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

who has ever felt disgruntled, rebellious, or alienated about anything.

Bec-de-Gaz bar

rue du Montparnasse in Paris,

Raymond Aron,

So why not concentrate on the encounter with phenomena and ignore the rest?

The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl,

Martin Heidegger, added a different spin.

the question of Being.

‘if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!’

Now they saw its interest: it was a way of doing philosophy that reconnected it with normal, lived experience.

Epistemological questions

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

am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.

‘Existence precedes essence’.

for I am always a work in progress.

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

By reflecting on life’s vagaries in philosophical ways, they believed they could become more resilient, more able to rise above circumstances, and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment or anxiety. In the tradition they passed on, philosophy is neither a pure intellectual pursuit nor a collection of cheap self-help tricks, but a discipline for flourishing and living a fully human, responsible life.

denote thought concerning the problems of human existence.

‘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.

All the same, here is my attempt at a definition of what existentialists do.

Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence.

They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have.

am whatever I choose ...

myself at every...

I am...

I’m responsible for every...

an anxiety inseparable from human exi...

I am only free within s...

always want more: I am passionately

involved in personal projects of all kinds.

Human existence is thus am...

transcendent and exhi...

but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself.

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

in short, to the things themselves.

In which we meet the phenomenologists.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks discussed such experiences in his 1984 book A Leg to Stand On,

In all these cases, the Husserlian ‘bracketing out’ or epoché allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question ‘But is it real?’,

epoché

If you do so, you will have grasped the profound meaning of the discovery Husserl expresses in this famous phrase: ‘All consciousness is consciousness of something.’

We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are.

quoting St. Augustine:

Truth dwells in the inner man.

ignoble, but Husserl was expecting

Simone de Beauvoir

know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set — what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close.

Chandos-like moment

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

Not surprisingly, this radical freedom makes people nervous.

We cannot say (to quote more examples from Sartre’s 1945 lecture) ‘I have never had a great love or a great friendship;