At the Existentialist Cafe

Author's Name: Sarah Bakewell

From the author of How to Live, a lively and insightful book about one of the most important intellectual movements of the twentieth century and the revolutionary thinkers who launched it.
Paris, 1933. Three young friends are sitting in a bar, drinking apricot cocktails. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and their mutual friend Raymond Aron. They are talking about a new term coming from Berlin called “phenomenology.” He says to them: “Come on. If you were phenomenologists, you could talk about this cocktail and philosophize about it too.” This simple sentence established the emergence of an intellectual movement if it inspired Sartre to combine the term “phenomenology” with his French humanist mentality. The spirit of this movement would move to jazz clubs, cafes, and the left before making its way into words as existentialism.
The existentialists, a group of philosophers and novelists who challenged the conventional wisdom of their time, left their mark on the youth culture of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, anti-colonialism, feminism, and other liberation movements and trends. Then, it seemed, existentialism was over. But now, in the 21st century, we find ourselves once again confronting fundamental questions of identity and freedom, this time in a complex, hyper-technological world. Perhaps the existentialists have more to say to us than ever before.

This book is a personal account of this bold movement and the thinkers who created it, with their romantic and sexual relationships, their teachings and rebellions, their lifelong friendships and sometimes violent rivalries. An epic tale of big ideas, its heroes passionate characters stronger than life itself, sitting in a large existential café where the noisy, agitated mind roars: Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, and others.