I have watched that brief film clip online a dozen or more times, peering into the low-definition images of the many faces, wondering what existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre meant to each of them. I only really know what they meant to me. Sartre’s books changed my life too, albeit in an indirect and low-key way. I somehow failed to notice the news

She wrote to Heidegger during the winter of 1932–3 asking point-blank whether he was a Nazi sympathiser. He denied it, in an angry letter emphasising how helpful he had been to Jewish students and colleagues. She was unconvinced, and they lost contact for seventeen years.

Those who had jobs were haunted by the fear of losing them. People who could not afford homes became vagabonds or relied on relatives to put them up, which strained family relationships to their limits.

I now read the whole thing again. Then came Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre. Eventually I returned to the monumental Heidegger.

Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety. He heightens this anxiety by pointing out that what you do really matters.

René Descartes, who had founded modern philosophy by stating Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the starting point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this prec

Sartre and Beauvoir made it novelistic, and hence more palatable for the non-professional. In her 1945 lecture ‘The Novel and Metaphysics’, Beauvoir observed that novels by phenomenologists were not as dull as those of some other philosophers because they described instead of explaining or putting things in categories. Phenomenologists take us to t

Yet she stuck by her analysis: for Arendt, if you do not respond adequately when the times demand it, you show a lack of imagination and attention that is as dangerous as deliberately committing an abuse. It amounts to disobeying the one command she had absorbed from Heidegger in those Marburg days: Think!

‘existential’ in a new way to denote thought concerning the problems of human existence.