— Philosophy —
At the Existentialist Café
Sarah Bakewell
— 2016 —
“
In the early 1930s, at a bar in Paris, Raymond Aron told Jean-Paul Sartre that phenomenology would let him make philosophy out of the apricot cocktail in front of him.
Decide its fate
⚖The case for it
Three friends over apricot cocktails in 1933, and Aron points at his glass and tells Sartre you can make philosophy out of that. Bakewell builds the movement out from there, one chapter per thinker, and readers who could not get through Sartre or Heidegger directly say they came away with a real grasp anyway. The rescue of Husserl’s manuscripts from Nazi Germany reads as an actual thriller. She keeps the failures in rather than around them, Heidegger’s Nazism especially. The Sartre and Camus split on freedom is the clearest line running through it.
— the honest librarian
✕The case against
The cast is large, Husserl and Heidegger and Jaspers and Merleau-Ponty alongside the famous three, and no one gets sustained depth. Readers finish knowing the biographies well and still feel unequipped to open Being and Nothingness, which is the specific disappointment they name. The book leans on personality where some wanted the arguments walked through step by step. Bakewell’s sympathy for Sartre strikes a few as generous given his record, especially measured against her Camus. And readers wanted Beauvoir’s own philosophy rather than Beauvoir mostly in relation to Sartre.
— the honest librarian
9h
honest hours
13
sittings
beyond the verdict
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