In 1928, aged thirty-nine, he returned to Freiburg to take over the chair left vacant when Husserl retired — again with Husserl’s helpful support.

Beauvoir worried that he’d never get out of the hall again.

Tomáš Masaryk — Czechoslovakia’s president, and the friend who had persuaded Husserl to study with Franz Brentano. He died in 1937, and

As Arendt might put it, we slip into banality, failing to think.

The Husserl archives survived the war and are mostly still in Louvain, with his library. They have kept researchers busy for over seventy-five years, and have generated a collected edition under the title Husserliana. So far, this comprises forty-two volumes of collected works, nine volumes of extra ‘materials’, thirty-four volumes of miscellaneous

I might mistake it for something coming from afar, perhaps a thin and reedy keening like the unheard cries for help of

But as a human being, I have no predefined nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. 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.

Here she drew on her wartime reading of Hegel, who had analysed how rival consciousnesses wrestle for dominance, with one playing ‘master’ and the other ‘slave’. The master perceives everything from his own viewpoint, as is natural. But, bizarrely, so does the slave, who ties herself in knots trying to visualise the world from the master’s point of

phenomenological ‘reduction’ instead: the process of boiling away extra theorising about what coffee ‘really’ is, so that we are left only with the intense and immediate flavour — the phenomenon.