At the Existentialist Café, my thoughts

Book in question.

Once again, the internet did not disappoint with its recommendation of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. I want to say I regret not picking it up earlier. But I know full well my younger self would have loathed the idea of reading a companion book like this one. I’ve always been about authenticity, but I used to take it to the extreme. I wanted to understand what Heidegger and Camus thought. I couldn’t have cared less about Sarah Bakewell’s interpretation of them. Boy how naive I was.

At the Existentialist Café is a beautiful book narrating the history of existentialist ideas. It focuses mainly around Heidegger and Sartre. But it also has generous chapters on Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Aside from them, there’s plenty of references to Husserl, Camus, Jaspers, and Richard Wright. With sprinkles of Kafka, Nietzsche, Koestler, and Dostoevsky. And I’m probably forgetting people. But the book is so, so rich, that it has something for everyone.

Honestly, this book shifted my approach to philosophy. I always thought the most important thing was understanding the ideas themselves. That art and ideas were a one way, closed communication between author and reader, to be had on an empty white room. But that’s wrong. Ideas don’t spring themselves into existence alone. They are a product of the historic and personal context of their conceiver. And shining light on that context is what this book does best. It might aswell be like a Big Brother of philosophers. I always thought these people were recluses that did nothing but write about their ideas. But that couldn’t be further from the truth (in all but Martin Heidegger’s case, lol).

They talked to each other. They read each other. They supported each other and they criticized each other. Friends turned enemies, students turned lovers. Let me tell you, France was a crazy place in the first half of the XX century. Wait, scratch that, when has France not been a crazy place? Kind of makes me want to learn french just to read these guys and their history in their native language.

I feel really fulfilled after finishing this book. It gave me all the motivation I need to sit down and try to knock on the so interesting ideas of these people. Camus was a favorite growing up, but honestly I feel like reading every single thing every single writer mentioned has ever published. Thank you Sarah, for rekindling my love of philosophy.