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4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
Perf intro for existential dabblers. I think they get a thing or two wrong but I DONT REMEMBER WHICH!! :D
Early in this fantastic introduction to existentialism/historical biography of it’s most prominent thinkers, Bakewell mentions that for a while, existentialism had fallen out of fashion with academics. This gave me pause. I struggled to remember if one of our many philosophy professors had covered the existentialists when my bestie and I were in college – I couldn’t remember any of them every mentioning it. I checked with her, because she is my second brain, and she confirmed that I am not senile, and that over the course of our 2-year Liberal Arts degree, the entire existentialist movement had been gracefully glossed over by the faculty. Before I fell in love with Simone de Beauvoir a couple of years ago (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1888684165), all I had ever known about her, Sartre and Camus had been learned pillaging my mother’s library, and not at all from an academic context. But I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Bakewell: while the existentialists were put on the shelf for a while, I find their history and their thinking more relevant than ever, and well-worth exploring – or re-exploring!
“At the Existentialist Café” is one of those fantastic non-fiction book that is so well-written that it proves hard to put down, that explains complicated events and ways of thinking in simple terms yet does not talk down to the reader who may not be a phenomenology expert, and where the obvious love the author has for her subject does not make her forget it's darker facets.
Most people know the names of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Pointy and Martin Heiddeger, but not much about their lives, their ideas and their impact on culture. Sarah Bakewell discovered Sartre’s fiction as a teenager, and has clearly never fallen out of love with existentialism. With wit and compassion, she puts the philosophers in their social and historical context to illustrate how they came to develop their philosophy and how the course of history, especially World War II, influenced their thinking and their work. The biographies are not deep dives, but go a long way to make the work easier to relate to and make sense of.
Bakewell is also quite honest about her subjects’ ambiguities, contradictions and struggles to apply their philosophic principles to their lives as honestly as possible – which obviously opened the doors to may conflicts, fights and serious falling outs between them. But as she points out herself, people are often more interesting than idea, and these people were exceptionally interesting, partially because of their flaws.
As mentioned previously, I think that Bakewell is right to argue that the existentialists’ emphasis of authenticity and freedom are issues that concern us now more than ever, in the hyper-connected yet bizarrely shallow world we live in. But I also understand how mis-understandings and clichés have been factors that put the entire movement out of fashion in the 1990s and early 2000s. I feel like those years were less cynical, less morally confusing and less dangerous than the point we are at now, and that it must have felt like a bummer to think about being in bad faith and being responsible for one’s existence at a point where we were just excited about the new millennium.
To me, this is a fascinating subject, and I find significant overlaps between existentialism and many aspects of Zen Buddhism (both of which can be described as philosophies of action), and also with the ideas behind what one might call "punk philosophy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0w4OeZWWTI).
Reading this made me shift “Nausea”, “The Mandarins” and “The Second Sex” a little closer to the top of my pile, and appreciate the Beauvoir and Camus books I’ve gobbled up over the past few years even more. If you have ever felt hazy about what existentialism is about, or if you are simply interested in the lives of Beauvoir, Sartre and their colleagues, I can’t recommend this book enough.
“At the Existentialist Café” is one of those fantastic non-fiction book that is so well-written that it proves hard to put down, that explains complicated events and ways of thinking in simple terms yet does not talk down to the reader who may not be a phenomenology expert, and where the obvious love the author has for her subject does not make her forget it's darker facets.
Most people know the names of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Pointy and Martin Heiddeger, but not much about their lives, their ideas and their impact on culture. Sarah Bakewell discovered Sartre’s fiction as a teenager, and has clearly never fallen out of love with existentialism. With wit and compassion, she puts the philosophers in their social and historical context to illustrate how they came to develop their philosophy and how the course of history, especially World War II, influenced their thinking and their work. The biographies are not deep dives, but go a long way to make the work easier to relate to and make sense of.
Bakewell is also quite honest about her subjects’ ambiguities, contradictions and struggles to apply their philosophic principles to their lives as honestly as possible – which obviously opened the doors to may conflicts, fights and serious falling outs between them. But as she points out herself, people are often more interesting than idea, and these people were exceptionally interesting, partially because of their flaws.
