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

The journalist Sebastian Haffner, a law student at the time, also used the word ‘uncanny’ in his diary, adding, ‘Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’ Haffner

It is to follow the first phenomenological imperative: to go to the things themselves in order to describe them, attempting ‘rigorously to put into words what is not ordinarily put into words, what is sometimes considered inexpressible’.

Existentialism and Humanism. Both lecture and book culminated in an anecdote which would have sounded very familiar to an audience fresh from the experience of Nazi Occupation and Liberation. The story summed up both the shock value and the appeal of his philosophy.

The two women were taken, along with many other converts of Jewish origin, to a transit camp and then to the camp of Westerbork.

rather than of seeking knowledge or wisdom for their own sake.

For Husserl, therefore, cross-cultural encounters are generally good, because they stimulate people to self-questioning. He suspected that philosophy started in ancient Greece not, as Heidegger would imagine, because the Greeks had a deep, inward-looking relationship with their Being, but because they were a trading people (albeit sometimes a warli

There is no traced-out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path. But, to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him.

If this is so, then there is a certain refreshment of perspective to be had from revisiting the existentialists, with their boldness and energy. They did not sit around playing with their signifiers. They asked big questions about what it means to live an authentic, fully human life, thrown into a world with many other humans also trying to live. T

the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is: even a book only reveals what it’s ‘about’ to someone who picks it up and peruses it, and is otherwise merely a