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Very readable! Author Bakewell brings all the pieces of the existentialist puzzle together here. This is more of what she did so well for Montaigne in How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which I admired. Bakewell's deft touch makes the turgidities of philosophy dissipate like so much fog over oncoming terrain. The book is so tremendously rich, so filled with great stuff that one wants to memorize it, so just a few highlights here.

1. We're introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and their crowning achievements at the start in writing that is engaging and at times amusing. Then we learn of the others who contributed to the development of phenomenology and its offspring, existentialism, in ways large and small. These include Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Clemens Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil and Jan Patočka.

2. It was Husserl's conception of phenomenology that first excited Sartre. "The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality." (p. 40)

3. The section detailing the removal of the Husserl's unpublished manuscripts from a Germany on the precipice of war is pure cloak and dagger. The papers were kept in a big house by Husserl's widow, "officially classed as Jewish despite her Protestant faith," whose civil rights were by this time almost nonexistent. Adding to the urgency was the fact that the papers (40,000+ pages!) were written in an minuscule shorthand that to the untrained eye would probably look like secret code. Fortunately, a small coterie comprised of clergy, Husserl's colleagues and protégées and several nuns eventually got the papers to Louvain, Belgium—by way of Berlin!—where they remain today.

4. When Albert Camus arrives upon the scene in 1942, we learn of the "important philosophical differences" that divide his work from Sartre's.

As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns applying their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I'm seeing, then I'm not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.

Sartre knew very well that we can lose sight of the sense of things. If I am sufficiently upset at how my team is doing, or undergoing a crisis in my grasp of the world in general, I might stare hopelessly at the players as though they were indeed a group of random people running around. Many such moments occur in Nausea, when Roquentin finds himself flummoxed by a door knob or a beer glass. But for Sartre, unlike for Camus, such collapses reveal a pathological state: they are failures of intentionality, not glimpses into a greater truth. (p. 151)

5. The philosophy of Heidegger, one of Husserl's protégés, is compared and contrasted with actions in his life, like joining the Nazi party. This is Bakewell's method with all her philosophers, but with Heidegger the approach is especially gripping. Did any of Bakewell's subjects' words diverge more from their actions than Heidegger's? Jaspers spent the immediate postwar years writing The Question of German Guilt. In it:

Jaspers inner voice calls to mind Heidegger's [early] authentic voice of Dasein, [which] calls from within and demands answerability. But Heidegger was now refusing answerability and keeping his own voice to himself. He had told Marcuse he did not want to be one of those who jabber out excuses, while carrying on as though nothing had changed. Jasper similarly felt that facile or hypocritical excuses were no good. But he would not accept Heidegger silence either. (p. 192)

6. Postwar France was an uneasy place. Much of it centered around personal allegiance to the Soviet Union, while the Gaullist's party, Sartre felt, "had become almost fascist in style." The justification for the USSR in those days was that, yes, while Stalin may appear to be running a police state—complete with show trials; prison camps; no human, much less civil rights; state-sanctioned terror, etc. (See Robert Conquest's The Great Terror)—these methods were mere bagatelles, crude, temporary stop gaps in support of the coming socialist paradise. It was a means-justifies-the-ends argument. One might ask how the Existentialists, for whom freedom was a key philosophical pillar, reconciled matters. It's a very good question.

When the Korean war broke out our philosophers and many of their countrymen expected Russia to occupy Paris, much as Germany had done, all as a prelude to the global holocaust of World War III. North Korea's invasion of the South so shocked Merleau-Ponty that he "...thought it showed the Communist world to be just as greedy as the capitalist world and just as inclined to use ideology as a veil." He ultimately turned away from Communism. Never one for the Soviet Union's roughshod methods of expediency, especially if they cost lives, Albert Camus published The Rebel, a theory of political activism that was very different from the Communist-approved one. The book appeared at a time when Sartre was turning more resolutely toward Communism. It proved the end of their already strained friendship.

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This is just the sort of writing that I prize. Bakewell has been aware of existentialism ever since picking up Sartre's Nausea at age sixteen. One feels she's lived the material here. At The Existentialist �䲹��é is foremost a tracing out of existentialism's lineage in a biographical format, but it is also a valuable grounding in its literature. The span of human lives—the philosophers' lives—is the armature on which the principles of phenomenology and existentialism are arrayed and thus given meaning. In that structural sense the book reminds me of Walter Kaufmann's fine Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, though �䲹��é is the better written book. Highly recommended.

PS: This was a surprise to me, though perhaps it shouldn't have been, Jean-Paul Sartre apparently loathed the novels of Marcel Proust. No doubt the latter's tales of fin de siècle society cut too close to the bone for someone who'd grown up bourgeois and was now dedicating his life to helping the workers of the world unite.