At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

I found re-reading this book as delightful and engaging as it was on my first encounter with it.

Sarah Bakewell writes with a charming lightness of touch, and has the happy knack of conveying interesting and often complex ideas with a charming simplicity and clarity. Her book is, essentially, a potted history of existentialist thought with some illuminating biographies of many of the leading proponents. Her principal focus is on Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, though it extends to some of their contacts and counterparts, with interesting sections about fellow philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 

Bakewell recounts how Sartre and de Beauvoir were drinking in the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris in early 1933 with Raymond Aron, a school friend of de Beauvoir. He had recently returned from Berlin where he had been studying phenomenology, a new branch of philosophy of which the leading proponent was Husserl. Sartre was so impressed by what Aron told them that they immediately decided that they had to go to Berlin and discover more for themselves. This was, of course, an unpropitious time to be going to Berlin, with Hitler’s National Socialist party have just been ‘jobbed into power’. This was to prove more than a little significant in the life of Martin Heidegger, who would become one of the leading existentialists of his time.

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At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell is available to buy on Amazon.