The concepts of Existentialism, whether we are aware of them or not, are deeply embedded within our modern discourses. Many of us, especially in the Millennial generation, like to emphasize the virtues of authenticity. Netflix shows such as Black Mirror and Love, Death, and Robots reveal that our existential anxiety is intimately intertwined with rapidly-developing technology, just as Heidegger warned his audience in his 1953 lecture, “The Question Concerning Technology.” People today, just as in the 1930s, talk about our fear of commitment and our lack of agency in a society of excess consumerism and overwhelming choices. Many of us who are trapped in the concrete jungle of various cityscapes long for the days when we can get away to rediscover the beauty of nature, reconnect with other human beings, and disconnect from our ever-present source of anxiety (aka. our smartphones).

In our current historical moment, discussions of freedom, responsibility, and agency dominate the popular political discourse, just as they did in the early 20th century. In a time when we desperately need to understand how our freedom and responsibility will shape an increasingly uncertain future, existentialism seems more relevant than ever in addressing these questions. Yet, at least when I studied the existentialists in college, we tended to focus merely on their philosophical ideas, rather than the grittiness of their personal lives.  In her 2016 book, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, author Sarah Bakewell dives headfirst into the complicated, messy lives of the existentialists of the early 20th century, showing how their ideas were intrinsically shaped by their surrounding social and political context. 

Overview: 

In this volume, Bakewell offers us an accessible account of the philosophies and lives of Europe’s existential thinkers of the early-mid 20th century. She primarily focuses on two major hotbeds of existential thinking: France (with Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus) and Germany (with Martin Heidegger Edmund Husserl, and Karl Jaspers). Bakewell offers a compelling account of existentialism's development in the 1930s, its deep divisions in German-Occupied France during the Second World War, and its sudden popularity that thrust Sartre into the cultural spotlight in the 1940s and 50s. Bakewell notes how, just as much as a philosophy, existentialism was also a fashion and style in 1950s Paris, characterized by edgy figures donning black turtlenecks, holding a half-smoked cigarette between their lips as they offer a blasé quips about death to those in their company. While this may seem over-the-top and somewhat silly from our 21st century viewpoint- as most fads of youth tend to be- existentialism was also a serious philosophy that emphasized a real moral commitment to politics, literature, and art in the aftermath of a world that seemed shattered in meaning after the previous World Wars. Bakewell shows that existentialism was not only a mood nor merely a philosophy, but both.

Aside from philosophers, Bakewell also discusses other existentialist thinkers who were in these figures’ orbits, such as Hannah Ardent (a former student and lover of Heidegger), Gabriel Marcel (whom I have a particular interest in, personally), and Franz Fanon (whose work on psychoanalysis and race is still influential in today’s modern discourse).  The expansive cast of characters that this book covers doesn’t just include philosophers, but artists, playwrights, and friends of the existialists, including Arthur Koestler, who was a friend of both Camus and Sartre but fell out with them after a night of drunken fistfighting as a result of their political disagreements. Bakewell also discusses existentialism impact outside of France and Germany, as it helped to inspire leaders of the Prague Spring in 1968 and influenced cinematic, literary, and activist works in Britain and the United States during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Overall, Bakewell emphasizes that existentialism is a philosophy that is incredibly concerned with what it means to be human, and what it means to live authentically and with conviction in the face of an absurd existence.

Positives: 

Bakewell’s account is incredibly well-written and erudite. Her distillation of complex philosophies (such as phenomenology) are some of the most accessible and succinct descriptions that I’ve ever encountered, rivalling many compelling lectures that I’ve attended over the years. To aid in this clarity, instead of taking the role of an omniscient, objective narrator, she instead injects her own encounters with these authors into her retelling. For example, she writes that she originally read Heidegger in her teen years, just when existentialism was falling out of fashion in the 1980s. She writes candidly about her shifting perceptions of these figures over the years. In her conclusion, Bakewell writes, “When I first read Sartre and Heidegger, I didn’t think the details of a philosopher’s personality or biography were important… I intoxicated myself with concepts, without taking account of their relationship to events and to all the odd data of their inventors’ lives… Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so (326). In much the same way, before picking up this book, I must confess that I was less inclined to be interested in biographies, preferring instead to reduce these historical figures down to the ideas they produced. However, much like Bakewell, I found that, by the end, I was much more fascinated in these figures’ personal lives and ordeals, as they illuminated the myriad of ways in which the events of their lives influenced their philosophical work. 

