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4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
challenging
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
If you have an interest in philosophy, this is essential reading
The three star rating is purely because I was utterly unacquainted with phenomenology before reading this book, so the brief explanations given here were not nearly enough for me to understand. Unfortunately, Bakewell devotes a lot of time to Husserl, Heidegger, and other phenomenologists. Their biographical sections I obviously was able to understand, but their philosophical sections were pretty abstract. Perhaps I will return to this, many years later, after studying them more.
On the other hand, everything related to Sartre, Beauvoir, and Existentialism was fascinating. It deepened my knowledge on the philosophy, and their lives were absolutely fascinating. Everybody's biographical sections were, in fact. I felt like I feel like I got to know them on a personal level, and the section that recounted all of their deaths made me really sad. It felt like I had lost friends, even though I had only known about them all for 200 pages at that point.
Bakewell is great at recounting lives and biographies, but less so at philosophies. I know its a hard task to undertake, but I genuinely wouldn't have minded reading an extra few hundred pages if more time was devoted to making the philosophy a bit clearer.
If you are already familiar with philosophy, then give this book a go, its great. If you are like me, then prepare to be a little lost for some of the time. Its still worth a read, though. I'll definitely end up revisiting this at some point.
On the other hand, everything related to Sartre, Beauvoir, and Existentialism was fascinating. It deepened my knowledge on the philosophy, and their lives were absolutely fascinating. Everybody's biographical sections were, in fact. I felt like I feel like I got to know them on a personal level, and the section that recounted all of their deaths made me really sad. It felt like I had lost friends, even though I had only known about them all for 200 pages at that point.
Bakewell is great at recounting lives and biographies, but less so at philosophies. I know its a hard task to undertake, but I genuinely wouldn't have minded reading an extra few hundred pages if more time was devoted to making the philosophy a bit clearer.
If you are already familiar with philosophy, then give this book a go, its great. If you are like me, then prepare to be a little lost for some of the time. Its still worth a read, though. I'll definitely end up revisiting this at some point.
This was lovely. A readable walkthrough of some major philosophic movements of the 20th century that manages to walk a good line between inaccessible and surface-level.
Philosophy can often be inaccessible. Philosophers write long, rambling texts that amount to a life’s work and which contain specialised vocabulary that only they and a few elite readers can understand. Second-hand accounts of these works are often over-simplified and can be very dry.
Sarah Bakewell’s approach is to include biographical elements, not only of the philosophers but also of herself, as she revisits books she read as a student twenty-five years ago. The result is a fascinating look at what Iris Murdoch called ‘inhabited philosophy,’ which shows us how people's lives are affected by the philosophies that occupy them.
Before beginning she tries to define existentialism, which takes up a page in Chapter One. However, definitions are not very helpful, especially when the philosophers themselves keep changing their minds. The book is most alive when she delves into the biographical details and shows how friendships, careers and even lives were at stake as the thinkers in this story developed, articulated and refined their ideas.
It begins in the Moravian town of Prossnitz, where Edmund Husserl could be found yawning his way through his schooldays. “He once yawned so hard that his lower jaw remained stuck.” But Tomas Masaryk, the future president of Czechoslovakia, persuaded him to take classes with a philosophy teacher named Franz Clemens Brentano, a former priest who questioned everything and encouraged his students to think for themselves.
As a result, Husserl eventually became a philosophy professor in Freiburg in the middle of the first world war. Here, troubled by bouts of depression and beset by worries about his two living children on the front line and grief for his eldest son, who was killed at Verdun, he tried to make sense of everything from first principles by analysing how we perceive the world. He did this by describing phenomena. The intensity of his studies required a laboratory of phenomenology and Husserl demanded absolute loyalty from the small entourage of students who became his laboratory assistants.
Martin Heidegger, who had begun his academic life as a student of divinity, was influenced by Husserl’s work and the two became friends and colleagues in Freiburg.
Heidegger’s great work is called Being and Time and it took shape during the rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s. It showed an ambivalent attitude towards the extreme political policies of Nazi Germany. It is tainted by his association with that regime, by his unkindness towards his students and friends, and by his lack of compassion towards those who were persecuted and killed.
Nevertheless, the writings of Husserl and Heidegger electrified Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends in Paris. Phenomenology contained the seeds of political dissent because it led philosophers to question the status quo. The French philosophers, including Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, developed their ideas into a political creed that embraced communism and rejected social, economic and political conformity.
