Review: At the Existentialist Café

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had been going through a streak of existentialist books for the past year, and I chose this book to cap it - it looked like it would be a good overview of the philosophy and history of existentialism, and serve as a fine conclusion. Although the book was good, it was a little disappointing.

I think the book fell short on two regards: First, I think I expected a more dramatized take on the lives of the existentialists - that is, still real, but with more life. Something like "The Agony and The Ecstasy" or "The Origin" by Irving Stone - biographical, but still mesmerizing. Instead, it's a dry accounting of the philosopher's lives and histories.

Second, I didn't like much the choice of which "characters" to focus on, Heidegger and Sartre. I was expecting the book to focus on Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus - I mean, they (and only they) are right there on the cover! So the focus on Heidegger was a little puzzling. I understand that he preceded the others, and was incredibly influential at the time, but he is not exactly an existentialist like the others, he is primarily a phenomenologist. I must also admit that I dislike his philosophy, specially the later stuff with a focus on rustic living and luddism. As the book progresses, it does start giving some focus to the other characters, although it feels more superficial, never delving too deeply into what made them tick. De Beauvoir got some attention, but Camus was definitely a secondary character in this book. Towards the end, the sequence of events and the cast of characters become a sprawling mess, as the author rushes to include every other existential philosopher into the book.

The explanations of the philosophy themselves also felt underwhelming. The part in which the books talks about the early existentialists and phenomenologists makes it sound like they were just trying to philosophize about things that feel more like behavioral psychology, sociology, or even psychiatry - like anxiety and depression. It also makes it sound like most of the time, philosophy is just an exercise in ignoring science. Philosophy questions "being", but not minds, brains, consciousness. The book spent a lot of time talking about "being"; it spent a lot less time dealing with the ethics and humanism of existentialism.

I was a bit annoyed with the Anglo-American, the right-leaning attitude of the author. It comes across when she talks about communism, and the struggles of existentialists in embracing and disavowing communism; she readily dismisses communism as an *obviously* wrong ideology, without ever explaining why. At a late point in the book, she mentions how the belligerent and bellic attitude of a communist country impugns communism, but never explains why when a capitalist country does the same, it doesn't impugn capitalism… But then again, it seemed that even the existentialist philosophers had a problem grasping the concept that authoritarian governments are bad no matter what form of economic system they pretends to spouse.

One more aside about existentialism, not really about this book: When reading the existentialists ideas about being, I kept thinking, "What about animals?". Not how existentialism applies to animals, but what do is it learn from animal - from modes of being that are not human, but are not also as simple as that of a tree. Some do think and have feelings, and have societies. But no existentialist seem to pay much attention to that - they don’t seem to learn anything from other minds, they just take the human adult brain fully formed and call that a mind, everything else is irrelevant. They ignore that humans are just an instance of animals. If their theories don’t generalize, then how meaningful can they be? How are they more than navel gazing and self aggrandizement?

Despite these disappointments with the book, it was still interesting, and covered a lot of ground, ideas, and lives. It starts with a nice review of existentialism and a brief overview of the lives of Sartre and de Beauvoir (before diving into phenomenology, existentialism's precursor). It was actually interesting, despite the long list of misgivings listed above.

One clear takeaway from the book for me is that Existentialism is perfectly suited to the 2020s - with the pandemic, war breaking out in eastern Europe, rise of white-nationalism and fascism, it feels like we are right back to the 1920s-1930s, and the philosophy of freedom, responsibility and social engagement advocated by existentialism is increasingly urgent.

It also cemented my opinion that the best philosophers of the century (and top 5 ever) were definitely de Beauvoir and Camus, because they were the ones whose philosophy really focused on ethics, on *how* to lead a meaningful life.

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