At The Existentialist Café summary

Freiburg-im-Breisgau is a university city in southwest Germany bordered by the Rhine river and the Black Forest. In the first decades of the twentieth century, it became the epicenter of phenomenology. Students flocked there to study with the discipline’s founder, Edmund Husserl, who became the university’s philosophy chair in 1916.

We’ve already mentioned phenomenology. But what is it exactly?

Many students end up eclipsing their teachers, creating something entirely new out of the things they are taught. This was definitely the case with Husserl’s brightest student, Martin Heidegger, who revolutionized philosophy with his 1927 book Being and Time.

As a student of Husserl, Heidegger had learned to set aside his preconceived notions in order to look more clearly at things. Looking at a cup of coffee, he might have said, “It is rich and dark.” But in Being and Time, he asked an important question about that kind of statement: What exactly does “is” mean?

Sartre was a novelist as well as a philosopher, so his writing about existentialism had a literary feel to it, especially the anecdotes he used to illustrate his ideas, which were often drawn from real life.

This made sense, because at the heart of existentialism is the notion of freedom in real people’s lives.

Sartre and de Beauvoir strove to exemplify their philosophy and ideals in every aspect of their lives. This started with their relationship. They became lovers when they were students and were soon inseparable. Marriage might have been the next logical step for many, but not for Sartre and de Beauvoir. To them, marriage meant assuming confining gender roles, accumulating property and lying to each other about affairs. This didn’t appeal to them and it didn’t fit with their philosophical ideas about freedom and choice either.

So they chose something else instead. One evening in 1929, in the Tuileries Garden in Paris, the two made an arrangement. They would agree to a “two-year lease” – meaning that they would be a couple for two years, albeit in an open relationship. After two years, if things were working, they could continue on. If not, they could split up or change the relationship in some way.

Throughout 1939, anxiety was building – war was on the horizon. Following the German invasion of Poland in September, Britain and France declared war on Germany and ordinary people around Europe found their lives upended.

For Sartre, this meant going to war. Persistent eye problems meant that he was posted to a meteorological station in Alsace rather than going to the front, but in 1940 he was taken prisoner and sent to a POW camp. In captivity, he took notes and read Heidegger’s Being and Time. It was an inspiration to him during this difficult time.

After the devastation of the Second World War, it was clear that the Europe of old was gone. The future would require new ways of thinking, and existentialism provided just that.

In 1945, existentialism exploded in popularity. On October 28, Sartre gave a public talk in Paris that was so overcrowded it was chaotic. Chairs were broken, people passed out from the heat and the whole event was big news. Before long, everyone was buzzing about Sartre and his philosophy.

In 1943, Sartre and de Beauvoir met the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus. Camus was handsome, warm, funny and emotional. Sartre and de Beauvoir liked him right away and the three became good friends.

Camus didn’t describe himself as an existentialist, but his philosophy and novels had many existentialist elements. Camus also added a little absurdity to things. Take his 1942 book The Myth of Sisyphus. In it, Camus looks closely at a story from Homer’s Odyssey in which a king named Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill each day, only to have it slip away near the top and roll back down every time.

Existentialism could be applied to anything in life and it often was. So surely there was little ground left uncovered after the existentialist boom of the mid-1940s? Not so. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking work The Second Sex examined the state of being as it applied to an overlooked category of people: women.

De Beauvoir looked at women’s experience of being in the world, something that’s vastly different from that of men. This difference starts early in life, so people usually just chalk it up as something inherent to femininity. But de Beauvoir says that ideas about what’s “natural” are simply myths. And these myths need to be set aside if we’re going to examine what it means to be raised as a woman.