not existentialists at all (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), or existentialists but not phenomenologists (Kierkegaard);

Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence.

one person who attended a Husserl lecture said it reminded him of a ‘watchmaker gone mad’.

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 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.

Instead, this cup of coffee is a rich aroma, at once earthy and perfumed; it is the lazy movement of a curlicue of steam rising from its surface. As I lift it to my lips, it is a placidly shifting liquid and a weight in my hand inside its thick-rimmed cup. It is an approaching warmth, then an intense dark flavour on my tongue, starting with a slightly austere jolt and then relaxing into a comforting warmth, which spreads from the cup into my body, bringing the promise of lasting alertness and refreshment. The promise, the anticipated sensations, the smell, the colour and the flavour are all part of the coffee as phenomenon. They all emerge by being experienced.