Sarah Bakewell’s starting point for her lively account is the meeting of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Raymond Aron at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on Rue Monparnasse in 1932. It all makes for an entertaining read, knowing and irreverent by turns.
From this legendary meeting of creative minds, Sartre would dream up his philosophy of love and desire, of freedom and being and the others would do something similar. This was an era when people did not sit staring at iphones in cafés, but rather, smoked a pipe i.e Sartre, or otherwise multiple Disque Bleu or Gitane cigarettes, cogitating hard all the while over café au lait - or apricot cocktails - and blowing intellectual smoke rings at each other.
Eventually books got written, and among them the almost forgotten Chemins de la Liberté trilogy of novels which showed Sartre to be a fine yarn-spinner, when he wanted to be, aside from his sometimes trying philosophical treatises and almost unreadable works like La Nauseé.
The ancillary cast of characters in this 400-pager includes Albert Camus (The Outsider), Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, all of of whom considered two fundamental questions – what we are and how we are to live. The book – whose subtitle is Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails – is accessible, trust us, it would not have got read on BBC Radio 4 if it wasn’t.
I like the remark of Georg Picht, a former student of Heidegger, who recalled the great force of thinking that the revered philosopher radiated on entering the lecture room. Heidegger, it seemed urged his students to think too - forcefully, no doubt - but not necessarily to answer back.
`He thought that saying the first unthought-out thing that came to mind, which is called `discussion’ today, was empty chit-chat,’ recalls Picht. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Paddy Kehoe
