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

The philosophy at the heart of this book is existentialism, a philosophy that offers meaning for those who are searching for meaning. For author Sarah Bakewell, “existentialism was precisely a philosophy of mattering . . .”, and she has written At the Existentialist Café for “anyone, in short, who has ever felt disgruntled, rebellious, or alienated about anything.”

Yes, this reviewer is disgruntled and alienated to his very core and has enjoyed At the Existentialist Café immensely and recommends it to readers.

The first chapters of At the Existentialist Café are presented in a style of immediacy, providing the reader a sense of “you are there” when existentialism was being invented. You are there in a long ago Paris café on the eve of WWII, talking with philosophers, hearing their thoughts, engaging in serious discussion.

Existentialism started with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Raymond Aron in Paris, in 1932. Author Bakewell (at first) passes over the looming war and the Nazi occupation of France, jumping ahead to a recently liberated Paris in 1945, where Sartre is feted as a celebrity and a hero. Bakewell expresses the mood, “A photo-caption writer for Time magazine put it ‘Philosopher Sartre. Women swoon.’”

Philosophy appears to have been a serious business, though this reviewer wonders, was existentialism a French kind of thing, akin to their love of Jerry Lewis? Apparently not. In 1948 the Catholic Church put Sartre’s entire works in its Index of Prohibited Books, along with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

Bakewell addresses the philosophical waypoints that led to existentialism. Not to say that existentialists superseded other philosophies so much as existentialism grew out of other philosophies. One of the more important precursors was phenomenology, though phenomenology was more of a method than a set of theories. Phenomenology’s intent was to describe things as they are experienced, rather than what we think things are, or think what things are supposed to be. Phenomenology is useful for talking about the religious, aesthetic, and mystical experiences of others rather than dismiss the experiencers as whack jobs. Phenomenology takes a step away from labeling—no one likes to be labeled—and is an alternative to the “theory of mind” as it is a more objective “describing of behaviors.” Philosophers who were phenomenologists include Edmund Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas.

There were other branches of philosophy before the existentialists that provided influence, including the ideas of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. Their philosophies are introduced lightly and made accessible to the reader (well, as best as one can in the case of Heidegger). Bakewell spends much time on Heidegger, making a creditable attempt at explaining his opaque philosophy, a philosophy that held as a cornerstone the concept of “being.”

One of the difficulties readers will have with Heidegger is that he invented new words for commonly used words, and though this is confusing, Heidegger found it very important to create a different word to get his readers to think beyond the word. Bakewell explains that, “it can help to think of Heidegger as an experiential novelist or poet.” The truth for Heidegger was that everything was linked to everything, and so he needed to coin new words to describe everyday items that would forcibly call into mind the linkages he was trying to show.

Readers of At the Existentialist Café will discover it is easier to understand the lives of the philosophers more than the intricacies of any particular branch of philosophy. Bakewell shows how philosopher’s personalities led to the creation of their philosophies. What comes across most clearly is that one can’t separate the philosophies from the philosophers.

It is interesting to see how disconnected (some of) the philosophers were from real life. Heidegger was a noxious case in point for the following reasons: He joined the Nazi party, enforced Nazi laws as rector of Freiburg University and removed Jews from University posts not out of convenience but from conviction. Heidegger took a Jewish lover, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, and told her nothing of his Nazi activities.

The philosopher Karl Jaspers, a friend of Heidegger, questioned Heidegger about Hitler’s academic credentials (his credentials, of all things!) Heidegger replied, “Education is completely irrelevant, just look at his wonderful hands!” To this, what more can one say? Alas, Sarah Bakewell is silent on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the one philosopher who considered what there was to say when there was nothing more to say.

It becomes obvious that philosophy does not magically spring out fully formed from the philosopher’s head. Philosophy comes from the life and the personality of the philosopher. A sad philosopher is compelled to come up with a sad philosophy, a crazy philosopher is compelled to come up with a crazy philosophy. It is their nature. How could it be otherwise? Readers may or may not agree with a philosopher and philosophy within At the Existentialist Café but readers will most certainly be able to figure out where each philosopher’s philosophy came from.

The French philosophers were led to existentialism by their common wartime experiences—the binding experience was that their homeland, France, had been partitioned and run by the Nazis. So to no surprise, existentialism at its heart extolls freedom.

On the losing side of the war, Heidegger was unrepentant. Until 1950 he was banned from teaching. Heidegger turned inwards toward mysticism. His philosophy, which in its early years was incomprehensible to non-philosophers, became incomprehensible even to his peers.

Sartre, famous after the war also started writing unreadable books but for a different reason. He considered himself too important to be edited. Invited to Hollywood to write a screenplay from a biography on Freud. The screenplay was rejected for being too wordy. Told to trim it, Sartre instead lengthened it to what would have been, if filmed, a seven hours movie.

At the Existentialist Café also shows that philosophers’ philosophies can evolve over time—philosophers can and do change their minds. As they change their minds, they change their philosophies; their writings can be separated into “earlier” and “later” stages, each stage contradictory when compared to another.

One significant life-changing event that caused philosophers to change their minds was the aftermath of discovering of Stalin’s murderous treatment to his own people. Sartre held firm in his belief that communism was good, equating communist ideology to morality—to create a more perfect world it is moral to kill whoever gets in the way.  Over this, Sartre came into conflict with Albert Camus, who said the Communists were no better than the Nazis. This disagreement caused Sartre to have a falling out with Camus that lasted to Camus’ death (not at Sartre’s hands, in case you were wondering).

Sartre however did reconsider his stance on the superiority of French nationalism during the Algerian war of independence. Bakewell identifies Sartre’s ethical dilemma, “If a lot of people with incompatible interests all claim that right is on their side, how to you decide between them? . . . Sartre had sketched the outline of a bold solution: why not decide every situation by asking how it looks to ‘the eyes of the least favored,’ or to ‘those treated most unjustly’?”

Sartre then took the side of Algerian independence, and received death threats and bomb attacks (that he survived, in case you were wondering). Sartre was active into his 60s, speaking at the Paris demonstrations and joining the protests in 1968. And fifty thousand mourners attended his funeral in 1980.

Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism extended beyond France through 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s influencing American culture in books, such as The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, and Growing Up Absurd; in 1950s movies including The Man In the Grey Flannel Suit, and Rebel Without a Cause, and in more recent movies, those that question authenticity such as Blade Runner, The Truman Show, and American Beauty.

Although existentialism went into a decline after Sartre’s death, existentialists and existentialism demand rereading today. For Bakewell, the existentialists “remind us that human existence is difficult and that people behave appallingly, yet . . . show how great our possibilities are.” And as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, a colleague of Sartre said, “Life becomes ideas and ideas return to life.”

At the Existentialist Café is an interesting and not at all difficult book to read considering the subject matter of philosophy—certainly worth a look if you are a fan of philosophy but not of its jargon, which is thankfully kept to a minimum.

At the Existentialist Café has numerous photos, illustrations, 100 pages of notes, a bibliography, and an index.