Bakewell’s method is biographical-philosophical: enough about the lives to make the ideas intelligible, enough about the ideas to make the lives worth knowing. The book opens with the famous 1932 moment when Raymond Aron describes to Sartre and de Beauvoir what he’d learned about the new German philosophy of phenomenology, pointing at his glass of apricot cocktail: “You can talk about this cocktail and that is philosophy.” Sartre, the story goes, went pale with excitement. He’d found his method. What Bakewell does with this story — and with dozens like it — is show how philosophy actually happened in the twentieth century. Not in academic articles. In conversations, relationships, arguments, and the pressure of history bearing down on all of it.
Key Lessons from At the Existentialist Café
- Existentialism begins with phenomenology — the careful description of experience as it is actually lived, before theoretical interpretation strips it of its texture.
- Heidegger’s “Being-in-the-world” refutes the Cartesian picture of a mind trapped inside a body — we are always already embedded in a world of practical engagement and meaning.
- Sartre’s “existence precedes essence” means there is no pre-given human nature you must live up to — you are what you choose to make yourself, which is both liberation and terrifying responsibility.
- De Beauvoir applied existentialist freedom to gender and showed that “femininity” is a situation imposed and maintained, not a nature expressed.
- Camus refused the existentialist label but is inseparable from the movement — his “absurdism” describes the confrontation between the human need for meaning and the universe’s radical silence about meaning.
- The political choices of the existentialists — particularly Heidegger’s Nazism and Sartre’s Stalinism — are inseparable from their philosophy and must be reckoned with rather than bracketed.
- Philosophy as a practice of attending carefully to your actual experience is available to anyone, without credentials or academic apparatus.
The Takeaway on At the Existentialist Café
Bakewell has written a book that is simultaneously rigorous philosophy, compelling biography, and excellent history of ideas. She makes Heidegger comprehensible without falsifying him. She makes Sartre lovable without excusing him. She makes de Beauvoir’s intellectual courage visible in a way it rarely gets in accounts that treat her mainly as Sartre’s companion. Most importantly, she makes existentialism feel urgent — not a historical episode in twentieth-century thought but a live set of questions about freedom, responsibility, authenticity, and what it means to be a human being. More relevant now than when they were first asked, if anything, because the circumstances that made them urgent haven’t diminished. They’ve intensified.
The Core Idea Behind At the Existentialist Café
Existentialism is not a doctrine. It’s a sensibility — a way of approaching philosophical questions that starts from lived experience rather than abstract theory, taking freedom, responsibility, and authenticity as its central concerns. The movement emerges from French intellectuals colliding with German phenomenology — specifically the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger — filtered through the particular historical pressure of fascism, occupation, collaboration, resistance, liberation, and the Cold War that followed.
The philosophical core can be stated simply, though the implications are anything but: there is no pre-given human nature. There’s no essence that existence expresses. Existence comes first, and essence is what gets made of it through choice. This is the meaning of Sartre’s famous reversal. In traditional theology, God conceives the idea of a person — the essence — before creating them, the existence. Without God, the order flips. Existence comes before nature. The nature has to be chosen, and choosing can’t be avoided — even the refusal to choose is a choice, and it’s one you’re responsible for.
The freedom this describes is not comfortable. Sartre called it “condemned” — condemned to be free, meaning the responsibility for what gets made of the self can’t be escaped. The “bad faith” Sartre keeps returning to is the attempt to escape this freedom by pretending it doesn’t exist: treating yourself as determined by your role, your nature, your circumstances, your past. The waiter who performs his waiter-ness so completely he seems to have become his function. The woman who submits to her society’s expectations of femininity as though they were natural rather than imposed. Both in bad faith. Both refusing the radical freedom that’s actually their condition.
At the Existentialist Café: Chapter by Chapter
Husserl and the Phenomenological Method
Bakewell traces existentialism’s roots to Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher who developed phenomenology as a method for philosophy. Husserl was responding to a crisis in European thought: the natural sciences had gotten so successful at describing the physical world that a lot of intellectuals concluded the only real description of experience was the scientific one — neurons, physics, biochemistry. Which left out everything most immediate and most important about human experience. The quality of the red of a rose. The texture of anxiety. The structure of a conversation.
