At the Existentialist Café

A beautiful, extremely pleasurable and invigorating read. The best I've read in a long time. It brought back the 'heady' exhilarating times when I first encountered existentialism as an 18 year old freshmen in college in 1970. It was my first encounter with existentialism. But initially not through the philosophical works themselves but through a course in 20th century literature: Sartre, Hesse, Camus, Malraux, de Beauvoir. It was eye-opening for an 18 year old who grew up in what was still a "1950's" suburban life. I was then so fortunate to take small seminars (6 - 8 students) on "Nietzsche", "Being and Time", and "The Later Heidegger" with professors such as Joseph P. Fell ("Emotion in the Theory of Sartre" and "Heidegger and Sartre") and Ernest Keen ("Three Faces of Being: Toward An Existential Clinical Psychology" and " A Primer in Phenomenological Psychology" and "Ultimacy and Triviality In Psychotherapy") . I will always be grateful for what they taught me to see and question. I didn't know of Sarah Blakewell until this book. I don't where she might have been "hiding" but she is a tremendously gifted writer and extremely well-read scholar. I have never seen such complex concepts translated into such accessible explanations. More than that, she is able to poetically convey the mood of the times and the ambience of the existential café - its life, its commitment and its energy. As she herself said, after 30 years of being enthralled with the "ideas", it was the lives that mattered and were most interesting. No, I wasn't there, but she makes you feel as if you had been. Nothing in my ongoing reading of existentialism and phenomenology has touched me as this has. There is so much I lost to the "herd" mentality over the years as a hospital; social worker in constant conflict with ridiculous government regulations, insurance companies' greediness and a mentality regarding technology (specifically computerized records) that dictate that physicians and nurses spend more time at their computers than with patients (Heidegger was right:: the essence of technology is not technology at all but how we relate to the world, the Earth and each other). In conclusion, I hope this has not been too rambling a review. But Bakewell's book has invigorated me to reassess what I do every day, how I do it and why I do it. It is by far the best read, and most motivating read, I've had in years. I recommend it most highly, especially to those like me, who lived through the tumultuous '60's and were inspired by a philosophy of freedom and engagement. May this book bring us back to those heady days of freedom and future that we thought we were destined to have - but unfortunately thought could be achieved without the sacrifice and commitment necessary. And maybe, to some, whose lives are governed by their "life" on the technology of FaceBook, Twitter etc, may they come to understand that technology is not the essence of life, of Being, or anything else. There is no "authenticity" in Facebook....it is a technological "bad faith" I didn't know who Sarah Blakewell was until this but she is marvelously informed and extremely well-read.

Although I have some reservations (below), I liked Bakewell's latest and recommend it as a good read about the cadre of leading existentialists, their key ideas, and how they did (or did not) live the philosophy they espoused. I was led to this purchase because I particularly liked her previous, excellent thematic biography of Michel de Montaigne ("How to Live"), as well as her friendly writing style. In some respects, this book continues to address the question of "how to live," considered not only philosophically but in actual practice. Bakewell also has a fine writer's knack not only for clarifying sometimes complex ideas but also in bringing the reader into the conversation. It may be helpful to say that Bakewell's book is more a biographical look at a half-dozen or so of the leading proponents of 20th century existentialism (originating in phenomenology) than an in-depth examination of the philosophy. One does, in fact, learn about fundamental ideas or themes associated with the philosophy, although Bakewell is perhaps more interested in exploring the extent to which the adherents lived or "inhabited" their philosophy. Her treatment is often fairly personal, referring to her own interests in the ideas and personalities of these existentialists. As such, she has her favorites: As a rather more critical comment on Amazon by Drew Odom observes, she arguably short-changes some, while perhaps being too quick to justify others. At one point, Bakewell observes that philosopher Hanna Arendt (a young student and lover of Heidegger) while deeply critical of his later thinking and behavior may be "overgenerous" in the image she ultimately paints of the man. I am inclined to say that Bakewell is similarly overgenerous in her treatment of Sarte, in particular: Although rejecting his support of odious regimes (e.g., shifting loyalties from an increasingly embarrassing Soviet Union to Mao and Pot Pol, among others), she emphasizes that he was well-intentioned and ultimately a "good man." Well, maybe. Anyway, she is earnest about factual balance, and if she has some biases that I do not share, she is not disingenuous. On a smaller, stylistic note: Although I enjoy Bakewell's very personal interest in the ideas and personalties examined, some of her "asides" smack of notes one might write to oneself in the margin of a book and are occasionally distractions. I can't say this troubled me too much, as I find her opinions mostly amusing and sympathetic, but a bit of self-editing might be warranted. That said, I enjoy her light and personal tone, and think she usually strikes a good balance between scholarship and conversation with the reader. If I didn't "love" this book to the extent of my 5-star opinion of "How to Live," I nevertheless found it stimulating and enjoyable, and will look forward to any future writing by Bakewell.

