A Sip of What Philosophy Needs

A long, long time ago, philosophy mattered.

In the medieval period, serious study always included Aristotle, and Arab commentators’ novel interpretations of his core concerns helped stimulate the development of the first universities of Europe. In the early modern West, political philosophers prodded citizens and some who governed them to rethink notions of political legitimacy. By the 18th century, philosophical reflections on the bases of knowledge and on the relationship of mind and body affected how educated classes understood themselves and their connection to the world around them. The attempt to present a framework of knowledge while describing how knowledge led to action became an urgent (not just academic) task.

When young people “discover philosophy” today, it usually means either that they have come upon writings that call into question what they thought they knew, or that they suddenly feel awake to new modes of perceiving and interacting with the world. So it famously was in late 1932, when three twenty-somethings went out for drinks and one suggested excitedly that they could make philosophy out of the very cocktails they were sipping. This wasn’t just overintellectualized navel gazing, it was an invitation to do philosophy in a way “that reconnected it with normal, lived experience.”

The three philosophers in the cafe were Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and their encounter is seen as a founding moment of French existentialism. They were talking about the new way of doing philosophy taking off in Germany called phenomenology: an approach that focused on how we experience the everyday world all around us. Of course, there was a new way of doing politics also taking off in Germany at that time: Hitler came to power in the winter of 1933.

Thus existentialism would begin with intellectual excitement about how philosophy might intersect with ordinary life, and it would develop in a context of intense political pressure, murderous violence, and, eventually, world historical change. The three young intellectuals may have started by talking about cocktails, but, as Sarah Bakewell makes clear in her lively account, At the Existentialist Café, existentialism’s great subject would be what it meant to be free. The stakes, it turned out, could not have been higher for philosophy and for those who engaged with it.

As a teenager Bakewell read Sartre’s novel Nausea as an invitation to reject convention and find something at once more meaningful and closer to really living. She was enthralled by this invitation to philosophy but at university discovered that the academic discipline was moving in a much more abstract, even anti-experiential direction. With the linguistic turn and its aftermath, questions of what it meant to be free were seen to be, at best, amateurish.

Bakewell dropped her philosophy graduate program, but she continued to engage vigorously with ideas. As with her lovely book on Montaigne, nicely titled How to Live, here in At the Existentialist Café she has taken on a huge subject with an admirable determination to make it accessible to a wide audience. In addition to extended considerations of Sartre and Beauvoir, she offers brief, responsible, and intriguing accounts of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, of Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and Jan Patocka — to name only some of the thinkers she calls her “cast of characters.” She wants readers to feel invited to explore these thinkers further, to rediscover how philosophy can be a mode of thinking that we can inhabit and learn from in our ordinary lives.

Bakewell borrows the phrase “inhabited philosophy” from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. Murdoch, she writes, insisted that we “should be able to look through the windows of a philosophy … and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.” In this inspiring intellectual history and group biography, Bakewell allows us to do just that, showing how thinkers creatively responded to their milieu, and how they were in turn shaped by it.

The key ideas to which the French existentialists returned again and again were authenticity and freedom. These writers were engaged in finding ways to be themselves, even as they were infused by the passions, constraints, and possibilities of their time. For the existentialists, authenticity was bound up with the notion that there was no escaping one’s freedom, no matter how oppressive the situation. Even during the Nazi occupation, Camus refused to accept the “collapse of meaning,” and Sartre insisted on the virtuous clarity of the freedom to choose resistance or collaboration.

The authentic embrace of one’s freedom led some of Bakewell’s thinkers to odious political choices and personal behavior, but she finds the embrace in itself worthy of respect. Today — when thinkers attribute human behavior to intentionless affect, the evolutionary development of our brains, or to highly developed networks, and when much of academic philosophy seems to aspire to being nothing more than a handmaiden to the latest scientific research — it is invigorating to be reminded of an epoch when philosophers dealt with the most pressing personal and political dimensions of life in ways that were accessible to nonprofessional readers. “If done correctly, all existentialism is applied existentialism,” Bakewell writes.

The most powerful single work of “applied existentialism” was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Bakewell gives a concise account of this extraordinary exploration of the factors that “have conspired to hold a woman back from establishing authority and agency in the wider world.” In good existentialist (and Hegelian) fashion, Beauvoir shows that within these constraining factors lies an invitation to acknowledge one’s freedom. “Women can change their lives,” Bakewell writes, “which is why it is worth writing books to awaken them to this fact.”

Awakening to see the world in a new and powerful way has been one of philosophy’s promises for a very long time. Beauvoir, Bakewell tells us, “had a kind of genius for being amazed by the world and by herself.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another hero of At the Existentialist Café, saw that “the philosopher’s task is neither to reduce the mysterious to a neat set of concepts nor to gaze at it in awed silence.” With what Bakewell describes as a noble devotion to evidence and to ambiguity, Merleau-Ponty sought to rigorously put into words what is often considered inexpressible.

Bakewell’s existentialists at their best are much like her Montaigne: full of wonder and curiosity with a high tolerance for uncertainty. Her account is acutely relevant to our own age of technology, conformity, and surveillance. Although At the Existentialist Café is not a book aimed at university audiences, there is surely a lesson here for those of us who teach philosophy in academic settings. Rather than succumb to the quest for sophisticated purification, as Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle recently described the professionalization of the discipline in a New York Times blog, we should instead acknowledge our students’ hunger for meaning and political engagement, stimulate their curiosity about freedom, and amplify their capacity for wonder. When we try to do so, we may find, as did Sarah Bakewell, that “we need the existentialists more than we thought.”

Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University and the author, most recently, of Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living With the Past (Columbia University Press, 2012) and Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014).