Husserl’s phenomenological method said: bracket the theoretical assumptions, describe the actual structure of experience as it presents itself to consciousness. Not “what is consciousness, neurologically?” — “what does it look like from the inside?” His student Heidegger took this method somewhere dramatically different, asking not about the structure of consciousness but about the structure of “Being” itself — what it means for anything to exist at all, and how that question bears on the particular mode of being human beings have.
Heidegger: Being-in-the-World
Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (1927) is one of the most influential and most difficult books in the philosophical canon. Bakewell’s treatment of it is arguably her greatest achievement in the whole book — genuinely comprehensible without pretending it’s simpler than it is. Heidegger’s central contribution is “being-in-the-world,” his alternative to the Cartesian picture of the mind as a thinking substance somehow enclosed inside a body, connected to an external world only indirectly.
For Heidegger, that picture is confused from the start. We don’t first exist as minds and then reach out to encounter the world. We’re always already in it — embedded in a network of practical concerns, tools, other people, and meaningful contexts that constitute our being rather than confronting it from outside. The hammer in your hand isn’t an object you’re aware of as an object; when you’re hammering properly, the hammer is an extension of your purposeful engagement with the task. It only becomes an object of explicit attention once it breaks. Trivial-seeming example. Carries enormous philosophical weight anyway — it shows theoretical contemplation is a derived mode of experience, built on a primary mode of engaged, practical, world-directed activity.
Heidegger’s other great contribution, feeding directly into existentialism, is his analysis of “Dasein” (roughly, human existence) as characterized by its relationship to its own death. We’re the beings who know we’ll die, and that knowledge — genuinely owned rather than suppressed in what Heidegger calls “das Man” (the They, the impersonal social average) — is the source of authentic existence. Genuinely face your finitude and something shifts: the time is yours, and it’s limited; the choices are genuinely consequential because there’s no unmaking them; the conventional answers to how to live — what “one does,” what “they say,” what “everyone” expects — stop substituting for authentic engagement with actual possibilities.
The Heidegger Problem
Bakewell doesn’t let Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation pass without examination. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and, as rector of Freiburg University, participated enthusiastically in transforming the university along Nazi ideological lines. He gave speeches celebrating Hitler’s governance and — more disturbing — never genuinely recanted after the war. His postwar statements were evasive, self-serving, notably lacking any acknowledgment of the specific evil he’d abetted.
The philosophical question this raises isn’t simple, and Bakewell examines it honestly: can Heidegger’s philosophy be cleanly separated from his politics? The case that it can is that the philosophy doesn’t logically entail Nazism — other people drew very different political conclusions from phenomenology. The case that it can’t is that the specific features of his philosophy that seemed to make Nazism attractive to him — hostility to rational universalism, valorization of particular rootedness (Heimat, the German people’s specific being), contempt for cosmopolitan liberalism — aren’t incidental to the thought. They’re connected to its deep structure. This is the hardest case in the book, and Bakewell handles it with more intellectual honesty than most Heidegger commentators manage.
Sartre: Freedom as Burden
Sartre’s philosophy is in many ways a radicalization of themes found in Heidegger, stripped of the mystical elements and reframed around conscious choice. The core of Sartre’s existentialism is the absolute freedom of consciousness: consciousness is defined by its ability to negate, to take a distance from, any situation it finds itself in. However determined the circumstances, however much shaping by history and biology has occurred, there’s always a gap between the situation and the choice of how to respond to it. Absolute freedom lives in that gap. So does absolute responsibility.
Bad faith is the attempt to deny this freedom — acting as if there were no choice, as if character, role, past, nature determined behavior independent of the ongoing act of choosing. Sartre’s examples are famous and slightly unfair: the waiter who’s become so completely the waiter he seems to have no being outside the role; the woman who, on a first date, lets her companion take her hand without withdrawing it or actively reciprocating, pretending not to notice what’s happening. Both treating freedom as though it weren’t there.
Bakewell is useful in showing why this analysis, compelling as a description of bad faith, is limited as a prescription for how to live. The demand for permanent self-consciousness, for permanent acknowledgment of radical freedom, is psychologically unsustainable and, pushed far enough, pathological. There’s good reason for the waiter to inhabit the role of waiter while waitering — exhausting and counterproductive not to. The real question is whether the role gets chosen and inhabited with awareness, or whether it’s replaced the self entirely.
