Narrator: Imagine it’s Paris in the early 1930s. Three young friends—Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Raymond Aron—are sitting in a bar, talking over apricot cocktails. Aron, just back from studying in Berlin, leans in and tells a restless Sartre something that will change the course of 20th-century thought. He gestures to his glass and says, "If you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!" For Sartre, this was a revelation. Philosophy didn't have to be about abstract, dusty ideas; it could be about the lived, breathing, and immediate experience of life itself—even the taste of a cocktail.

This single conversation was a spark that ignited a movement. In her book, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, Sarah Bakewell chronicles the story of existentialism and phenomenology, not as a dry academic discipline, but as a passionate, chaotic, and deeply human story of ideas forged in the crucible of war, love, and rebellion.

Narrator: Before that cocktail conversation, philosophy was often seen as a discipline detached from the world. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl sought to change that with a new method he called phenomenology. His central command was simple yet revolutionary: "To the things themselves!" Instead of relying on preconceived theories, a phenomenologist was to describe phenomena exactly as they appeared in their own experience. This meant setting aside, or "bracketing," all assumptions to focus on the immediate, lived reality of an object or feeling.

Husserl famously told his students, "Give me my coffee so that I can make phenomenology out of it." This wasn't a joke; it was a declaration that philosophy could be found in the most mundane moments. The goal was to describe the taste, the warmth, the aroma, and the very experience of the coffee, not just its chemical properties. This approach was electrifying for a new generation of thinkers. Emmanuel Levinas, a student who traveled to study with Husserl, described it as "a new ideal of life, a new page of history, almost a new religion." It promised to rescue philosophy from abstraction and root it firmly in the concrete world of human experience.

Narrator: Jean-Paul Sartre took Husserl's method and turned it into a philosophy of human life. He built his system on a single, powerful slogan: "Existence precedes essence." This means that humans are not born with a pre-defined nature or purpose, like a knife is designed to cut. Instead, we are first simply thrown into existence—we exist—and only then, through our choices and actions, do we create our own essence, our own identity and meaning.

Sartre argued that we are "condemned to be free." This radical freedom is a heavy burden. Without a divine plan or fixed human nature to guide us, we are entirely responsible for what we become. Bakewell shares a powerful story from Sartre that illustrates this dilemma. During the Nazi occupation of France, a former student came to Sartre for advice. The young man’s brother had been killed fighting the Germans, but his father was collaborating with them. He was torn between two duties: staying to care for his grieving mother, who depended on him entirely, or escaping to England to join the Free French and fight for his country.

Sartre refused to give him an answer. No ethical system, no religious text, could make the choice for him. Sartre’s only advice was, "You are free, therefore choose—that is to say, invent." The student had to invent his own path, and in doing so, create his own values. This is the terrifying and exhilarating core of Sartrean existentialism.

Narrator: If we are so radically free, why don't we feel it all the time? Sartre observed that most people flee from this "anguish" of total freedom by engaging in self-deception, a state he called "bad faith." We pretend we are not free by acting as if our roles and circumstances define us completely.

Sartre’s most famous example is the Parisian café waiter. He describes a waiter who moves with a little too much precision, whose gestures are a little too theatrical. He isn't just a man doing a job; he is playing at being a waiter. He has adopted the role so completely that he treats himself as an object, a "waiter-thing," rather than a free individual who chooses to be there. By convincing himself that he is a waiter, he escapes the dizzying reality that he could, at any moment, walk out and do something else entirely. We all do this. We tell ourselves, "I have to go to work," or "I can't do that, it's not who I am," creating what Sartre called "guard rails against anguish." Bad faith is an escape from the burden of inventing ourselves every single moment.

Narrator: While Sartre focused on consciousness and freedom, another towering figure, Martin Heidegger, was obsessed with a different, more fundamental question: the question of "Being" itself. Heidegger argued that philosophy had forgotten to ask what it means "to be." He was a captivating and enigmatic teacher, nicknamed "the magician from Messkirch," who mesmerized students like Hannah Arendt by making them feel that "thinking has come to life again."

Heidegger developed the concept of Dasein, or "Being-there," to describe the unique way humans exist in the world—always engaged, always in a situation. He also described the powerful force of conformity he called das Man ("the they"), the anonymous social pressure that encourages us to think, say, and do what "they" do, robbing us of our authenticity. The only way to resist das Man, Heidegger argued, was to heed the "call of conscience" and embrace our own mortality, our "Being-towards-death."

However, Heidegger's philosophy is forever stained by his own actions. In 1933, he enthusiastically joined the Nazi party and became the rector of Freiburg University, delivering speeches filled with Nazi rhetoric. The man who wrote about authenticity and resisting the crowd became a willing participant in a totalitarian regime, a devastating contradiction that has haunted his legacy ever since.

Narrator: The ideas of existentialism were not confined to lecture halls; they were lived, debated, and fought over in the cafés and streets of post-war Paris. The intense political climate of the Cold War created deep divisions among the thinkers. Albert Camus, once a close friend of Sartre's, argued for a "stubborn humanism" that refused to justify violence for any political cause. He famously declared, during the Algerian War, "People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother."

Sartre, however, became increasingly radicalized, arguing that in the fight against oppression, violence could be a necessary tool. This ideological chasm became too wide to bridge. The friendship between Sartre and Camus fractured publicly and painfully. Simone de Beauvoir later captured the sense of irreconcilable difference in an encounter with their former friend, Arthur Koestler. When Koestler suggested they have lunch, Beauvoir refused, explaining with a philosophical analogy. She told him that their political views were now so different that when they looked at the same sugar lump, they saw entirely different objects. Their worlds no longer aligned, making even a simple meal together impossible.

Narrator: Though the heyday of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés scene is long gone, Bakewell argues that existentialist ideas have seeped into the very fabric of our culture. We talk about anxiety, authenticity, and the search for meaning. We watch films like Blade Runner and The Matrix that ask fundamental questions about what it means to be human in a world of technology and artificial realities.

The writer E.M. Forster, in his prescient 1909 story "The Machine Stops," imagined a future where people live in isolation, communicating only through screens. He lamented that this technology ignored "the imponderable bloom," the indescribable essence of real, face-to-face human interaction. This is the very territory the existentialists explored. They remind us that our lives are not abstract problems to be solved but experiences to be lived, felt, and created. They force us to confront the questions we often try to avoid: What are we doing here? And what should we do next?

Narrator: At the Existentialist Café masterfully shows that philosophy is not a spectator sport. It is an active, vital, and often messy engagement with the world. The single most important takeaway from the book is that the questions these thinkers raised—about freedom, responsibility, and how to live an authentic life in a meaningless world—are not historical artifacts. They are our questions, too.

The existentialists, with all their flaws and contradictions, left behind a profound and unsettling challenge. They insisted that we are the authors of our own lives, free to create our own values and purpose. The final, lingering question they pose to us is as relevant today as it was in a Parisian café nearly a century ago: In a world that constantly tries to define you, how will you choose to invent yourself?