This is a perfect book for anyone who enjoys biography and seeks more understanding of a philosophical concept that is a vibrant idea for our time and life. Philosophy opens the mind to ideas. Biography opens the mind to the broad spectrum of life. This book combines both, bringing life to ideas. The author, Sarah Bakewell, shows how the lives of famous intellectuals influence the ideas that make them famous. Philosophy began with Plato infusing the life of Socrates with profound insight. We cannot today separate that life from the ideas discussed in the dialogues. That is what after more than two thousand years makes them still so appealing. In this book Sarah Bakewell achieves a similar magic, weaving threads of various lives with the evolving patterns of what during those lives were - and for us today continue to be - revolutionary thoughts. We see how the semi-Platonic sexual relationship of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir gives flavor to their work. In the alternating friendship and conflict between Sartre and Camus we better understand the political ramifications of existentialism. Encompassing lives of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others, the author paints a vivid picture of how ideas grow with an emphasis on existentialism and a depth than cannot be found in a book that concentrates only on the concept. For example, in reading about Edmund Husserl we encounter more than Sartre’s thrill in discovering in phenomenology an idea that contributed to his own thinking. As an added treat we get a succinct description of phenomenology easily digested and a revealing light on the relationship to existentialism.

This is one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. Like Bakewell, I was quite interested in the existentialists back in the 1970s and 80s, but I moved on to other thinkers and had almost forgotten the passion, brilliance, and excitement of existentialism. The joy is back for me, thanks to Bakewell. Reading At the Existentialist Café, I re-experienced the passionate brilliance of the women and men that made philosophy into a lifelong passion of mine. Bakewell writes beautifully, with great insight and an obvious love and compassion for the men and women who shook the world in the middle of the 20th Century. Bakewell doesn't just provide biographies of these great and controversial thinkers; she reveals how their lives illuminate their ideas. Indeed, she does this with a skill that is breath-taking. For anyone who is not familiar with existentialism, this book would be immensely helpful because Bakewell has a rare ability to make complex ideas comprehensible. For those who have studied the existentialists, this book is a beautiful reminder why these men and women are so vitally important and why we fell in love with them in our youths. Above all, Bakewell makes you want to go back and re-read the great works of existentialism, which I am most definitely going to do. And, I will re-read them with Bakewell's insights and passion to guide me. One last thing: this book is a great work of philosophy AND literature. It is beautifully written and at times poetic and often deeply moving. Read this book! Just read it! You will be very glad you did.

Bakewell’s book is an unusual mixture of intersecting biographies, philosophical discussions and the history of philosophy. Indeed, it might be said to be simultaneously a history of philosophy and a history of philosophers. This unusual combination goes beyond Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies by showing the complex relations among philosophers’ social lives – in the broadest sense of the term – and their (never static) philosophical positions. Bakewell’s writing is clear and concise as well as entertaining, even when trying to explain to the reader some complex points of Heideggerian philosophy. She shows Sartre and Richard Wright as feminists and enthusiastic supporters of Beauvoir’s feminism. And, she shows how that feminist strands of existentialism opened movements around gay rights, class barriers, race relations and anti-colonial struggles. She notes correctly that philosophy and the social sciences tend to focus nearly entirely on ideas and bracket biography. Yet, her work shows us quite well how social biographies can help philosophy. One curious omission is that she only mentions American pragmatism once and then dismisses it, even though both pragmatism and phenomenology have much the same roots and cover much of the same territory. However, this hardly affects what is a stunning tour de force that will change how many people think of philosophy.

