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

Sartre uses the example of an alarm clock: it goes off, and I roll out of bed as if I had no choice but to obey it, rather than freely considering whether I really want to get up or not. A similar idea lies behind more recent software applications that block you from helplessly watching videos of cats and puppies when you would rather be getting on

the notion that the Absence of Cream and the Absence of Milk are two definite negativities, just as Cream and Milk are two definite positivities. It is peculiar idea — but what Sartre is trying to get at is the structure of Husserlian intentionality, which defines consciousness as only an insubstantial ‘aboutness’. My consciousness is specifically

Much as they liked Camus personally, neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. For them, life is not absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.

The Flies (the play that was in rehearsal when he met Camus), the Roads of Freedom novels, his many essays and lectures, and above all his masterwork Being and Nothingness, which he developed from his years of note-taking and published in June 1943. It seems extraordinary that a 665-page tome mainly about freedom could come out in the midst of an o

The Stranger and Sisyphus remained bestsellers, appealing to readers for generations afterwards — including those grappling with nothing more unbearable than discontentment in suburbia.

For Kierkegaard, the story shows that we must make this sort of impossible leap in order to continue with life after its flaws have been revealed. As he wrote, Abraham ‘resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd’. This was what Camus thought his modern readers needed to do, but in his case without an

How do you live without sense? The answer offered by both Camus and Kierkegaard amounted to something like the motto in the British morale-boosting poster: Keep Calm and Carry On.

for Camus, we must decide whether to give up or keep going. If we keep going, it must be on the basis of accepting that there is no ultimate meaning to what we do. Camus concludes his book with Sisyphus resuming his endless task while resigning himself to its absurdity. Thus: ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

He is afraid, yet finds a perverse consolation as he looks up at the sky and opens himself ‘to the tender indifference of the world’.