At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Citation

Bakewell, S. (2017). At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. Vintage. (First published 2016 by Chatto & Windus in the UK and Other Press in the US.)

Chapter Summary

The book is a narrative history rather than a textbook. Its fourteen chapters, with notes and an index, take some 330 pages of main text in the US edition and follow the movement roughly chronologically. The publisher's account starts in Paris around the turn of 1932–33, when Raymond Aron tells Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir over apricot cocktails that phenomenology could make philosophy out of the cocktail in front of them. From there, as Tomasz Sawczuk's review in Explorations (2017) summarises, the book runs from Husserl's phenomenology and the emergence of Heidegger and Jaspers, through the heyday of Sartre and Beauvoir, to the revival of existentialist ideas by American, British and Czechoslovak thinkers from the 1960s onward. Early on, Bakewell explains that she prefers to break the great works into pieces mixed through the narrative, like chocolate chips in a cookie, rather than treat each one whole.

Chapter 1: Sir, What a Horror, Existentialism!

The book opens in the Bec-de-Gaz bar with the apricot-cocktail scene, which shows what drew Sartre to phenomenology: the promise of a philosophy of ordinary lived experience. Early in the book Bakewell also states the two questions she takes the existentialists to pose, what we are and what we should do, and argues that their ideas offer a refreshment of perspective today.

Chapters 2–6: To the Things Themselves; The Magician from Messkirch; The They, the Call; To Crunch Flowering Almonds; I Don't Want to Eat My Manuscripts

These chapters turn to the German sources and the 1930s. The title of Chapter 2 is Husserl's call to return to "the things themselves"; Chapter 3 is named after Heidegger's home town of Messkirch, and Chapter 4 after two of his concepts, "the They" (das Man) and the call of conscience. Sawczuk highlights, from this part of the book, Bakewell's account of Heidegger's rural background and his emphasis on practical engagement before detached reflection, Karl Jaspers's idea of border situations, and her extended critical discussion of Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, in which she asks whether his ideas of resoluteness and authenticity could instead have supported resistance. He also points to her reading of Sartre's Nausea in the light of Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics?" and Levinas's "On Escape", and to her account of the survival of Husserl's late manuscripts as an example of the role of contingency in human affairs.

Chapters 7–12: Occupation, Liberation; Devastation; Life Studies; The Dancing Philosopher; Croisés comme ça; The Eyes of the Least Favoured

As the first two titles indicate, this part of the book covers the war years, the occupation and liberation of France and the devastation that followed, and then the postwar heyday of the movement and its spread. The publisher describes the story as running through the Second World War to the movement's role in postwar liberation movements such as anticolonialism, feminism and gay rights. Among the topics Sawczuk mentions from the middle and later parts of the book are Levinas's memory of a stray dog in a wartime prison camp, Simone Weil's radical sense of obligation, Bakewell's reading of Beauvoir's The Second Sex through Husserl and Sartre's idea of bad faith, Richard Wright's life in Paris and the 1960s reception of The Second Sex, and the influence of existentialism on psychotherapy and anti-psychiatry.

Chapters 13–14: Having Once Tasted Phenomenology; The Imponderable Bloom

The final chapters follow the later careers of the main figures and the afterlife of their ideas. According to Sawczuk, Chapter 14 shows how far the existentialists diverged from one another, and the book ends by arguing that their concern with freedom and human agency matters in an age of neuroscience, biotechnology and surveillance.

Key Concepts

Phenomenology (Chapters 1–6)

• Phenomenology: the method, associated with Husserl, of describing experience as it presents itself, setting aside theories about it; the source of Aron's remark about the cocktail.
• "To the things themselves": Husserl's call to attend to phenomena rather than to accumulated theories.
• The They (das Man): Heidegger's term for the anonymous public self that sets what "one" does.
• Being-in-the-world: Heidegger's idea that we are first of all practically engaged with things and others, before any detached contemplation.

Existentialism (Chapters 1–14)

• Freedom and choice: the existentialist view that human beings make themselves through what they choose.
• Bad faith: Sartre's term for evading one's own freedom by pretending to be fixed or determined.
• Authenticity: owning one's existence and choices rather than living as the They dictates.
• Inhabited philosophy: Iris Murdoch's idea, taken up throughout the book, that philosophy is lived out in a life as well as argued.

Legacy (Chapters 7–14)

• Engagement: the existentialists' involvement in politics and liberation movements after the war.
• Ambiguity: a theme Bakewell associates with Merleau-Ponty, whose embrace of ambiguity she recommends as a lasting lesson.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Ideas explained through lives. Reviewers agree that the combination of biography and philosophy works. The publisher quotes Jane O'Grady (Daily Telegraph) on its lucid and unpatronising exposition interwoven with anecdote, and Julian Baggini (Financial Times) found it both warm and intellectually rigorous, adding that anyone looking for a textbook on phenomenology and existentialism would do well to read it instead.
• Clear on difficult thinkers. Sawczuk singles out the clarity with which Bakewell explains major concepts, including Heidegger's often impenetrable thought; another review quoted by the publisher compares her explanation of phenomenology favourably with French university teaching.
• Critical where it matters. The book does not idealise its subjects. Sawczuk calls the scrutiny of Heidegger and Nazism the most critical part of the book, and he notes how it shows the existentialists sometimes living out their philosophies further than was sensible, as with Sartre's visit to Germany in 1948.
• Wide cast. Beyond Sartre, Beauvoir and Heidegger, the book brings in Husserl, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Levinas, Weil, Murdoch and Richard Wright, so readers see the movement as a network of encounters rather than a list of doctrines.

Limitations

• Not a textbook. As Baggini notes, it is not written as one: arguments are embedded in narrative and the major works are deliberately broken into fragments rather than presented one by one.
• Uneven depth by design. Because the book follows people and events, some philosophers receive extended treatment while others appear mainly through anecdote; students needing a systematic account of a single thinker will need the primary texts and a commentary.
• A personal perspective. Bakewell writes partly as a long-time reader of the existentialists and states her own view of their present relevance; students should separate her judgements from the exposition.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the most accessible way into the twentieth-century part of the course and a good first read before the primary texts. Simon Critchley's Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction is a short argued essay on the whole tradition since Kant and on why it became set against analytic philosophy; it supplies the larger frame that Bakewell's narrative does not attempt. David West's Continental Philosophy: An Introduction is a historical introduction that places each movement, from Kant and Hegel through phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory and poststructuralism, in its intellectual and political context; it is the natural systematic companion.

Among the primary texts on the list, Heidegger's Being and Time (in the revised Stambaugh translation) is the work behind Chapters 3–4, and Bakewell's chapters make a useful orientation before attempting it. Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit belong to the nineteenth-century background; the book introduces Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as forerunners, but its subject is the twentieth century.

How to Use This Book

No previous philosophy is needed. The book suits first-year students, students of literature or history interested in existentialism, and general readers.

• Read it whole, early: as a narrative, it works best read from beginning to end at the start of a course, before the primary texts.
• Focus chapters for a module on phenomenology and Heidegger: Chapters 1–6.
• Focus chapters for Sartre, Beauvoir and postwar existentialism: Chapters 7–12.
• Alongside: keep a list of concepts as they appear (bad faith, authenticity, the They, being-in-the-world) and check each against a short passage of the original; the notes guide readers to the sources Bakewell quotes.
• Use the critical chapters for discussion: the treatment of Heidegger's politics and of Sartre's political commitments makes good seminar material on the relation between a philosopher's life and work.

After finishing, read Critchley or West to place the story in the wider continental tradition.