As mentioned previously, I think that Bakewell is right to argue that the existentialists’ emphasis of authenticity and freedom are issues that concern us now more than ever, in the hyper-connected yet bizarrely shallow world we live in. But I also understand how mis-understandings and clichés have been factors that put the entire movement out of fashion in the 1990s and early 2000s. I feel like those years were less cynical, less morally confusing and less dangerous than the point we are at now, and that it must have felt like a bummer to think about being in bad faith and being responsible for one’s existence at a point where we were just excited about the new millennium.
To me, this is a fascinating subject, and I find significant overlaps between existentialism and many aspects of Zen Buddhism (both of which can be described as philosophies of action), and also with the ideas behind what one might call "punk philosophy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0w4OeZWWTI).
Reading this made me shift “Nausea”, “The Mandarins” and “The Second Sex” a little closer to the top of my pile, and appreciate the Beauvoir and Camus books I’ve gobbled up over the past few years even more. If you have ever felt hazy about what existentialism is about, or if you are simply interested in the lives of Beauvoir, Sartre and their colleagues, I can’t recommend this book enough.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Çok beğendim. Okuması müthiş zevkli bir kitap ; espritüel, objelerle, fikirlerle mesafesini çok iyi ayarlayan bir yazar. En beğeniyle okuduğum felsefe kitaplarından biri. Kimi kısımları copy/paste olmuş ve hızlı geçilmiş, özellikle Anglo-Sakson tarafları, yine de totalde çok başarılı yazılmış bir kitap.
loved this so, so much. and now I have so much de Beauvior and other awesome stuff to add to my to-read list.
challenging
informative
inspiring
relaxing
What a read! Was difficult at first and kind of tiring to read in long stretches, this is the kind of book one should read in increments, taking time to read and understand. A mix of biography and philosophy, maybe it is best to say that it's a book about people and their ideas, it's definitely interesting.
Regarding the last chapter, I would now love her analysis of generative AI and existentialism as technology has come far since this book has been published.
Regarding the last chapter, I would now love her analysis of generative AI and existentialism as technology has come far since this book has been published.
Numa palavra, brilhante. É com uma enorme admiração por Bakewell que chego ao final da leitura de "At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails" (2016), plenamente satisfeito com o conhecimento e experiência proporcionados. Sarah Bakewell fala a partir de um enorme lastro de conhecimento sobre a corrente do existencialismo, assim como das histórias de vida dos seus autores mais reconhecidos: Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Brentano, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Sartre e Beauvoir. Bakewell usa as histórias dos filósofos para construir uma narrativa ligeiramente romanceada — usando como personagens centrais: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre e Beauvoir —, apresentando todo o conhecimento fora do reino da abstração e focado nas histórias, relações, ações e decisões ao longo do século XX. Desta forma, a leitura permite-nos não só compreender os objetivos, alcance e limitações da corrente, como o contexto das suas origens e desenvolvimento. Ao chegar ao final, sentimos conhecer de perto não só aquelas pessoas e o seu tempo, mas acima de tudo as razões que suportaram as suas ideias.
É provável que muito do meu carinho por este livro emane do facto de sentir, num plano mais pessoal do que científico, uma enorme proximidade com as ideias do existencialismo, e ter sempre sentido grande interesse pelos vários proponentes do mesmo. Julgo que isso se deve ao facto da corrente se alicerçar na esfera de interesses da psicologia. Na vontade de estudar e compreender o que somos, como somos e porque somos. Contudo, e apesar desse foco, a corrente apresenta o problema do método que usa para chegar ao conhecimento que diverge totalmente da psicologia, baseando-se na mera análise subjetiva da realidade. Se a análise do comportamento humano é em si mesmo algo já bastante complexo pela impossibilidade de nos colocarmos do "lado de fora", limitar essa análise à mera auto-análise como fez Freud, torna tudo ainda mais irrelevante, naturalmente de um ponto de vista científico.