De Beauvoir: Freedom Situated
Simone de Beauvoir is both the most underrated figure in the existentialist canon and the one whose work has turned out to be most directly consequential in the world. “The Second Sex” (1949) applied Sartrean existentialism to the situation of women with devastating effectiveness: femininity is not a natural expression of female essence but a “situation” — a set of imposed constraints, expectations, and definitions limiting women’s freedom just as effectively as any explicit prohibition. Women have been encouraged to define themselves as “the Other” — a complement and contrast to the male subject who defaults to being the person — rather than as free subjects defining their own existence.
The philosophical move is simple and radical: if existence precedes essence, then “femininity” as an essence imposed on women from outside — by culture, by expectation, by the requirement to be appealing and complementary to men — is exactly the kind of bad faith existentialism condemns. A woman who accepts the definition of herself as essentially feminine is in bad faith the same way a waiter who’s completely become his function is in bad faith. The authentic response is recognizing the situation as a situation — constructed, contingent, alterable — and exercising genuine freedom within it and against it.
Camus: The Absurd
Albert Camus refused the existentialist label but is philosophically inseparable from the movement. His contribution was “the absurd” — not a description of something ridiculous but the name for a specific confrontation: the human need for meaning, clarity, explanation on one side, the universe’s complete and permanent silence about meaning on the other. The universe doesn’t mean anything. The need for it to mean something doesn’t stop. The gap between those two facts is the absurd.
The wrong responses to the absurd are “philosophical suicide” (adopting a religious belief that fills the gap with a borrowed meaning) and actual suicide (eliminating the being that needs meaning). The right response, in Camus’s vision, is revolt — continued passionate engagement with life in full acknowledgment of its meaninglessness. Sisyphus pushing his boulder is the absurd hero: the task is pointless, he knows it’s pointless, he continues anyway, with what Camus calls defiant joy. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Not irony. The deepest affirmation humans are capable of — affirming life in full knowledge of its futility.
What Bakewell Gets Right
The biographical-philosophical method is brilliantly executed throughout. By showing who these people were — their loves, their arguments, their political betrayals and intellectual courage — Bakewell makes the philosophy feel like what it actually was: thinking done by specific human beings in specific circumstances, with everything at stake. She’s also exceptionally fair to all her subjects, including the difficult ones. She treats Heidegger with more intellectual generosity than most and more intellectual honesty than his admirers. She treats Sartre with more warmth than his critics manage while staying clear-eyed about his considerable flaws as a person and as a political thinker.
What Bakewell Gets Wrong
The book occasionally sacrifices philosophical rigor for narrative flow. Some of the more technical aspects of Heidegger’s and Sartre’s philosophy get simplified to the point of losing important distinctions. Merleau-Ponty, who in many ways is the most immediately useful of the existentialists for practical life, gets less attention than Sartre and Heidegger, even though his embodied phenomenology has proven more scientifically productive and more practically applicable than either of theirs. The book also, understandably, focuses on the French-German axis and gives relatively little attention to the broader existentialist tradition — Kierkegaard’s foundational work, Jaspers’s existenz philosophy, the Spanish tradition of Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset.
The Protocol: Applying Existentialist Ideas
- Phenomenological attention: Choose one ordinary activity — making coffee, commuting, eating lunch — and spend five minutes attending to it the way phenomenology does: not evaluating it, not planning through it, describing its actual texture as it presents itself. Harder than it sounds. More useful than it looks.
- Bad faith inventory: Identify one area of life where the current behavior treats a choice as a non-choice, as if the role or situation determined the behavior independent of any choosing. Name the freedom being denied. Not an invitation to abandon every role — an invitation to inhabit them with awareness.
- Authentic finitude: Apply Heidegger’s death meditation. Acknowledge, specifically and concretely, that death is coming, that the time available is genuinely limited, and that the conventional answers for how to spend it are not automatically the right ones. What changes about current priorities once that’s actually acknowledged?
- Absurdist revolt: Apply Camus to the most significant current source of meaninglessness or futility. The task isn’t finding meaning where there is none — it’s continuing to engage fully with a life known not to be permanently meaningful. What does full engagement with futility actually look like, specifically?
