Genre: Philosophy/Biographical
Page Count: 448
Looking back at my life, I can see myself sadder on more occasions than happier. It became particularly disturbing as I grew into adulthood and my consciousness started to collect all these experiences and sorted them into a narrative – a very bleak narrative, if you may.
I’ve been sad for obvious reasons like loneliness, false comparisons, low self-esteem, bit of perfectionism, but also for non-obvious reasons which bothered me even more, since I didn’t know why I was sad. I looked for causes both inside me and outside in life, but I didn’t have much help from myself.
This is, once again, where books came as a rescue in my life. In reading books, I have and continue to find answers that I couldn’t develop on my own. And in this particular case, ‘existentialism’, more or less, was the answer for my non-obvious causes of sadness. I’m using the word sadness as an umbrella word here, which shelters other feelings of frustration, depression, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and melancholy.
My first introduction with the term ‘existentialism’ came from the videos from ‘The School of Life’. From then on, I got interested in philosophy and started reading philosophical articles. And slowly, as I got familiar with philosophy while also getting sadder, the idea of suddenly finding myself ‘individually alone in this big world, trying to find a way while also being responsible for it, and suffering from the depressive questions of life’s meaninglessness’ became clearer and known.
It wasn’t a revelation of any sort, but rather a gradual process of learning and facing a much scarier world compared to a comforting one of childhood. However, what mattered for me was a ‘learned’ suffering in which I knew and therefore had some control over it than an ‘unaware’ suffering. And that is very important: to know and to understand is to be free; maybe not from the very struggles, but from the anxiety and uncertainty of it.
So far, this review has just been a personal essay, but I wanted to create a connection between me reading ‘existentialism’ now to it being the ‘non-obvious’ cause for my peculiar sadness.
Bakewell’s ‘At The Existentialist Café’ not only made me a more learned individual in the study of existentialism, but also took away some of my ‘aloneness’ by familiarizing me with some of its great thinkers.
This book is generation-saga of philosophers who brought down the remote field of philosophy amidst the troubled lives of 20th century humans and used it as light out of the dark times. It’s not just about the popular existentialists like Sartre or Camus but also their predecessors and their contemporaries.
It starts with ‘a new philosophy’ called ‘phenome logy’ which could be applied to just about anything in real life – even to the apricot cocktail that Sartre and Beauvoir were having when they heard about it in a French Café. Phenomenology is a philosophy of describing things ‘anew’ by stripping off everything we know about it, and its founder was Edmund Husserl – and it’s from Husserl that this chain starts! Heidegger then gets inspired from Husserl and develops him own version of it.
And from these two founding fathers, pretty much every other existentialist philosophers invent their own philosophies; they include names like: Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, and others.
Honestly speaking, since this book follows all these philosophers, their different ideas, their influences on each other, their impacts on the world at that time, their friendships and their break-ups, and their individual and intertwined journeys in the war-struck time of 1950s, it gets pretty overwhelming and stays so throughout the whole book.
But what makes it such a thrilling reading experience is Bakewell’s passionate and fluent prose. She is relentless, funny, and upbeat throughout this book, and presents her extensive work on all these great thinkers and the world through 1930s to 1970s with incredible freshness and grit. Bakewell’s personal interest in this book along with her brilliant insights from these many ideas would make any reader enjoy reading it with an awed expression.
Since there’s so much to talk about this book, I’d rather recommend this book, than continue talking about it, and encourage the readers to go read this great book themselves. It’ll be one thrilling, shocking, and amazing journey!
Ratings: 4.5/5 **** (October 25, 2020)