Finished reading: At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 📚
A really engaging and enjoyable read. I agree with Bakewell in being disturbed at the flaws of many of her cast of existentialist characters, but I like how she brings out their humanity in the midst of these flaws. And this book reminded me of my own cast of thinkers who, taking their cue from Merleau-Ponty, celebrate and wonder about what it means to live as embodied beings in a material world: I think of Nic Carr; David Abram; Jenny Odell; Norm Wirzba; Albert Borgmann; Tim Ingold; Robert MacFarlane; Ian Mcgilchrist; Rowan Williams. There is something about careful consideration of what it means to be embodied that I gives me a deep sense of satisfaction in reading and re-reading.
“I do not think the existentialists offer some simple magic solution for the modern world. As individuals and philosophers, they were hopelessly flawed. Each one’s thought featured some major aspect that should make us uncomfortable. This is partly because they were complex and troubled beings, as most of us are. It is also because their ideas and lives were rooted in a dark, morally compromised century. The political turmoil and wild notions of their times marked them, just as our own twenty-first-century turmoil is now marking us.
But that is one reason why the existentialists demand rereading.They remind us that human existence is difficult and that people often behave appallingly, yet they also show how great our possibilities are.They constantly repeat the questions about freedom and being that we constantly try to forget. We can explore the directions the existentialists indicate without needing to take them as exemplary personalities, or even as exemplary thinkers. They are interesting thinkers, which I believe makes them more worth our trouble.” (319)