Books Similar to At the Existentialist Café
Sarah Bakewell’s earlier “How to Live” on Montaigne applies the same biographical-philosophical method to a single figure with similar success. Frederic Gros’s “A Philosophy of Walking” is a shorter example of the same genre — philosophy made vivid through biographical and experiential context. For Sartre directly, his “Existentialism Is a Humanism” lecture (published separately) is the most accessible entry to his own thought, about sixty pages. De Beauvoir’s “The Ethics of Ambiguity” is her own best philosophical statement, shorter and more accessible than “The Second Sex.” For Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus” is essential, and “The Stranger” gives the philosophical position its most powerful fictional form. For Heidegger, the only genuinely accessible introduction is Magda King’s “A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time.”
Who Should Read At the Existentialist Café
Anyone who wants to understand existentialism and has been put off by the difficulty of the primary texts. Anyone interested in twentieth-century intellectual history — the period in which existentialism operated, roughly 1930-1970, was one of the most consequential in that history, and these figures were central to it. Anyone interested in the relationship between philosophical ideas and political choices — the existentialists’ political lives are among the most instructive, and cautionary, examples in modern intellectual history.
The book is also genuinely useful for people working through questions of freedom, authenticity, and responsibility in their own lives. Existentialist philosophy got created by people under enormous pressure — occupied France, Cold War choices, the aftermath of the Holocaust — and it shows. Not comfortable ideas. Honest ones. The honesty is part of the value.
Integration: Living Existentialism
The existentialist insight most immediately useful for contemporary life is bad faith — specifically, the habit of treating choices as non-choices, letting the surrounding cultural framework answer the fundamental questions (how to live, what to value, who to become) that are actually yours to answer. Bad faith is comfortable. It removes the burden of radical responsibility. It allows living as “one does” instead of as chosen, which means the circumstances get blamed when the life stops feeling like it belongs to the person living it.
The existentialist demand — not comfortable, not always achievable, but the right demand — is to inhabit your freedom. Not abandon every role and commitment in a permanent revolution of self-reinvention. Choose the roles with full awareness that they are choices. Inhabit the commitments knowing they’re yours rather than assigned. Take responsibility for what’s being made of the existence you’ve been given. This isn’t therapy. It’s philosophy — the harder, slower, more honest practice of thinking seriously about what it means to be a human being, and what that means for how life actually gets lived.
Existentialist Caf Summary: Your Questions Answered
Do I need to read the original existentialists to benefit from this book? No — Bakewell’s book functions as a complete introduction. But reading it creates the desire to read the originals, which is part of its value. Designed to open doors, not replace what’s behind them.
Was Heidegger genuinely a Nazi or was he just opportunistic? Bakewell examines this carefully and arrives at a detailed conclusion: the evidence suggests genuine ideological affinity with aspects of National Socialism, particularly its hostility to liberal rationalism and its valorization of particular cultural rootedness over universal values. How much this compromises the philosophy is a genuine philosophical dispute. Bakewell’s position is that the philosophy has to be engaged with in full awareness of the political failure, not quarantined from it.
What is the practical upshot of “existence precedes essence”? There’s no expression of a fixed nature anyone was born with. What gets made through choice is what a person is. Which means current character or behavior can’t be justified by appeal to “that’s just who I am.” It also means there’s no pre-given answer to how to live available to lean on — the decision has to get made, it’s yours, and you’re responsible for it. Liberating and terrifying at once, which is why the existentialists insisted freedom wasn’t a gift. It was a burden.
Is Camus an existentialist? Camus actively resisted the label, and the philosophical dispute between Sartre and Camus in the early 1950s — which ended their friendship — was partly about this. Camus’s “absurdism” shares existentialism’s starting point (a world without given meaning, human beings who need meaning) but differs in its response: Sartre emphasizes radical choice and commitment, Camus emphasizes revolt and passionate engagement with life as it is. Real difference. Strong family resemblance regardless. Bakewell treats him as part of the existentialist world without forcing the label onto him.
The Lasting Provocation
Existentialism’s legacy is partly carried in the specific ideas of its founders, but it’s also carried in a style of philosophical engagement that they pioneered and that remains as necessary as it ever was. That style combines rigorous philosophical analysis with genuine attention to concrete human experience, philosophical honesty with political engagement, and the courage to ask uncomfortable questions with the intellectual integrity to follow them wherever they lead.