Ainda assim, não posso deixar de recomendar tremendamente a leitura, porque se aprende imenso sobre Heidegger, o confronto entre as suas ideias e a defesa do nazismo, sobre Sartre, e o confronto entre a integridade das ideias e a dura realidade da biologia, sobre Beauvoir, Ponty, e todos os demais do grupo que passou por Paris, sobre o pensamento da época da segunda guerra, o pós-guerra e depois os intensos anos 1960. É toda uma viagem por entre cabeças cheias de ideias, debatendo-se consigo e com o mundo, num movimento frenético de vontade de chegar a conhecer, saber, dominar o mundo das ideias.
Talvez aquilo que mais me desiludiu foi o próprio Sartre, pois no caso de Heidegger já não esperava muito, ainda que Bakewell faça um excelente tratamento da persona do alemão. O grande mantra de Sartre, de que “A Existência precede a Essência” é de uma enorme fragilidade, tanto que me vi a mim mesmo, a chocar de frente, pois tinha concordado em parte com ele, aquando da leitura sobre a logoterapia de Viktor E. Frankl, quando este diz que a vida tem sempre um sentido, e que nós somos sempre livres de comandar o sentido que lhe oferecemos. Ora isto é apenas verdade em parte, e todos o devíamos saber, pois já Aristóteles tinha demonstrado que temos continuamente de abrir exceções morais de particularização aos postulados da ética. As condições da nossa essência determinam as escolhas da nossa existência, é assim com a sexualidade, assim como é assim com os genes passados dos nossos pais, e ainda pelos ambientes e pessoas que nos formaram. Podemos racionalizar, mas não podemos virar-nos do avesso, não somos uma coisa, somos seres humanos, complexidade feita de corpo e mente em diálogo permanente. No final, sigo Beauvoir e Camus, pois se tenho alguma certeza sobre o que somos, é de que somos feitos da capacidade de ser em cada momento o que conseguirmos ser, e tal acarreta por vezes contradições que não nos tornam menos dignos, antes pelo contrário, nos tornam mais humanos.
Publicado no Virtual Illusion:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com/2021/09/na-esplanada-do-existencialismo.html
É provável que muito do meu carinho por este livro emane do facto de sentir, num plano mais pessoal do que científico, uma enorme proximidade com as ideias do existencialismo, e ter sempre sentido grande interesse pelos vários proponentes do mesmo. Julgo que isso se deve ao facto da corrente se alicerçar na esfera de interesses da psicologia. Na vontade de estudar e compreender o que somos, como somos e porque somos. Contudo, e apesar desse foco, a corrente apresenta o problema do método que usa para chegar ao conhecimento que diverge totalmente da psicologia, baseando-se na mera análise subjetiva da realidade. Se a análise do comportamento humano é em si mesmo algo já bastante complexo pela impossibilidade de nos colocarmos do "lado de fora", limitar essa análise à mera auto-análise como fez Freud, torna tudo ainda mais irrelevante, naturalmente de um ponto de vista científico.
Ainda assim, não posso deixar de recomendar tremendamente a leitura, porque se aprende imenso sobre Heidegger, o confronto entre as suas ideias e a defesa do nazismo, sobre Sartre, e o confronto entre a integridade das ideias e a dura realidade da biologia, sobre Beauvoir, Ponty, e todos os demais do grupo que passou por Paris, sobre o pensamento da época da segunda guerra, o pós-guerra e depois os intensos anos 1960. É toda uma viagem por entre cabeças cheias de ideias, debatendo-se consigo e com o mundo, num movimento frenético de vontade de chegar a conhecer, saber, dominar o mundo das ideias.
