Author(s): Sarah Bakewell

Literature

From the best-selling author of How to Live, a spirited account of one of the 20th century's major intellectual movements and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it. Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it " It was this simple phrase that would ignite a movement, inspiring Sartre to integrate phenomenology into his own French humanistic sensibility, thereby creating an entirely new philosophical approach inspired by themes of radical freedom, authentic being, and political activism. This movement would sweep through the jazz clubs and caf s of the Left Bank before making its way across the world as existentialism. Featuring not only philosophers but also playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries, At the Existentialist Caf follows the existentialists' story from the first rebellious spark through the Second World War to its role in postwar liberation movements such as anticolonialism, feminism, and gay rights. Interweaving biography and philosophy, it is the epic account of passionate encounters - fights, love affairs, mentorships, rebellions, and long partnerships - and a vital investigation into what the existentialists have to offer us today, at a moment when we are once again confronting the major questions of freedom, global responsibility, and human authenticity in a fractious and technology-driven world.

Not only a chatty and enjoyable introduction to mid-century Continental philosophy from phenomenalism to existentialism and beyond but also a source of anecdotal gossip about the personalities, relationships, foibles, diets, hairstyles and other eccentricities of the group of writers and philosophers clustered either physically or thematically around Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s Parisian café table (or should that read: Not only a source of anecdotal gossip about the personalities, relationships, foibles, diets, hairstyles and other eccentricities of the group of writers and philosophers clustered either physically or thematically around Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s Parisian café table but also a chatty and enjoyable introduction to mid-century Continental philosophy from phenomenalism to existentialism and beyond), At the Existentialist Café is pointy-headed enough to satisfy your curiosity about what these thinkers thought and pointy-nosed enough to satisfy your curiosity about how these thinkers lived. Indeed, either integral or coincidental to the existentialist project was the drawing closer of life-as-lived and life-as-thought-about, and Sarah Bakewell manages to pleasantly reassert the importance of whichever half of the equation you may have neglected (with respect to your knowledge of the existentialists, anyway) or to advance both halves for your general education and amusement. She seems to know when to linger in the company of one intellectual so as to grasp the fundamentals of her or his thinking and when to stand up and move on to the table of another, and she demonstrates the ongoing relevance of phenominalist and existentialist approaches to the ordinary lives of ordinary people (who may or may not have realised that they are adopting phenominalist or existentialist approaches). By the time you have read this book you will be on chatting terms with (or at least about) Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger (though you may not wish to sit at his table), Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, and you will certainly have enhanced your rating as a conversationalist in whatever café you frequent.

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