In a cultural moment characterized by the mass production of comfortable philosophical frameworks — positive psychology applied without nuance, stoicism marketed as a life hack, mindfulness divorced from its ethical foundations — existentialism remains a provocation. Its insistence on radical freedom sits uncomfortably in a culture that wants to explain everything through brain chemistry, childhood trauma, or social structure. Its insistence on responsibility sits uncomfortably in a culture that wants to excuse everything through victimhood, addiction, or systemic forces. Its insistence on authenticity sits uncomfortably in a culture that wants to tell people they’re fine exactly as they are, that current preferences and current beliefs require no examination or challenge.
The existentialists were not always right. Sometimes wrong in spectacular and damaging ways, actually. But they were never comfortable, and their discomfort was productive. The questions they asked remain open, and the quality of attention they brought to those questions remains a standard worth aspiring to. That’s what Bakewell’s generous and intelligent book demonstrates, and it’s the most important thing it has to say.
What Existentialism Got Right That Psychology Gets Wrong
Contemporary psychology and psychiatry have largely displaced existentialism as the language educated Westerners use to make sense of their inner lives. This displacement has had costs worth naming. Psychology, at its clinical base, runs on a medical model: normal functioning state, deviations from it, restoring the function. Existentialism runs on a different model entirely: no pre-given normal, only the ongoing project of becoming, and the relevant question isn’t whether functioning is normal but whether the life is authentic — genuinely yours, or an assemblage of external definitions accepted without examination.
The psychological model is better equipped to treat genuine pathology — mood, cognition, and behavior disruptions with neurobiological components that respond to specific interventions. But for the more diffuse suffering that characterizes much of contemporary unhappiness — the sense that the life isn’t yours, that a role someone else wrote is being performed, that everything you were supposed to want is in hand and none of it registers — existentialism has more to say than clinical psychology does, because it’s asking the right question. Not “what’s wrong with your functioning?” Whose life is this, actually, and is it being lived?
This is what Bakewell’s book ultimately offers beyond its value as intellectual history: a vocabulary and a set of questions that cut through the therapeutic language that has colonized the discourse of the self. Bad faith, authentic existence, being-toward-death, the absurd — not clinical concepts. Philosophical ones, addressing a philosophical problem: the problem of being a free consciousness in a world constantly pressuring that freedom to stop exercising itself and just become what’s expected. The existentialists faced this problem in its most extreme form — under fascism, under Stalinism, in the shadow of the Holocaust — and built tools for thinking about it that stay sharp precisely because the pressure they addressed hasn’t diminished. It’s just changed form. The coercion is gentler now. The conformity is more comfortable. The bad faith is more voluntary. If anything, the existentialist questions are more urgent than ever.
The Legacy and the Future
Existentialism as a movement peaked in the 1950s and 1960s and was subsequently displaced in academic philosophy by analytic philosophy (in the Anglophone world) and structuralism and post-structuralism (in France). The academic displacement is real but largely irrelevant to existentialism’s practical value. The questions it asked — what does it mean to be free? what constitutes authentic existence? how do we live in a world without given meaning? — are permanent features of human experience, not temporary preoccupations of a particular historical moment.
What Bakewell does, in the end, is show these questions weren’t answers to abstract puzzles but responses to actual situations: the occupation, the camps, the choices about collaboration and resistance, the aftermath of liberation, the decisions about how to live once the comfortable certainties of religion and political ideology had been destroyed by events. Philosophy at its best is always responsive to actual human situations. Existentialism was philosophy at its best, by people at their most tested. The ideas outlasted the historical moment that produced them because the human situation they describe — freedom without guarantee, meaning that must be made rather than found, responsibility that can’t be escaped without bad faith — isn’t historical. It’s simply what it’s like to be a conscious, mortal, free human being in a world that doesn’t automatically answer back.
The Politics Problem and the Philosopher’s Dilemma
Bakewell’s book confronts a problem that haunts the entire existentialist project: the relationship between philosophical commitment and political engagement. The existentialists were not detached academics. They believed passionately that philosophy required action, that intellectual integrity demanded political commitment, that the choice not to engage was itself a political choice. They were right about this. And their political choices were, in several cases, catastrophic.