Talvez aquilo que mais me desiludiu foi o próprio Sartre, pois no caso de Heidegger já não esperava muito, ainda que Bakewell faça um excelente tratamento da persona do alemão. O grande mantra de Sartre, de que “A Existência precede a Essência” é de uma enorme fragilidade, tanto que me vi a mim mesmo, a chocar de frente, pois tinha concordado em parte com ele, aquando da leitura sobre a logoterapia de Viktor E. Frankl, quando este diz que a vida tem sempre um sentido, e que nós somos sempre livres de comandar o sentido que lhe oferecemos. Ora isto é apenas verdade em parte, e todos o devíamos saber, pois já Aristóteles tinha demonstrado que temos continuamente de abrir exceções morais de particularização aos postulados da ética. As condições da nossa essência determinam as escolhas da nossa existência, é assim com a sexualidade, assim como é assim com os genes passados dos nossos pais, e ainda pelos ambientes e pessoas que nos formaram. Podemos racionalizar, mas não podemos virar-nos do avesso, não somos uma coisa, somos seres humanos, complexidade feita de corpo e mente em diálogo permanente. No final, sigo Beauvoir e Camus, pois se tenho alguma certeza sobre o que somos, é de que somos feitos da capacidade de ser em cada momento o que conseguirmos ser, e tal acarreta por vezes contradições que não nos tornam menos dignos, antes pelo contrário, nos tornam mais humanos.
Publicado no Virtual Illusion:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com/2021/09/na-esplanada-do-existencialismo.html
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
By the end of the book, I could say that I agree with Sarah Bakewell's conclusion. At first, I did not really think that the details of a philosopher's personality or biography were important. It was their ideas that matter. Fast forward to the last chapter of this book, I have changed my view which similarly holds by the author. Ideas are interesting, but people are even more so.
My first flirt with the taste of existentialism was several years ago when I read the first book written by [a:Albert Camus|957894|Albert Camus|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1506091612p2/957894.jpg], [b:The Outsider|17213767|The Outsider|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1357519386l/17213767._SY75_.jpg|3324344]. This work from Camus tells the story of Meursault who was charged for the murder of an Arab in French Algeria, to which he defended himself by saying, "It was the sun. I killed him because of the sun." His answer did not make much sense to the people who attended the hearings, much less to the judge. However as the trials proceeded, he's charged further not because of this murder, but more because he hasn't shown any emotion during his mother's funeral. Along in his other works, [b:The Myth of Sisyphus|91950|The Myth of Sisyphus|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347654509l/91950._SY75_.jpg|48339830] and a play [b:Caligula|15698|Caligula|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1341261238l/15698._SY75_.jpg|3139665], he brought similar theme which he termed as his three absurds since they all dealt with the meaninglessness or absurdity of human existence. I got thrilled by Camus' notion of absurdity which helps to explain some questions that I have towards life itself.
Reading this book, it was as though I was experiencing myself sitting at the same table in a cafe in Paris discussing the meaning behind human existence and what does it mean to exist. As I sat back and observed them, it began to dawn on me why, for example, Sartre developed a different form of existentialism from Camus. Sartre's thought of freedom and being was heavily influenced by the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. Meanwhile, Camus' quest began by reading the earlier version of existentialism written by Søren Kierkegaard.
'At the Existentialist Cafe' is an interesting footnote to understand the thoughts of existentialist thinkers from the 20th century such as [a:Jean-Paul Sartre|1466|Jean-Paul Sartre|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1475567078p2/1466.jpg], [a:Simone de Beauvoir|5548|Simone de Beauvoir|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1555042345p2/5548.jpg], [a:Albert Camus|957894|Albert Camus|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1506091612p2/957894.jpg], [a:Maurice Merleau-Ponty|118600|Maurice Merleau-Ponty|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1226812798p2/118600.jpg], [a:Martin Heidegger|6191|Martin Heidegger|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1217243699p2/6191.jpg], and many others. It digs heavily their personal circumstances, their relationships with each other, as well as about the period in which they lived. Like what Hippolyte Taine has summed up about the three factors which influence our lives: 'la race, le milieu, le moment', three factors which eventually heavily affected our philosophers in this book. It's interesting to see how they developed their ideas differently, falling in, then falling out, and coming into terms with mutual respect upon their differences in political and ethical views on numerous subjects.
