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

cannot take away my existential freedom.

Sartre here resurrects the ancient Stoic idea that I may not choose what happens to me, but I can choose what to make of

We should not expect freedom to be anything less than fiendishly difficult.

The Blood of Others, which weighed the need for rebellious action against the guilt that comes from putting people in danger.

‘Thingness of Things’. It described a philosophy of ‘resistentialism’ propounded by one Pierre-Marie Ventre, dedicated to understanding why things resist and frustrate human beings at every turn, as when they trip us up underfoot, or decline to be found when lost. Ventre’s slogan is ‘Les choses sont contre nous’ — ‘Things are against us’.

Jaspers he made no comment on the contents of his Schuldfrage,

So who, in the end, was the better communicator?

these relationships were the foundation of our existence, not an extension of it.

Gabriel Marcel

Thus it is in relation to three men that Simone de

Beauvoir describes the origin of her great feminist work, The Second Sex.

It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement.

carry the weight of the world by myself’?

‘eyes of the least favoured’

Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in a Nazi concentration camp had led him to conclude that the human need for meaning was almost as vital as that for food or sleep.

A flurry in 1956 included Irving Goffman’s

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,

Paul Goodman’s Growing ...

Hannah Arendt. Her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem,

phenomenon which she characterised as ‘the banality of evil’. Her

Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo perfected experiments exploring just how far people would go in obeying orders.

epoché.

Perhaps phenomenology, even more than existentialism, is the truly radical school of thought.

Brentano, the original phenomenological rebel, would be entitled to feel proud of the long line of influence he had.