Heidegger’s Nazism has already been covered. Sartre’s Stalinism is a different but equally instructive case. Sartre knew about the Soviet gulags — the evidence was available, and Albert Camus confronted him with it directly — and refused for years to acknowledge their significance, because acknowledging them would have undermined the political commitment he’d already decided to make. His reasoning: the Soviet project represented the best available hope for the working class, and criticizing it would undermine that hope in a way that served reactionary interests. He was wrong. And the wrongness had a cost — his considerable authority got used, through the 1950s, to suppress information about systematic Soviet atrocities.
The lesson Bakewell draws isn’t that intellectuals should avoid politics — the existentialists were right that avoidance is itself a political act. The lesson concerns the specific danger of letting political commitments override epistemological ones: deciding in advance what you will and won’t allow yourself to believe because of the political consequences you fear the belief might have. This is the intellectual’s version of bad faith — using the framework of political commitment to justify not looking at evidence that would complicate the commitment. Sartre, the philosopher of authentic existence and radical responsibility, repeatedly used political loyalty as cover for refusing the specific responsibility of acknowledging inconvenient truths. The irony isn’t lost on Bakewell. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone reading her.
The practical lesson for anyone who takes ideas seriously: hold political commitments with genuine intellectual humility. Commitment to justice and human flourishing doesn’t determine in advance what specific conclusions thinking about the world must reach. Those conclusions have to be earned through honest engagement with evidence, not protected through the motivated reasoning political loyalty so often generates. The philosopher willing to follow evidence wherever it leads, even somewhere inconvenient, is doing philosophy. The one shaping evidence to protect prior commitments is doing something else, however eloquently it gets dressed up.
The Value of the Biographical Approach to Philosophy
Bakewell’s method — biography and philosophy woven together — is worth defending as a general approach, because it has real epistemological advantages over purely abstract philosophical argument. Knowing Heidegger developed his analysis of anxiety and being-toward-death while watching his own world disintegrate after World War I, the philosophy resonates differently. Knowing Camus wrote “The Myth of Sisyphus” under German occupation in Paris, the insistence on revolt and the refusal of despair becomes something more than a philosophical position. It becomes testimony. Knowing de Beauvoir’s analysis of women’s situation was drawn partly from her own experience navigating a philosophical world that consistently treated her as Sartre’s companion rather than a thinker in her own right, the philosophical analysis gains a dimension abstract argument alone can’t provide.
This isn’t the genetic fallacy — the error of evaluating an argument by its origin rather than its merits. The philosophical arguments stand or fall on their own terms. But philosophical ideas aren’t generated by abstract reasoning machines operating in contextual vacuums. They’re generated by specific human beings trying to make sense of specific circumstances, and understanding those circumstances helps clarify what the ideas are actually for — what problem they’re solving, what experience they’re trying to articulate, what’s at stake. Bakewell’s great contribution is restoring this human context to philosophy that academic presentation has stripped away, and showing the ideas are stronger, not weaker, once the lives they emerged from are understood.
Situated Freedom: Between Determinism and Pure Choice
One of the lasting philosophical problems Bakewell’s survey highlights is the tension between existentialism’s emphasis on radical freedom and the obvious ways human freedom is constrained by social, historical, and biological conditions. Sartre’s early formulation — “we are condemned to be free,” meaning even in the most constrained circumstances the necessity of choosing can’t be escaped — seems to deny or minimize those constraints in ways that strike many readers as naively voluntarist.
De Beauvoir’s philosophical development of the existentialist framework is in large part a response to this tension. Her concept of “situated freedom” — freedom always exercised within a situation that constrains, shapes, and enables it — gives a more adequate account of the relationship between freedom and condition than Sartre’s early stark dichotomy between the pour-soi (consciousness, freedom) and the en-soi (things, facticity). Freedom is real. But it’s always the freedom of this particular person, in these particular circumstances, with this particular history, these particular capabilities, these particular relationships.
This matters for how resilience gets understood. The resilient person isn’t one who claims unlimited freedom from circumstances, who treats adversity as irrelevant because consciousness is always free. That’s a form of philosophical denial. The resilient person exercises the genuine freedom that remains available within genuinely constraining circumstances — who, as Frankl demonstrated, maintains the freedom to choose an attitude and a response even after everything else has been taken. A situated freedom. A constrained freedom. But genuine freedom nonetheless — the kind that actually matters for navigating the worst that life delivers.