If there's anything left out in this book, I think it's more about the precursors to the 20th century existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky who came from the century before that. Since there are many sources from this book which came from the voluminous autobiography written by Simone de Beauvoir, I began to understand why that part has been left out and why this book is focused solely on the contemporary existentialism. I think the author in this sense wants to imply more about how this movement called existentialism impacted the lives of people from the 20th century and in what way their legacies are still relevant to our lives in the 21st century.
To sum up, existentialist ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves heavily into the modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all. People, at least in some parts of the world, discuss about anxiety, dishonesty, and fear of commitment. They worry about being in bad faith, although this term is rarely used. And the overwhelming force of consumerism and rapid development in technology has been trying to control us more than ever before, posing us with too many choices to make in life and the ethical concerns in that sense.
My first flirt with the taste of existentialism was several years ago when I read the first book written by [a:Albert Camus|957894|Albert Camus|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1506091612p2/957894.jpg], [b:The Outsider|17213767|The Outsider|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1357519386l/17213767._SY75_.jpg|3324344]. This work from Camus tells the story of Meursault who was charged for the murder of an Arab in French Algeria, to which he defended himself by saying, "It was the sun. I killed him because of the sun." His answer did not make much sense to the people who attended the hearings, much less to the judge. However as the trials proceeded, he's charged further not because of this murder, but more because he hasn't shown any emotion during his mother's funeral. Along in his other works, [b:The Myth of Sisyphus|91950|The Myth of Sisyphus|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347654509l/91950._SY75_.jpg|48339830] and a play [b:Caligula|15698|Caligula|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1341261238l/15698._SY75_.jpg|3139665], he brought similar theme which he termed as his three absurds since they all dealt with the meaninglessness or absurdity of human existence. I got thrilled by Camus' notion of absurdity which helps to explain some questions that I have towards life itself.
Reading this book, it was as though I was experiencing myself sitting at the same table in a cafe in Paris discussing the meaning behind human existence and what does it mean to exist. As I sat back and observed them, it began to dawn on me why, for example, Sartre developed a different form of existentialism from Camus. Sartre's thought of freedom and being was heavily influenced by the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. Meanwhile, Camus' quest began by reading the earlier version of existentialism written by Søren Kierkegaard.
'At the Existentialist Cafe' is an interesting footnote to understand the thoughts of existentialist thinkers from the 20th century such as [a:Jean-Paul Sartre|1466|Jean-Paul Sartre|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1475567078p2/1466.jpg], [a:Simone de Beauvoir|5548|Simone de Beauvoir|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1555042345p2/5548.jpg], [a:Albert Camus|957894|Albert Camus|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1506091612p2/957894.jpg], [a:Maurice Merleau-Ponty|118600|Maurice Merleau-Ponty|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1226812798p2/118600.jpg], [a:Martin Heidegger|6191|Martin Heidegger|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1217243699p2/6191.jpg], and many others. It digs heavily their personal circumstances, their relationships with each other, as well as about the period in which they lived. Like what Hippolyte Taine has summed up about the three factors which influence our lives: 'la race, le milieu, le moment', three factors which eventually heavily affected our philosophers in this book. It's interesting to see how they developed their ideas differently, falling in, then falling out, and coming into terms with mutual respect upon their differences in political and ethical views on numerous subjects.
If there's anything left out in this book, I think it's more about the precursors to the 20th century existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky who came from the century before that. Since there are many sources from this book which came from the voluminous autobiography written by Simone de Beauvoir, I began to understand why that part has been left out and why this book is focused solely on the contemporary existentialism. I think the author in this sense wants to imply more about how this movement called existentialism impacted the lives of people from the 20th century and in what way their legacies are still relevant to our lives in the 21st century.
To sum up, existentialist ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves heavily into the modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all. People, at least in some parts of the world, discuss about anxiety, dishonesty, and fear of commitment. They worry about being in bad faith, although this term is rarely used. And the overwhelming force of consumerism and rapid development in technology has been trying to control us more than ever before, posing us with too many choices to make in life and the ethical concerns in that sense.
informative
lighthearted
medium-paced