At The Existentialist Café Book Summary - At The Existentialist Café Book explained in key points

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At The Existentialist Café summary

Name: At The Existentialist Café
Rating: 4.6 (199 reviews)
Author: Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell

Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails

4.6 (199 ratings)

27 mins

Brief summary

At The Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell traces the lives of existentialist thinkers and analyzes their works. It offers insight into the movement's philosophy and how it influenced cultural, political, and social changes.

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Western Philosophy

Table of Contents

At The Existentialist Café
Summary of 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Learn how philosophy can be a part of life.

Philosophy can seem like a distant subject to most of us. Perhaps we might imagine a bearded figure in a cave somewhere, pondering the nature of reality. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with our everyday lives. But that’s what made existentialism different.

Starting in the 1930s, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and others began developing a philosophy that would embrace life and ask questions about how and why we live the way we do. Their philosophy would not only guide them in their own lives – it would sustain them in the dark days of the Second World War.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how to use a cocktail in philosophy;
how to talk about pain; and
why so many people keep seeing women as objects.

An apricot cocktail started Jean-Paul Sartre on the road to existentialism.

For a lot of us, existentialism is a murky term, one that suggests gloomy ideas about the futility of life. But existentialism started with something a lot more cheerful: an apricot cocktail.

Around the end of 1932, Jean-Paul Sartre, his girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir and his friend Raymond Aron sat in the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris, sipping cocktails and catching up. The three had studied philosophy together at École normale supérieure in Paris, and had graduated restless and unsatisfied. The school’s curriculum was dominated by the same questions that philosophers had been asking since Plato’s time, like “How can I know that things are real?” and “How can I be sure that I know anything for certain?” It was hard to see the point in any of it, and the three friends were hungry for a new kind of philosophy, something that spoke to their dissatisfaction with the stale old questions that had bored them in school.

But what other ways of philosophizing could there be? Sartre and Beauvoir had been teaching in the French provinces since they’d graduated, and neither had any new ideas to report. Aron, though, thought he had found an answer. Studying in Berlin after graduation, he had encountered a new and different philosophy that had originated in Germany: phenomenology. What made phenomenology so exciting was that it put stale metaphysical questions like the ones they’d studied at the École normale supérieure to one side in order to look at the stuff of real, everyday life. With phenomenology, Aron said, he could even use his apricot cocktail to philosophize!

His friends were astounded.

Sartre lit up, and went straight to a bookstore. Hungry to know more about phenomenology, he asked for every book on the topic that the shop had. Unfortunately, that only meant a single book. Though Sartre tore through it, he was desperate to know more; soon he was making arrangements to study in Berlin for a year, just as Aron had. There, Sartre created something entirely new, blending the phenomenology books that he read with other philosophers’ ideas and his own literary style and personality. By the time he returned to Paris in 1934, he was ready to found a new philosophy of his own: existentialism.

Sartre’s year in Berlin had been fruitful. But ironically, a different city in Germany was actually the heart of phenomenology: Freiburg.

Freiburg was the center of a new philosophy: phenomenology.

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?

Martin Heidegger was both a giant of philosophy and a deeply flawed man.

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?

Existentialism is about the burden of freedom and responsibility.

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.

To Sartre and de Beauvoir, existentialism was more than a philosophy – it was a way of living.

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.

War upended the existentialists’ lives, but it didn’t stop their work.

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.

Postwar France embraced the new in the form of existentialism.

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.

Albert Camus was a friend, then an antagonist to Sartre and de Beauvoir.

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.

Of all existentialist works, The Second Sex dealt the most directly with lived experience.

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.

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What is At The Existentialist Café about?

At the Existentialist Café (2016) recounts the birth of existentialism in the early twentieth century. Both a biography and a philosophical text, it tells the stories of individual philosophers as well as their ideas. Above all, it explores how big philosophical questions can illuminate our lives and the way we live them.

Who should read At The Existentialist Café?

Philosophers who feel that philosophy has lost touch with everyday life
Francophiles looking for insight on their national treasures
Curious observers who want to learn how to look more closely at the world around them

About the Author

Sarah Bakewell is a writer from Bournemouth, England. She spent her childhood traveling and living in Australia with her parents, before eventually returning to the UK. There, she studied philosophy at the University of Essex and worked as a cataloger and curator of early printed books at London’s Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine. She is the author of four books including The Smart, The English Dane and How To Live: A Life of Montaigne.

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