At the Existentialist Café

    An excellent book that ignited my appreciation for biographical works. Bakewell was able to give an enthralling presentation of the philosophies and lives of many thinkers. History has never been a subject my brain is willing to engage with, yet through this book I felt connected with so many lives that no longer walk this earth. While they had ceased to experience the bloom of life, the world around them had come to life in my mind, through their eyes and through the words of Sarah Bakewell.    Bakewell was not afraid of using the first personal pronoun and relating her own thoughts and experiences. Impressively, this did not impede the light of “neutrality” shone on the biographees. Everything was presented such that you are invited to judge for yourself whatever opinions they held. You also leave the book with a dozens more on your to-read list.    Unfortunately I do not find the same impartiality with regard to the presentation of Communism in this otherwise exceptional book. Meticulously placed quotation marks, superficial degradation of Marxism as a mere “ideology”, portrayal of the biographees' communist involvement as simple mistakes, etc. Maybe this is an invariable crust imposed on the author by a modern neoliberal view of the world, one that we will dig through one day as the people under her pen have. 

In conclusion:

‘Mais enfin, qu'est-ce que l'existentialisme?' (I'm still not sure)

Heidegger — what a dick!

Sartre — too cool for everything

Simone de Beauvoir — all kinds of awesome

Husserl — the OG

Marleau-Ponty — an emotionally stable male philosopher (!!!)

Camus - my problematic fave - did not get as much book space as I hoped for. There were some weird shifts in chronology and a couple of repetitions that made the whole thing feel like more of a collection of essays than a coherent book. Really great insights into the mentality of the French immediately pre- and post-WW2 though.

This is the 80th book I've read this year and it's probably the best. I was a philosophy major in college, so I was familiar with many of the “characters” in the book as well as the concepts, but never found these ideas or people so appealing as in Bakewell's presentation. Outstanding work. (Also, I listened to the audio version of this while dipping into the printed text, and the narrator is excellent.)

Western Thought was the philosophy class I took during my senior year of high school. It was a life-changing class for me. We read philosophy starting with Plato and Aristotle, and we discussed what we read. We discussed and discussed and discussed. You couldn't stop thinking about the readings and the discussion. It was that good.

We spent a few weeks on Existentialism, but I always wanted to know more. This book is my first real venture into Existentialism since high school and college. It's completely readable; lots of times I felt like the author was taking me aside for a few minutes and talking straight to me. It's about philosophy, of course, but it also about the lives of the people who mulled over, who crystallized the philosophy. You have heard all the names, I bet, but this author shares so many anecdotes, letters, gossip, teasers that I wondered over and over where she got her information.

I've never been big on reading philosophy. I've not read any Camus or Satre and only know the handful of Neitzche quotes every emo teenager learns. As far as I know, existentialists wear all black with a penchant for turtleneck and smoking Gauloises.

Despite that I found the book incredibly interesting. When the current philosophical craze tends to Hyyge or the teachings of Marie Kondo, the idea of Sartre and de Beauvoir sitting in Paris cafes “loudly slaughtering the sacred cows of philosophy, literature and bourgeois behaviour to anyone who venture into their ambit” is compelling.

This was a time where women swooned at a sold-out public talk by Sartre at the perfectly named Club Maintenant. Where Franciscan monks orchestrated the smuggling of philosophical papers with a cadre of Benedictine nuns. Ideas held power and thoughtful discourse was weighted with the realities of World War 2.

The book isn't written with the haughty tone of a Philosophy major holding forth on his intellectual heroes but more a clear-eyed examination from an ardent fan. Imminently readable even if, like me, you don't know your Hegel from your Heidegger.