Normally the question of how many stars to assign a work under review is not so difficult as it is for this book. On one hand I feel people should be encouraged to read this book. Bakewell may as others have complained have only included somewhat simple, perhaps superficial, summaries of the core principles and contributions of those covered, but she does make a good case for the relevance today of Existentialism. And those summaries are informative as far as they go, which is a real contribution. On the other hand I felt the book was rather disappointing in several respects. Hence I would like to give it a 4 or even 5 star rating for the value of reading it while a 3 for how successful, meaning less than so, that it is in achieving its purpose and goals The main problem with the book is that it is not adequately convincing in arguing that the merits and value of those core principles and philosophical arguments should be judged in light of the way the subject in question led his or her life. More accurately the question is how strongly that judgment should be made; it goes without saying there is some merit to analyzing the connection. As I recall Bakewell having put it, especially for the Existentialists, who were arguing that the way we are and live is in effect the starting point of understanding, how they actually lived is entirely relevant. But… I am reluctant to condemn an offered idea because of some personal shortcoming however severe of the philosopher who offered it. For example and most obviously there is the troubling involvement of Heidegger with Nazism. Bakewell in fairness succeeds in showing how at least some of Heidegger’s ideas fit however loosely with some aspects of what was going on in Nazi Germany. But she also points out how Heidegger’s apparent willingness to not only join but defer to the Party in accepting its (warped and abominable) principles contradicts Heidegger’s own analysis of the they, the Other, as a barrier to or drawing away from authenticity. In short, doesn’t that mean that Heidegger was NOT following his own philosophy in joining the Party and deferring to it? This would seem to be a perfect example of a personal shortcoming, not of a “problem” with the idea of the relation of the Other to authenticity. Bakewell’s obvious preference for Sartre and Beauvoir based on admiration for their lifestyle and politics is, even if one shares that preference, problematic as well. It hardly follows however well they fit together that the ideas the two had were necessary antecedents to their lifestyles and life choices. More to the point admiration for their life choices led in turn I think to two problems with the book. One is that Bakewell comes across as too easy as a moral matter on especially some of Sartre’s positions, statements and actions, most of which involved his association with Communism. Of even more concern to me, though, is that approval of Sartre the person does not improve or make better problems with his ideas. In that connection Bakewell completely fails to point out that Sartre’s core principle, that existence precedes essence, falls into the Cartesian trap of divorcing the two concepts. Heidegger by comparison rightly points out that essence and meaning can never be separated from existence. Perhaps a lesser problem for some is that Bakewell, who strongly implies that she is an atheist, also implies that atheism is on some way a logical extension of Existentialism. This is hardly the case. Whether one is both an Existentialist and an atheist is beside the point. The implication does not follow. Having stated my criticisms the book remains well worth reading. The brief biographical sections for those covered are not only interesting in and of themselves but help show how Existentialism came to exist in Western civilization, how it related to the times in which it was developing. But as noted above one of the chief values of the book is in raising the argument for its continuing vitality and relevance today. Perhaps the best example extends Heidegger’s discussion of the way Dasein can relate inauthentically to technology to recent developments in technology, including artificial intelligence. As a final note an unexpected result of reading this book has been to encourage me to revisit not so much the twentieth century subjects covered but Kierkegaard. Which I hope to do soon. So, 4 to 5 stars for the overall value of the book, but only 3 for how well it succeeds (hence the 4 I give it as a compromise).

I believe Sarah Bakewell's comments below sums up the book better than any impressions I might give. I just want to add that whatever shortcomings people have about the work, and some criticisms might be valid, that they pale in comparison to the insights we get from reading this book. I just wish she had more work in English so I could participate in how she frames the other more often. But at any rate, read her passage below to get a feeling of how she writes about a very complicated subject. The book reflects the same optimal flow. "When I first read Sartre and Heidegger, I didn’t think the details of a philosopher’s personality or biography were important. This was the orthodox belief in the field at the time, but it also came from my being too young myself to have much sense of history. I intoxicated myself with concepts, without taking account of their relationship to events and to all the odd data of their inventors’ lives. Never mind lives; ideas were the thing. Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so. That is why, among all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the world’s ever-changing substance. It gives us all the fury and vivacity of the existentialist cafés, together with ‘a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert’ — and all the rest of the exquisite, phosphorescent bloom of life, which reveals itself to human beings for as long as we are lucky enough to be able to experience it."

Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café is, like its title, entertaining and glib. It consists largely of anecdotes about and shallow intellectual histories of its major figures. Her heroes are Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, roughly in that order. Her summaries of the various philosophical positions rarely dig any deeper than the familiar commonplaces of each of them: Hussar's epoché, Sartre's existence precedes essence, Heidegger's investigations into Dasein and Being-in-the-World, for example. This is in no way a probing book. It could prove useful as a way of stimulating more insightful or complex readings in the original writings of each of them, but its own summaries remain doggedly superficial. Its bias is clearly toward Beauvoir and Sartre. Some of the consequences of that bias are troubling. She rightly excoriates Heidegger for not only his Nazi affiliations, but for the even more important Nazi-like implications in much of his thought, though there are far better and more probing studies of this problem in Heidegger's work, like Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots. But, though she rightly denounces Sartre for his support of some "odious" regimes, she nearly forgives him for that since his support was motivated by a wish for human freedom. The philosophical entanglement Sartre found himself in while promoting both freedom and engagement is one Bakewell discusses, but once again the treatment remains superficial and little detail is offered. A man who talked a lot about freedom and yet supported Stalin, Mao, and even Pol Pot shouldn't be forgiven for his sins quite so easily. About the famous disagreements between and falling out of Camus and Sartre she says too little. Camus, it seems to me, she discusses shabbily. It is one of those many places where her overall glibness and willingness to settle for the biographically anecdotal do injustice to the deeper issues involved. This is no place for me to review them. But many readers and thinkers have come to see Camus, like Raymond Aron, another thinker Bakewell treats unfairly, as more significant writers than either Beauvoir or Sartre, in part because they remained at least in part true to that other French tradition of the humanist enlightenment. Sartre, on the other hand, in later life gave his support to the anti-humanism and irrationalism that was in part the movement in French thought that followed him, even though in many ways it contradicted his own earlier positions. Bakewell has every right to state her own preferences, of course. But her reasons for them seem to me too easy, especially when she is forgiving a man (and Beauvoir, too) for his support of murderous, violent regimes because he did so out of desire to realize greater human freedom. The one word 'odious' is hopelessly insufficient. Her treatment of many other important French thinkers of the day are even more shallow. Her reading of Gabriel Marcel, for example, would seem to consist of little more than a glance at one of his book's titles. I don't mean that remark to be taken literally, of course, but it has some truth to it. And I think her book would have been improved if it had considered along side the men and women it does discuss some of the countervailing philosophies in France, Maritain's for example. It might have complicated her readings usefully. I find the near absence of Paul Ricoeur puzzling. His name is mentioned only once. Yet he was the true inheritor of Husserl in France, albeit of a somewhat later generation. Still, much of his work overlapped the time in which Sartre and many of the others were still writing. Of course, it would be hard to write anecdotally about Ricoeur. His life was his work. There's nothing to gossip about. Yet he was probably France's greatest philosopher during his lifetime. It is odd to find him here essentially absent since Bakewell's book does, to some extent, find its origins in phenomenology. At the Existentialist Café is at times entertaining, even ingratiating. It's a quick read. If one knows little to nothing about these thinkers, it could form a valuable introduction. But it is no more than that, and for a deeper understanding a reader should look elsewhere, especially to the writers themselves. Sartre's and Camus' fiction, for example, deserves far profounder readings than Bakewell offers here, even The Road to Freedom, despite Sartre's tendency to write about his characters less for themselves or what they might be but as examples of what his philosophy wants to say. Sartre was always a tendentious writer of fiction; Camus never was. Still, both man in their novels and stories were often more ambiguous writers than they were when writing philosophy or essays, Camus's much better and far more valuable today than Sartre's however. What Bakewell offers instead is mostly plot summaries and introductory interpretations, as if she were addressing a high school or first year college class. But that is how her book works throughout. It means to popularize. It is an insufficient goal, even when it works. See, for one more example, her writing on Arendt and Jaspers. There is far more to both than one would ever conjecture if all one had to go on was Bakewell's words. This is not a bad beginning, if one does not know these thinkers. But it often gives the wrong idea. And it is far too shallow, too eager to please, in a way, than it ought to be. There's too much of the café in it, gossip and glib chatting, and too little deep probing into existentialist thought, with only a rare, truly profound consideration of why, in its complexity and richness, it still matters.

This is an excellent introduction to the popular and valid philosophy called existentialism. All those who wish to understand this ground breaking vision of human life must read this book and reread it. It is an intellectual pleasure and a stylistic delight. The writer writes with an authentic voice. vishram gupte

An engaging exposure of some of the leading figuresof this movement..Sartre is not a philosopher. He is a cut & paste novelist, an essayist and playwrght mixing Heidegger, Husserl and others.into his philosophy.. He is an early example of a media personality. This book is an excellent fresh look at the ideas and milieu in which these people developed.Exhilarating

It feels like a trip through history combined with entry points of existentialist philosophy making it accessible for non-experts. All this while having a great style of writing which makes you be stuck to the book. Definitely a page turner

I've not finished reading this book however the reading is not tedious on the other hand the outhor uses very comprehensive sentences for a non philosopher or specialist in the subject. For me this book is very interesting full of new vocabulary As a foreign language speaker it's helping me alot.

I'm about a quarter into this and love it. It just works for me. It has rekindled my interest in Existentialism and its philosophers. I shall be sad to finish it.