These so-called existentialists concerned themselves with the freedom of individual choice. They saw everyone as being essentially free to act in the world within certain constraints. This freedom brings both responsibility and anxiety, partly because the constraints are ambivalent and sometimes illusory. Blaming an illusory constraint, such as social expectations, for your behaviour is to show bad faith. Another example of bad faith is if a person says he has never written a book because he doesn’t have time. Everyone has time but we all choose how to spend it. Perhaps this explains why Sartre and Beauvoir wrote such massive books. In them, they are constantly trying to describe and understand lived experience in an attempt to act more authentically and avoid bad faith.
Sartre wrote prolifically but his main work was Being and Nothingness, a massive tome that paid homage to Heidegger’s Being and Time. It took philosophy in new directions and, published in 1943, was expressive of the mood of a nation that was subject to Nazi occupation.
Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir became like superstars. Sartre’s lectures always drew large crowds. They both wrote novels and plays as well as works of non-fiction. Their friend, Albert Camus also wrote a mixture of fiction, drama and essays.
Most people know Simone de Beauvoir now for her massive feminine text, The Second Sex. Bakewell calls it “the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement” because it “re-situated men in relation to women.” But she says it never became established as one of the great cultural re-evaluations of modern times, partly because the 1953 translation by Howard M. Parshley simplified the existential terminology and left out some important sections.
I was dismayed to find that my copy of it, which runs to 741 densely filled pages, was the abridged Howard M. Parshley’s translation, with the terrible rendering of Lived Experience as Woman’s Life Today. I have now discovered there is a much better translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, which was published in 2009. I have never tried reading it in French, although I did read a few works by Camus in French because I studied them in school and they are all quite short.
My French teacher was a big fan of Camus, although I could never understand why, to be honest. Sarah Bakewell has changed my opinion and I now see more value in Camus than I did when I was a teenager, which is no discredit to my French teacher, whose enthusiasm inspired me to explore many other French writers.
The extremism of Sartre and Beauvoir led to rifts with Aron, Camus, Merleau-Ponty and others who gradually adopted a more moderate political outlook. Camus and Merleau-Ponty in particular emerge as much more compassionate and human than many of the philosophers described here, because they were not prepared to let innocent people suffer for the sake of a principle or an idea.
Bakewell is very reassuring to those of us who shy away from long philosophical tracts. She is not complimentary about Sartre’s later works, particularly his rambling biography of Flaubert. She is astonished that Simone de Beauvoir read it more than once and found it delightful. “I am saucer-eyed with awe,” she says, “at the achievement of the translator, Carol Cosman, who spent thirteen years meticulously rendering the whole work into English.”
It is these personal touches that make the book so readable. There is nothing patronising or dry about the text. She dwells on matters that are intrinsically interesting and shows us the human side of these philosophers, with all their strengths and failings.
Her description of Husserl’s final days is very moving. Then she expands the story to tell of what happened afterwards during the German occupation of the Netherlands and how Husserl’s wife, Malvine struggled to preserve his huge collection of papers. The tragic fate of Edith Stein and her sister Rosa is also described. When you read of the great lengths scholars went to and the hardships they endured to preserve and piece together Edmund Husserl’s and Edith Stein’s unpublished papers, it gives you a heightened sense of the value of their works, as well as being a very moving personal story.
Bakewell’s account is not linear but roams around to show the influences the philosophers had on one another. She brings it home to you in a very substantive way just how lucky we are to have such easy access to these books now. But we are especially lucky to have this very engaging and readable summary of them by this author, who has an amazing talent for making complex ideas both exciting and easy to understand.
One of her other gifts is to show the relevance of philosophy to the world we live in today. As others have noted, we don’t really learn much from history and the same mistakes are made again and again. The eternal questions remain unanswered.
Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s former lover and pupil, was in the United States during the crackdown on Communism and, like many people, was shocked by the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953. She feared that the political climate was moving towards what she had fled from in Germany. “An unimaginable stupidity must have taken hold in the USA,” she wrote to her friend Karl Jaspers. “It frightens me because we are familiar with it.”
