At The Existentialist Café, by Sarah Bakewell
Five more books every PPE student should read, book two.
This is the second in a five-part series. Read the first installment here, and the next in the series here.
Within most students’ experiences of PPE, the discipline of philosophy normally tackles questions of imposing and immense scale like “what is the most just distribution of resources across society?”, “how can we design a morally sound political system?”, “what does it mean to live a good life?”. However, in her book At The Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell challenges this exclusively grandiose application of philosophical thinking by showcasing a completely different scope of investigation. Through an exploration of the lives and ideas of the most important phenomenological and existentialist thinkers of the 20th century, Bakewell shows how methods of philosophical inquiry can and should be applied equally to moments as simple as walking past a stranger in a park, or holding an apricot cocktail in your hand.
In order to describe and traverse one of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century, Bakewell ties together the lives and works of a diverse and remarkable cast of characters. After mentioning the proto-existentialists like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky, this book traces how the idiosyncratic philosophical innovations of Edmund Husserl gave birth to an entire generation of innovative thinkers including Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Not simply content with explaining the complex thought of these well-known philosophers of existence, Bakewell also includes those with existentialist roots who broke with the tradition like Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, and shines a spotlight on overlooked yet central thinkers and creatives such as the Christian philosopher Gabriel Marcel and the African American author Richard Wright.
Existentialism and phenomenology are notoriously complicated and confusing philosophies, in large part due to their obscure and convoluted terminology. However, Bakewell manages to present the key ideas and concepts of these philosophical systems in a digestible way without sacrificing nuance or complexity. She makes sense of monstrosities like “thrown-being-for-itself-in-itself-in-the-world” through examples, analogies, and stories from the lives of these unique thinkers which are familiar and relatable. By interweaving complex philosophy into the biographical narrative of these remarkable men and women, she demonstrates that at the heart of all existentialist thought is a call to live authentically and passionately as inextricably connected subjects, creating meaning by actively experiencing the world and exercising our radical freedom.
Whilst Bakewell’s account refutes the unwarranted stereotype of existentialism as a depressing hyper-individualist philosophy, it does not shy away from many of the controversies that surrounded and pervaded the very public lives of these super-star academics. She includes stories of tumultuous affairs, feuds between friends, and questionable political allegiances which both highlight blind-spots and weaknesses in their theories and ways of living, yet at the same time humanise those who appear to us now merely as names on a dusty page. This technique of combining philosophical treatise with biography continues the genre-blending tradition of those about whom she writes, making for an incredibly engaging and inspiring account of the philosophy of everyday existence that will alter PPE students’ conceptions of the discipline.
Buy your own copy of At the Existentialist Cafe from Penguin Books, or borrow it from Brisbane City Council Library here.
This is the second in a five-part series. Read the first installment here, and the next in the series here.
Joseph Christensen is a fourth-year PPE student at UQ, and has read far too many books. This is his first article for Statecraft.
Thanks to Tom Watson and Daniel Quill for reviewing this article.