Summary of Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Existentialism is a mood, not a philosophy. It can be traced back to anguished novelists of the nineteenth century, and beyond that to Blaise Pascal, who was terrified by the silence of infinite spaces.
#2 The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, To the things themselves! It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and don’t wonder whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, and describe it as precisely as possible.
#3 Sartre was extremely excited about the prospect of studying with Husserl’s student Emmanuel Levinas. He had barely developed any philosophical ideas of his own, but he was ready to absorb the philosophical energy of others.
#4 Sartre's philosophy is based on the idea that humans are their own freedom. We create ourselves through action, and this is so fundamental to our human condition that it is the human condition from the moment of first consciousness to the moment of death.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Épistémologie
• Éthique et morale
• Existentialism

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 07 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669381457
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Existentialism is a mood, not a philosophy. It can be traced back to anguished novelists of the nineteenth century, and beyond that to Blaise Pascal, who was terrified by the silence of infinite spaces.

#2

The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, To the things themselves! It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and don’t wonder whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, and describe it as precisely as possible.

#3

Sartre was extremely excited about the prospect of studying with Husserl’s student Emmanuel Levinas. He had barely developed any philosophical ideas of his own, but he was ready to absorb the philosophical energy of others.

#4

Sartre's philosophy is based on the idea that humans are their own freedom. We create ourselves through action, and this is so fundamental to our human condition that it is the human condition from the moment of first consciousness to the moment of death.

#5

Sartre was a celebrity by the end of the Second World War. He was feted, courted, interviewed, and photographed. He wrote articles and forewords, and was often asked to pronounce on subjects outside his expertise.

#6

The student thought about going to a priest or a philosopher, but they could not help him. He then thought about turning to his inner voice, but he heard only a clamor of voices saying different things. Ultimately, he was left with no choice but to choose himself.

#7

Sartre’s existentialism is a philosophy that questions what it means to be human. It says that we are free and responsible for our actions, and that we must make decisions as though we were choosing on behalf of the entire human race.

#8

Sartre’s big question in the mid-1940s was: given that we are free, how can we use our freedom well in such challenging times. He offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility.

#9

The existentialist subculture that arose in the 1940s found its home in the environs of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church on the Left Bank of Paris. Sartre and Beauvoir spent many years living in cheap Saint-Germain hotels and writing all day in cafés, because these were warmer places than the unheated hotel rooms.

#10

Existentialists were a group of French intellectuals who grew their hair long and wore black woollen turtlenecks. They were known for their dangerous and provocative lifestyle, and everything that was nice or bourgeois was bad.

#11

Sartre and Beauvoir’s open relationship was more than just a personal arrangement; it was a philosophical choice. They wanted to live their theory of freedom. They never even lived together, but they put their relationship before all others and met almost every day to work side by side.

#12

The existentialists blended life and philosophy, and they made philosophy out of whatever they experienced. They believed that by reflecting on life’s vagaries in philosophical ways, they could become more resilient and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment, or anxiety.

#13

Søren Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen in 1813, was the first to use the word existential in a new way to denote thought concerning the problems of human existence. He believed that human existence comes first, and that it is personal.

#14

Sartre and Beauvoir were both influenced by the work of 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed that the only way to live is to throw ourselves into life without reservation. He believed that every great philosopher wrote a sort of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

#15

The modern existentialists were Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Beauvoir. They pioneered a mood of rebellion and dissatisfaction, created a new definition of existence as choice, action, and self-assertion, and made a study of the anguish and difficulty of life.

#16

The students and workers of 1968 were inspired by the slogans of existentialism, which emphasized freedom and authenticity. The movement was led by young intellectuals, who were often bored with their studies and longing for new ideas.

#17

Sartre was a bridge to all the traditions that he plundered, modernized, and reinvented. He insisted all his life that what mattered was not the past, but the future. He dedicated himself to the future.

#18

Sartre’s books changed my life, and I became interested in him a year after his death. I spent my sixteenth birthday money on his 1938 novel Nausea, because I liked the Salvador Dalí image on the Penguin cover.

#19

I had been inclined to absenteeism already, but under Sartre’s influence, I became a more dedicated truant than ever. I loved everything about the existentialist lifestyle, but I was also aware that it was out of fashion by the 1980s.

#20

I began reading philosophy again after my second dropping-out. I was amazed at how adventurous and rich Merleau-Ponty’s thinking was. I began reading the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Gabriel Marcel.

#21

I realized that, while I had changed in those twenty-five or so years, the world had changed too. The concerns of the twenty-first century are no longer the same as those of the late twentieth century.

#22

The relationship between existentialist philosophers and their life experiences was extremely close. They drew on their own life experiences to ask the two biggest human questions: what are we. and what should we do.

#23

The story of existentialism is a political and historical one. It is the story of a whole European century. The existentialists lived in times of extreme ideology and extreme suffering, and they became engaged with events in the world whether they wanted to or not.

#24

The story of the philosophers is a multilingual, multisided conversation that ran from one end of the last century to the other. Many of them never met, but they seem to have participated in a conversation that took place in a Parisian café.

#25

Existentialists focus on individual, concrete human existence. They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1