Bakewell digresses from here to discuss The Brothers Karamazov and an essay by Albert Camus called Neither Victims nor Executioners. I like her summary of Camus’s thoughts in this section so I will end by quoting her paraphrase:
Sarah Bakewell’s approach is to include biographical elements, not only of the philosophers but also of herself, as she revisits books she read as a student twenty-five years ago. The result is a fascinating look at what Iris Murdoch called ‘inhabited philosophy,’ which shows us how people's lives are affected by the philosophies that occupy them.
Inspired both by Merleau-Ponty’s mottos about lived ideas and by Iris Murdoch’s ‘inhabited philosophy’, and triggered by my own eerie feelings on retracing my steps, I want to explore the story of existentialism and phenomenology in a way that combines the philosophical and the biographical.
Before beginning she tries to define existentialism, which takes up a page in Chapter One. However, definitions are not very helpful, especially when the philosophers themselves keep changing their minds. The book is most alive when she delves into the biographical details and shows how friendships, careers and even lives were at stake as the thinkers in this story developed, articulated and refined their ideas.
It begins in the Moravian town of Prossnitz, where Edmund Husserl could be found yawning his way through his schooldays. “He once yawned so hard that his lower jaw remained stuck.” But Tomas Masaryk, the future president of Czechoslovakia, persuaded him to take classes with a philosophy teacher named Franz Clemens Brentano, a former priest who questioned everything and encouraged his students to think for themselves.
As a result, Husserl eventually became a philosophy professor in Freiburg in the middle of the first world war. Here, troubled by bouts of depression and beset by worries about his two living children on the front line and grief for his eldest son, who was killed at Verdun, he tried to make sense of everything from first principles by analysing how we perceive the world. He did this by describing phenomena. The intensity of his studies required a laboratory of phenomenology and Husserl demanded absolute loyalty from the small entourage of students who became his laboratory assistants.
Martin Heidegger, who had begun his academic life as a student of divinity, was influenced by Husserl’s work and the two became friends and colleagues in Freiburg.
Heidegger’s great work is called Being and Time and it took shape during the rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s. It showed an ambivalent attitude towards the extreme political policies of Nazi Germany. It is tainted by his association with that regime, by his unkindness towards his students and friends, and by his lack of compassion towards those who were persecuted and killed.
Nevertheless, the writings of Husserl and Heidegger electrified Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends in Paris. Phenomenology contained the seeds of political dissent because it led philosophers to question the status quo. The French philosophers, including Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, developed their ideas into a political creed that embraced communism and rejected social, economic and political conformity.
These so-called existentialists concerned themselves with the freedom of individual choice. They saw everyone as being essentially free to act in the world within certain constraints. This freedom brings both responsibility and anxiety, partly because the constraints are ambivalent and sometimes illusory. Blaming an illusory constraint, such as social expectations, for your behaviour is to show bad faith. Another example of bad faith is if a person says he has never written a book because he doesn’t have time. Everyone has time but we all choose how to spend it. Perhaps this explains why Sartre and Beauvoir wrote such massive books. In them, they are constantly trying to describe and understand lived experience in an attempt to act more authentically and avoid bad faith.
Sartre wrote prolifically but his main work was Being and Nothingness, a massive tome that paid homage to Heidegger’s Being and Time. It took philosophy in new directions and, published in 1943, was expressive of the mood of a nation that was subject to Nazi occupation.
Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir became like superstars. Sartre’s lectures always drew large crowds. They both wrote novels and plays as well as works of non-fiction. Their friend, Albert Camus also wrote a mixture of fiction, drama and essays.
Most people know Simone de Beauvoir now for her massive feminine text, The Second Sex. Bakewell calls it “the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement” because it “re-situated men in relation to women.” But she says it never became established as one of the great cultural re-evaluations of modern times, partly because the 1953 translation by Howard M. Parshley simplified the existential terminology and left out some important sections.
I was dismayed to find that my copy of it, which runs to 741 densely filled pages, was the abridged Howard M. Parshley’s translation, with the terrible rendering of Lived Experience as Woman’s Life Today. I have now discovered there is a much better translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, which was published in 2009. I have never tried reading it in French, although I did read a few works by Camus in French because I studied them in school and they are all quite short.
My French teacher was a big fan of Camus, although I could never understand why, to be honest. Sarah Bakewell has changed my opinion and I now see more value in Camus than I did when I was a teenager, which is no discredit to my French teacher, whose enthusiasm inspired me to explore many other French writers.