As such, her skill at writing compelling biographies truly shines in this work, as well as how her perspectives on these thinkers have changed over the years, as in how while Heidegger has become too claustrophobic for her now, she became increasingly fond of Sartre over the course of researching for this book (although she does readily admit his monstrous characteristics as well). Sartre comes out of this book in a relatively positive light, overlooking his tendency to support violent regimes for the sake of his comparative “goodness” (especially compared to Heidegger’s contemptuous personality). Despite his flaws, Sartre is praised for his stance on “taking the side of the least favored,” which led him to continuously readjust and contemplate his perspective of the world over the course of his life. While this led him to many mistakes, it also allowed him to continually rethink from his first principles. Bakewell continually connects the personal with the political in other ways as well, including whether Heidegger’s philosophy led him to Nazism or how Sartre and de Beauvoir struggled to reconcile their idealistic principles and support of Communism with the ruthlessness of Mao and Stalin. By taking the political and social atmosphere of the early-mid 20th century into account throughout these characters’ biographies, Bakewell provides a full and vibrant portrait of how a complex web of conditions and interactions can result in the construction of particular philosophical stances.

Bakewell builds her narrative from a wide array of primary sources, including these figures’ published works, diary entries, travel logs, and letters to one another. Bakewell has an especially apt talent at retelling anecdotes that put these figures’ individualistic personalities into perspective, such as Heidegger’s beleaguered trip to Greece, where, after years of refusing to go, he finally took a cruise to the nation and ended up complaining the entire time, revealing the ways in which he reacted when confronted with a world that did not match his expectation of it. In recounting these figures’ lives, Bakewell’s skill as a writer is brilliantly evident, as she describes the facets and quirks of each individual and how these features influenced their philosophies. We, the readers, truly get the sense that these thinkers are fully embodied beings, moving and thinking in the world with passion and zeal. 

For example, we see that Heidegger’s thought is filled with images of deep, impenetrable forests, while Sartre possessed an irrational squeamishness towards glue-like textures, utilizing the term “viscosity” to express his horror of the seemingly radical contingency of the world around him. Bakewell paints de Beauvoir as a woman who never stopped marveling at the world, and placed this sense of phenomenological wonder (from the crunching touch of rosebuds to the taste of a glowing sunset) at the center of her philosophical project. We also are faced with the darker aspects of these figures’ lives, from Sartre’s addiction to the painkiller Corydrane and serial adultery to de Beauvoir’s heavy drinking and fits of hallucinations in which swallows pulled at her hair. Bakewell writes generously about these figures, especially in the final chapters as she depicts their departures from life. Detailing Camus’ violent death an automobile accident, Merleau-Ponty’s sudden heart attack, Sartre’s gradual blindness and decline due to many years of drug addiction, and de Beauvoir’s death several years later due to cirrhosis of the liver, Bakewell movingly conveys her heartfelt affection for these figures (including the hard-to-love Heidegger) as she considers the legacy that they left behind for us. She reminds us that the contours of the human experience are riddled with difficulties and contradictions, but that these existentialist also remind us of the dizzying possibilities of lives lived in pursuit of freedom. 

Criticism: 

This work is incredibly well-written and researched, and her voice, while present, always seems balanced and non-judgemental, except on the rare occasion when judgement may be deserved (We’re looking at you, Heidegger). As such, there’s not much of this book that I found to be particularly objectionable or problematic. If there was one small criticism to levee against this book, it’s that in its wide sweep of history and expansive cast of characters, some of their thoughts can be oversimplified, such as Ardent’s work on fascism and Fanon’s treatises on race. As such, this can often lead figures who are often marginalized in the study of existential thought, such as Fanon, Marcel, and to be further relegated to the margins in order to make room for the larger than life personalities of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Heidegger, about whom much has already been written. Furthermore, Bakewell states in the introduction that she would focus primarily on the early 20th century existentialists, but her choice also leads me to wonder how much the work of these existentialists could be put into perspective against a critical engagement with the works of Kierkegaard. To be fair, it is entirely too difficult to accomplish this task in such a readable and accessible manner without filling multiple volumes, so Bakewell does a more than commendable job in attempting to distill these thinker’s philosophies, lives, and the world events that influenced them into such an approachable work. 

Conclusion:

Overall, this book serves as an excellent primer into the most influential thinkers, writers, and artists within the existential movement of the 20th century. If you’ve ever been curious as to what Jean-Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, or any other existential thinker has said, but may be too turned away by the verbose style of their writing, then this book will do an excellent job in distilling their essential ideas into an incredibly accessible narrative. Existentialism, at its core, asks of us: what does it mean to make meaningful choices within in a society so overwhelmed with decisions and absurdities? How do we begin to live authentic lives as we struggle against the tide of an increasingly uncertain future? In her conclusion, Bakewell argues that these questions remain just as salient today as they did in the early 20th century. She writes, “When reading Sartre on freedom, Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression, Kierkegaard on anxiety, Camus on rebellion, Heidegger on technology or Merleau-Ponty on cognitive science,one sometimes feels one is reading the latest news.” When surrounded by a quagmire of irrationality, Bakewell challenges us, just as the existentialists were challenged, to be courageous enough to discover how to struggle for freedom. As such, when reading her work, we might find more of ourselves in the dusty works of Sartre, Camus, and de Bouiviour than we may have originally anticipated.