At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

There, she argued that the question of the relationship between our physical constraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a ‘problem’ requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it.

From now on, he wrote, we must always take into account our knowledge that we can destroy ourselves at will, with all our history and perhaps life on earth itself. Nothing stops us but our own free choosing. If we want to survive, we have to decide to live.

Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.

But roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms.

I think philosophy becomes more interesting when it is cast into the form of a life.

This ‘setting aside’ or ‘bracketing out’ of speculative add-ons Husserl called epoché — a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics, who used it to mean a general suspension of judgement about the world. Husserl sometimes referred to it as a phenomenological ‘reduction’ instead: the process of boiling away extra theorising about what coffee ‘really’

Existentialist ideas flowed into the widening stream of 1950s anti-conformism, and then into the full-blown idealism of the late 1960s.

Whatever the source, Husserl’s new thinking included reflections on what he called the Lebenswelt, or ‘life-world’ — that barely noticed social, historical and physical context in which all our activities take place, and which we generally take for granted.

It is difficult enough to think of oneself as free at all, but Sartre goes further by saying that I am literally nothing beyond what I decide to be. To realise the extent of my freedom is to be plunged into what both Heidegger and Kierkegaard called ‘anxiety’ — Angst or, in French, angoisse.

They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences.