I am enjoying Sarah Bakewell’s book At the Existentialist Café. It gives a history of modern philosophers like Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir and Heidegger.
At the heart of French Existentialist thinking was the idea of freedom. “To realise the extent of my freedom is to be plunged into a state of angst. Not a fear of anything in particular, but a pervasive unease about oneself and one’s existence.”
French intellectuals were followers of American culture, particularly jazz, at the time. They were also given to wearing plaid shirts (like Monty Python’s lumberjacks).
Existentialism had its roots in Kierkegaard and Heidegger but became more accessible through the novels of Camus such as The Outsider, and Sartre’s Nausea.
odespinner 