The Body as Site of Vulnerability and Strength
Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the existentialist framework — the insistence that human existence is irreducibly bodily, that consciousness is always embodied and the body is always a form of intentionality — has real implications for how vulnerability and strength get thought about in the context of adversity. The body isn’t just a vehicle for consciousness. It’s the medium through which all experience occurs, and its condition directly shapes the quality and possibility of experience.
Adversity is often, at its most concrete, bodily adversity — illness, physical limitation, pain, the degradation of physical capability. The existentialist framework, in its Sartrean form, is ill-equipped to address this kind of adversity because it tends to treat bodily facticity as merely a constraint on freedom rather than something that constitutively shapes the experience of freedom. Merleau-Ponty’s embodied approach fits the reality of bodily adversity better: the person whose body has been damaged by illness or injury doesn’t simply confront new facticity from a position of unchanged freedom.
A different body results, with different capabilities and different vulnerabilities, and the freedom itself is genuinely different as a result.
But Merleau-Ponty’s framework also points toward the body as a source of strength and resilience, not just limitation. The skilled practitioner — the surgeon, the athlete, the musician — has a form of embodied intelligence that transcends explicit conscious knowledge, available precisely because the body has been trained to respond with a wisdom the conscious mind can’t fully access or articulate. Building this kind of embodied capability is a form of resilience investment. It creates resources that stay available even when conscious deliberation gets impaired by fear, grief, or exhaustion.
The Present Moment: Existentialism and Mindfulness
The existentialist analysis of time — particularly Heidegger’s account of authentic temporality in Being and Time — converges in interesting ways with contemporary mindfulness traditions. Heidegger argues that inauthentic existence is characterized by flight from the present: into the past (through nostalgia, guilt, endless replaying of what was) or into the future (through anxiety, planning, deferral of genuine engagement with what’s happening now). Authentic existence involves a different relationship to time — not denial of past and future, but a kind of “moment of vision” (Augenblick) in which the full situation of existence, past, present, and the possibilities the future projects, gets gathered and encountered with genuine presence.
Not identical to mindfulness as typically taught — Heidegger would resist the Buddhist dissolution of the self that some forms of mindfulness aim at — but it shares the emphasis on genuine presence, on genuinely encountering what’s actually happening rather than the managed, distracted relationship with experience that makes up most of ordinary daily life. The person genuinely present to their own situation, not fleeing the discomfort of the present into fantasies of the past or the future, is living more authentically. More resiliently, too, than the person who’s mastered the art of managing experience from a safe psychological distance.
Bakewell doesn’t develop these connections explicitly, but they’re latent in her presentation of the existentialist framework, and they suggest existentialism and contemporary contemplative traditions are engaged with overlapping problems from different angles — that the insights of each can illuminate the other in ways neither fully anticipates.
What Existentialism Demands of Its Readers
Reading Bakewell’s book — or any serious treatment of existentialist philosophy — is not a comfortable experience if it’s read genuinely rather than as an intellectual exercise. The existentialist challenge is a personal one: it asks how much of the reader’s own life is characterized by bad faith, by flight from freedom into the comfort of role, routine, and das Man. It asks whether genuine responsibility is being taken for the choices that constitute one’s existence, or whether the social structures and inherited expectations that feel like necessities — but are, at least in part, genuine choices — are being used as cover.
This examination is uncomfortable precisely because it tends to reveal the gap between self-understanding and actual practice — the ways bad faith has crept in, freedom has been hidden from, genuine choices have been treated as predetermined facts. The existentialist response to this revelation isn’t self-condemnation — Sartre is clear that bad faith is a universal human tendency, not a personal failing of particularly weak or cowardly people. It’s an invitation to greater authenticity instead: to begin, from wherever things currently stand, the project of taking genuine responsibility for the shape of a life.
Demanding work. No completion point exists for it. Authenticity isn’t a state achieved and maintained — it’s an ongoing project renewed in every situation, against the constant gravitational pull of das Man and the permanent temptation of bad faith. But it’s the work that makes genuine selfhood possible, and genuine selfhood is, in the end, what the existentialists were most seriously pursuing and most seriously recommending.
Bakewell’s book is an excellent guide to that project. It takes the thinkers seriously without taking them uncritically. It illuminates the ideas through the lives without reducing the ideas to biography. And it demonstrates, through its own quality of sustained, curious, honest attention, the philosophical virtue it’s trying to convey.
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