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

Of all the things Beauvoir wondered at, one thing amazed her more than any other: the immensity of her own ignorance. She loved to conclude, after early debates with Sartre, ‘I’m no longer sure what I think, nor whether I can be said to think at all.’ She apparently sought out men who were brilliant enough to make her feel at a loss in this way — and there were few to be found.

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Sartre was always the first to read Beauvoir’s work, the person whose criticism she trusted and who pushed her to write more. If he caught her being lazy, he would berate her: ‘But Castor, why have you stopped thinking, why aren’t you working? I thought you wanted to write? You don’t want to become a housewife, do you?’

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As he wrote later, his own skin was the boundary of the space he had, and even as he slept he could always feel someone’s arm or leg against his own. Yet it did not disturb him: those others were part of himself. He had never found physical proximity easy before, so this was a revelation.

These are Sartre's words on his experience as a prisoner of war. Powerful words. He was captured by German troops in 1940 and spent 9 months imprisoned. He received a letter to receive medical attention for his eye outside of the camp, which he used to escape and never return. He then reunited with his longtime girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir in Paris, where they continued to develop their ideas of philosophy.