The extremism of Sartre and Beauvoir led to rifts with Aron, Camus, Merleau-Ponty and others who gradually adopted a more moderate political outlook. Camus and Merleau-Ponty in particular emerge as much more compassionate and human than many of the philosophers described here, because they were not prepared to let innocent people suffer for the sake of a principle or an idea.
Bakewell is very reassuring to those of us who shy away from long philosophical tracts. She is not complimentary about Sartre’s later works, particularly his rambling biography of Flaubert. She is astonished that Simone de Beauvoir read it more than once and found it delightful. “I am saucer-eyed with awe,” she says, “at the achievement of the translator, Carol Cosman, who spent thirteen years meticulously rendering the whole work into English.”
It is these personal touches that make the book so readable. There is nothing patronising or dry about the text. She dwells on matters that are intrinsically interesting and shows us the human side of these philosophers, with all their strengths and failings.
Her description of Husserl’s final days is very moving. Then she expands the story to tell of what happened afterwards during the German occupation of the Netherlands and how Husserl’s wife, Malvine struggled to preserve his huge collection of papers. The tragic fate of Edith Stein and her sister Rosa is also described. When you read of the great lengths scholars went to and the hardships they endured to preserve and piece together Edmund Husserl’s and Edith Stein’s unpublished papers, it gives you a heightened sense of the value of their works, as well as being a very moving personal story.
Bakewell’s account is not linear but roams around to show the influences the philosophers had on one another. She brings it home to you in a very substantive way just how lucky we are to have such easy access to these books now. But we are especially lucky to have this very engaging and readable summary of them by this author, who has an amazing talent for making complex ideas both exciting and easy to understand.
One of her other gifts is to show the relevance of philosophy to the world we live in today. As others have noted, we don’t really learn much from history and the same mistakes are made again and again. The eternal questions remain unanswered.
Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s former lover and pupil, was in the United States during the crackdown on Communism and, like many people, was shocked by the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953. She feared that the political climate was moving towards what she had fled from in Germany. “An unimaginable stupidity must have taken hold in the USA,” she wrote to her friend Karl Jaspers. “It frightens me because we are familiar with it.”
Bakewell digresses from here to discuss The Brothers Karamazov and an essay by Albert Camus called Neither Victims nor Executioners. I like her summary of Camus’s thoughts in this section so I will end by quoting her paraphrase:
People will always do violent things but philosophers and state officials have a duty not to come up with excuses that will justify them.
A really well written book, which approaches massive topics in an interesting and easy to follow way (although I'm not sure anyone can make Heidegger anything less than baffling). Covers a range of philosophers including ones I knew little about and was glad to be introduced to, such as Merleau-Ponty, and the personal focus of the book was intriguing.
This felt like a long philosophy class and I loved every second of it.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Though I majored in Philosophy, my professors spent little time on the Existentialist thinkers. Perhaps it was not their area of expertise, or it may have been out of fashion, or some other reason. What I missed out on is diligently surmised by Sarah Bakewell in an engaging and thought provoking journey through history and life’s greatest mysteries.
Though tiny compared to the works of the subjects covered within, Bakewell manages to present a complete compendium of the historical context of the events, culture, and relationships that shaped existentialist philosophy. Moreover, she shows how perhaps no other philosophy manage to enthrall the masses and influence fiction, film, music and more. Because no other philosophy reflects life in the moment like existentialism.
Rather than lay things out in an encyclopedic flow, the format of this account casts us as flies on the wall of the cafes these intellectual giants haunted. We are first hand witnesses to all of the interactions that impacted them and subsequently their work on philosophy. We are also shown a mirror on our life by zooming out to general qualities of existence that make these philosophers relatable and approachable for the novice and expert alike.
Though tiny compared to the works of the subjects covered within, Bakewell manages to present a complete compendium of the historical context of the events, culture, and relationships that shaped existentialist philosophy. Moreover, she shows how perhaps no other philosophy manage to enthrall the masses and influence fiction, film, music and more. Because no other philosophy reflects life in the moment like existentialism.
Rather than lay things out in an encyclopedic flow, the format of this account casts us as flies on the wall of the cafes these intellectual giants haunted. We are first hand witnesses to all of the interactions that impacted them and subsequently their work on philosophy. We are also shown a mirror on our life by zooming out to general qualities of existence that make these philosophers relatable and approachable for the novice and expert alike.