At the Existentialist Café

Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café blends intellectual history, biography, and personal reflection to tell the story of existentialism, a philosophy centered on individual existence, freedom, and responsibility, and phenomenology, a method of describing lived experience as it appears to consciousness. Bakewell traces these movements from their origins in a Paris bar in the early 1930s through their post-war popularity, political entanglements, and lasting cultural influence.

The book opens near the turn of 1932–33 in the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris, where Simone de Beauvoir and her partner Jean-Paul Sartre listened as their friend Raymond Aron described phenomenology, which he had discovered while studying in Berlin. Aron told Sartre that phenomenology allowed one to make philosophy out of the very cocktail in front of them. Sartre rushed to a bookshop, bought a primer by the young Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and tore it open while walking. He traveled to Berlin the following year and returned with a new blend: German phenomenological methods, ideas from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and his own literary sensibility. This became modern existentialism, built on Sartre's core principle that "existence precedes essence": Human beings have no predefined nature but create themselves through choices and actions.

Bakewell steps back to explain phenomenology's roots. Its founder, Edmund Husserl, a philosopher of Moravian Jewish origin, held the philosophy chair at the University of Freiburg from 1916. His method was deceptively simple: set aside assumptions, a process he called the epoché (suspension of judgment), and describe phenomena as they present themselves to experience. Central to his work was intentionality, borrowed from his teacher Franz Brentano: the idea that consciousness is always directed toward something, always reaching outward.

Husserl's most brilliant student, Martin Heidegger, soon challenged the master. In his 1927 masterwork Being and Time, Heidegger argues that philosophers have forgotten the most fundamental question: What does it mean for something to be? He uses the term "Dasein" (literally "there-being") instead of "human being" and analyzes everyday existence as "Being-in-the-world," characterized by practical involvement rather than detached contemplation. Husserl read the book, realized it was partly directed against him, and their relationship collapsed.

The political catastrophe of the 1930s shaped existentialism. In April 1933, Heidegger accepted the rectorship of Freiburg University, joined the Nazi Party, and delivered pro-Nazi speeches. His private notebooks, published in 2014, confirmed anti-Semitic convictions. Husserl lost his emeritus status under the new racial laws. Karl Jaspers, a philosopher whose wife Gertrud was Jewish, watched in dismay as both came under threat. Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's former student and lover, fled Germany after a brief arrest. In his final years, Husserl wrote The Crisis of the European Sciences, calling for a "heroism of reason" to resist irrationalism. He died in April 1938; Heidegger did not attend the funeral.

Sartre, meanwhile, developed his own philosophy. His 1938 novel Nausea depicts the protagonist Antoine Roquentin experiencing revulsion at the sheer contingency of existence, finding relief only in a jazz song. Beauvoir read his drafts and pushed him to improve them. Their relationship, formed in 1929 through the École normale supérieure circle, rested on a contract of honesty and non-exclusivity. For 50 years, they met almost daily to write side by side.

As war approached, a Belgian Franciscan monk named Herman Van Breda rescued Husserl's enormous archive from Freiburg and transported it to Louvain in Belgium, where it survived the war. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist and friend of Beauvoir, visited the archive in 1939 and discovered Husserl's unpublished writings on embodiment and the "life-world," the everyday world as directly experienced before abstraction. These writings profoundly shaped his own philosophy.

The war scattered the existentialists. Sartre was captured, read Being and Time in a POW camp, escaped, and returned to Paris to join the Resistance. Albert Camus, a French-Algerian journalist born into poverty in 1913, published The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, developing his philosophy of the "absurd": Life's fundamental meaninglessness must be confronted rather than evaded. Sartre disagreed, arguing that consciousness gives life meaning through intentionality.

Sartre published Being and Nothingness in 1943, dividing being into the "for-itself" (free human consciousness) and the "in-itself" (everything else). Freedom is inescapable but terrifying, and people flee it through "bad faith," pretending to be defined by their roles. His play The Flies retells the Orestes myth as a parable of resistance against tyranny. After the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, existentialism exploded into public life. Sartre's packed October 1945 lecture ended in near-riot. He, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty launched the journal Les Temps modernes, calling for politically committed literature, and an existentialist subculture of jazz clubs and bohemian fashion flourished in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

In post-war Germany, Heidegger's philosophy underwent a "turn" (Kehre) toward receptivity and poetic dwelling. He wrote of modern technology as "machination" that forces the earth to surrender resources, and described art as "letting-be" that allows things to reveal themselves. Former associates sought explanations for his Nazism; Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher and former student, visited in 1947 and was rebuffed. When Sartre and Heidegger met in 1953, their conversation failed, and Sartre thereafter called Heidegger "the Old Man of the Mountain."

Beauvoir produced her masterwork The Second Sex in 1949, arguing that women are made, not born. Drawing on the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's master-slave dialectic, which models selfhood through relations of domination, she shows how conditioning teaches women to view themselves through men's eyes rather than asserting their own subjectivity. The book transformed lives worldwide. Sartre pursued biographical studies of writers like Jean Genet and Gustave Flaubert, seeking decisive moments of freedom in their lives.

Merleau-Ponty developed what Bakewell considers the most revolutionary phenomenological vision. In The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), he argues that experience comes through our moving, sensing bodies, shaped by expectations learned in childhood. He describes consciousness not as Sartre's "nothingness" but as a "fold" in the world, a temporary crumpling in the fabric of existence.

The Cold War split the existentialists. Camus published The Rebel in 1951, arguing that true rebellion sets limits on tyranny. Sartre responded with a devastating attack, ending their friendship. Merleau-Ponty lost faith in Communism and broke with Sartre over the journal. Through the 1950s and 1960s, existentialism's influence spread into anti-colonial struggles, feminism, and the counterculture. Sartre campaigned for Algerian independence amid death threats and wrote a foreword for Frantz Fanon's anti-colonial work The Wretched of the Earth. In Czechoslovakia, the phenomenologist Jan Patočka held underground seminars, signed the dissident Charter 77, and died in 1977 after prolonged police interrogation. Bakewell traces a line of anti-dogmatic refusal from Husserl through Patočka to the Czech dissident Václav Havel and the 1989 revolution.

The book's final chapters trace the departures. Boris Vian, a jazz musician, novelist, and fixture of the Saint-Germain scene, died at 39 in 1959. Camus was killed in a car crash in 1960, and Merleau-Ponty died suddenly in 1961. Heidegger died in 1976, having never condemned Nazism. Sartre's last years brought blindness, strokes, and the controversial influence of his young assistant Benny Lévy; he died on 15 April 1980, and some 50,000 people attended his funeral. Beauvoir died on 14 April 1986 and was buried beside Sartre in Montparnasse cemetery.

Bakewell closes by evaluating the existentialists' legacy. She finds Heidegger's philosophy exhilarating but uninhabitable, lacking an ethical center. She expresses unexpected admiration for Sartre's energy, generosity, and willingness to change his mind. She names Merleau-Ponty her intellectual hero and celebrates Beauvoir as one of the century's greatest intellectual chroniclers. The existentialists asked the questions about freedom and being that people constantly try to forget, and their vision of the "imponderable bloom" of lived experience, a phrase Bakewell borrows from E. M. Forster, remains vital.