Stepping Into the Café: Where Philosophy, Life, and Apricot Cocktails Collide

It is a familiar feeling for many: the sudden, dizzying sense that the ‘big questions’ of life, such as Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live?, have become immediate and urgent. This is the territory of philosophy, and Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café doesn’t just explore it; it brings the reader directly into the conversation.

Reading this book is to step into that discussion. Bakewell doesn’t just present information; she opens the door to a lively Parisian café and invites the reader to listen in on one of the most significant, complex, and important intellectual dialogues of the 20th century.

Beyond the Black Turtleneck

It is common for the word “existentialism” to conjure a familiar caricature: the Parisian intellectual in a black turtleneck, surrounded by cigarette smoke, lamenting the meaningless void of it all. It’s a picture of gloom and pretension, of a philosophy that seems to reject the joy in life.

But Bakewell argues this is a deep injustice. She asks us to look again, to see past the stereotype to the philosophy’s radical core. Consider Sartre’s famous line, which becomes the foundation of this worldview:

Existence precedes essence.

Heard one way, it sounds like despair. But Bakewell helps us hear it another way: not as a statement of nihilism, but as one of stark, thrilling, and liberating possibility. This freedom, however, is not without its weight. As Bakewell presents it, this is the essential human condition:

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

This was a philosophy for people engaged with life, with love and desire, with friendship and revolution.

A Drama of Minds and Hearts

What makes this book so compelling is that Bakewell understands a fundamental truth: ideas are not born in a vacuum. They are forged in the turbulent, passionate, and often paradoxical lives of the people who dream them up. This isn’t a stale, academic treatise; it’s an intellectual drama, populated by a cast of brilliant, flawed, and memorable human beings.

We meet Jean-Paul Sartre, the relentless “king” of the movement, a man whose physical ugliness was said to dissolve the moment he began to speak, his face illuminated by the sheer force of his mind. We meet his lifelong partner, Simone de Beauvoir, the fiercely intelligent “queen” who lived the philosophy and gave feminism its foundational text, famously arguing:

One is not born a woman, but becomes one.

Then there is the chill of Martin Heidegger, the ‘dark magician’ from the German Black Forest, a stark contrast to the bustling café scene. His genius is forever stained by his enthusiastic Nazism, forcing us to grapple with the difficult question: can we separate the thinker from their sins? We witness the heartbreaking fallout between Sartre and Albert Camus, the movement’s moral conscience, a friendship shattered over clashing visions of justice and violence in the wake of Camus’s book The Rebel. And through it all, we find an unsung hero in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the “happy philosopher” who found meaning not in grand systems, but in the basic, profound experience of having a body and seeing the world.

From a Cocktail to a Cosmos

How does one make a famously difficult philosophy feel immediate? The book suggests you start with a drink.

The book’s overture is a fabled scene. It’s 1933. Sartre and de Beauvoir are in a bar with their friend Raymond Aron. Pointing to his glass, he delivers the line that would ignite a movement:

“You can make a philosophy out of this cocktail!“

For Sartre, this was a revelation. Philosophy didn’t have to be about lofty, detached ideals. It could be about this glass, this café, this moment. It could be about the world as we actually experience it. The book encourages a similar focus: to truly look at a morning coffee, to describe the experience of it—the warmth of the mug, the dark swirl of the liquid, the aroma that fills the air. From that simple act of looking, Bakewell unpacks the movement’s core belief: “Existence precedes essence.”

The implications are significant. There’s no pre-written script for your life. You are thrown into the world, and then, choice by choice, action by action, you create who you are. As Bakewell explains the terrifying responsibility of this freedom:

Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be. If this sounds difficult and unnerving, it’s because it is.

You are a work in progress, radically free and wholly responsible for the masterpiece, or the mess, that you become.

A Philosophy Forged in Crisis

These ideas weren’t born in the quiet of a library. They were forged in the crucible of the Second World War, a significant crisis. Bakewell skillfully shows us how, under the boot of Nazi occupation, philosophy became an essential tool for survival. Suddenly, questions of freedom and responsibility were no longer academic. They were matters of life and death. This context gives new weight to the idea that:

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

We see Sartre smuggling a message of defiance past German censors in his play The Flies, an effective allegory for the occupation. We feel the weight of the post-war “Purge,” where the choice to condemn or forgive former collaborators tore friendships apart. We even get a cloak-and-dagger tale of how the founding manuscripts of phenomenology, 40,000 pages from the Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl, were smuggled out of Nazi Germany, a powerful reminder of the real-world stakes involved in preserving thought. This isn’t just intellectual history; it’s the story of how ideas become weapons, shields, and manifestos in the fight for the human spirit.

The Ripples from the Café

Bakewell traces how these ideas, born in Parisian cafés, radiated across the globe to become a potent tool for liberation. The philosophy’s emphasis on freedom and authenticity armed generations of thinkers and activists. It fueled the anti-colonial writings of Frantz Fanon, who used its concepts to analyze the psychology of oppression. It provided the moral framework for the American Civil Rights movement and the student uprisings of 1968. And most enduringly, through de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, it gave feminism a language to deconstruct centuries of patriarchal myths.

Why This Book is Worth Reading

In the end, At the Existentialist Café is more than a book about philosophy. It’s an argument for a certain kind of philosophy, one that is lived, breathed, and debated not just in lecture halls, but among friends and lovers, in cafés and on street corners. Bakewell positions herself as the ideal guide for this journey. Her voice is warm, clever, and deeply passionate. She isn’t a remote lecturer, but an enthusiastic companion, ready to explore these ideas with the reader.

She proves that these big questions never go away. In our own age of division and uncertainty, the existentialist call to live an authentic, responsible, and fully human life feels more urgent than ever. As the book reminds us of the existentialist predicament:

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

This book is a masterful work of synthesis, but more than that, it’s a sincere invitation. It doesn’t just explain existentialism; it makes you feel why it matters. It welcomes you into the conversation, leaves you with new questions, and, most importantly, validates the idea that one’s own life is a worthy philosophical subject.