Sarah Bakewell on Alienation, Existentialism, and People's Lives

Philosophical nonfiction author Sarah Bakewell has written the upcoming "At the Existentialist Café" in the spirit of delving further into existentialist thinking. The book follows the existentialist movement and its leading thinkers in a blend of biography and philosophy, exploring how existentialism can affect how we approach life today. Prior to her reading event at the Harvard Bookstore, Bakewell spoke with The Crimson about her newest work and her own story.

The Harvard Crimson: What was the inspiration behind ‘At the Existentialist Café’?

Sarah Bakewell: Well, it’s something I’ve been interested in [all my adult life]. I came across existentialism when I was about 16, and it just fascinated me—this weird thing that was a kind of philosophy but also about people’s lives and sort of a strange feeling of alienation from the world. I mean, all of this when you’re 16 has an immediate impact because you recognize something of yourself in it. I became interested in what the philosophy was underlying all of this and wanted to learn a bit more about it. There was one summer when I was doing a job actually selling ice creams on the beach…. In between selling ice creams I was reading, [and] I just found by random the autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir, which I really enjoyed…. She writes about her friends; her ideas; all the things that they discussed between the history, the war, and all the things that were unfolding at the time. It completely absorbed me, and I realized that she too was involved in this existentialist movement. By then, in fact, I’d started studying philosophy, so one thing led to another. I started a PhD in the thought of Heidegger, but… I kind of lost interest in his way of thinking for a while, so I dropped out and did lots of other things. About 30 years came by, I came back to it in recent times as being something that I could approach from a different angle and [something] that actually meant something different to me now.

THC: Your website mentions that ‘At the Existentialist Café’ has been ‘six years long in the making’. Over the past six years, have your views on existentialism expanded or changed, and has this impacted the dynamic of your new book?

SB: It did change while I was working on it, because I didn’t really know what to expect…. Increasingly, I just found I was more and more interested in the lives of all these thinkers and how they interacted with each other. There were so many quarrels that they had, so many times that they would disagree about some key idea and the politics of philosophy or literature, and really, all those disagreements and those fallings out and friendships that ended and passionate encounters became the focus of the story for me—but always in conjunction with the philosophy, because it was the philosophical disagreements that made them so argumentative.

THC: Do any particular existentialists serve as inspiration for you?

SB: I’m still very inspired by Simone de Beauvoir—just the fact that she was such a pioneer…. I also still really admire her autobiography, and I find that I enjoy going back to that more and more. She remains a great inspiration for me— the way that she tried to tangle with the ideas of her time and the history that was unfolding. Also, I really admire Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who comes into my book a lot. He’s not really an existentialist; he was a phenomenologist. He tried to write about the way that we’re not just disembodied creatures. We’re conditioned by having perceived things, and even when we think in the abstract, it’s not really abstract because we think in terms of the physical world. He wrote about human experience in a way that really just tries to understand the most basic things. He also writes a lot about childhood—how we become the person that we are and how we develop through life. He’s fascinating.

THC: How has existentialist thinking had an impact on your own life?