At the Existentialist Café - by Sarah Bakewell
ISBN: 9781590518892Date read: 2026-01-05
How strongly I recommend it: 3/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
More like a memoir of her re-discovery of existentialist writers. Interesting but because of it, less educational than I wanted.
my notes
Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience
As a human being, I have no predefined nature.
I create that nature through what I choose to do.
I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.
Ex-student of his had come to him for advice.
Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’
Trolley problem? “trolleyologists”
Sartre was not concerned with reasoning his way through an ethical calculus in the traditional way of philosophers.
None can relieve you of the burden of freedom.
Ultimately you must do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.
You might think you are guided by moral laws, or that you act in certain ways because of your psychological make-up or past experiences, or because of what is happening around you.
But the whole mixture merely adds up to the ‘situation’ out of which you must act.
And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.
It is forbidden to forbid.
Be realistic: demand the impossible.
Sartre had taught me to drop out, an underrated and sometimes useful response to the world.
Merleau-Ponty was a brilliant essayist.
Merleau-Ponty’s main work The Phenomenology of Perception.
I was amazed afresh at how adventurous and rich his thinking was.
Read:
* Sartre on freedom
* Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression
* Kierkegaard on anxiety
* Camus on rebellion
* Heidegger on technology
* Merleau Ponty on cognitive science
Their philosophies feel current - and remain of interest.
Existentialists inhabited their ideas.
This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre.
She later moved away from it.
She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules.
But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in.
We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.
Philosophy becomes more interesting when it is cast into the form of a life.
Likewise, personal experience is more interesting when thought about philosophically.
His aim was always to work in whatever topic seemed the ‘most distressing and uncertain’ to him at any time — the ones that filled him with most anxiety and self-doubt.
Phenomenology describes stripping away clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to see the ‘things themselves’, exactly as they appear.
As it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality.
Set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations.
A general suspension of judgement about the world.
Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mystical experiences:
We can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately.
In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the ‘isms’ around it.
If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back.
He was so absorbed in his reading that at first he barely noticed the outside world.
He drank and went for long walks.
“I rediscovered irresponsibility.”