Modern existentialism originated in a 1932-3 Paris bar conversation
Evidence
But one can go the other way, and narrow the birth of modern existentialism down to a moment near the turn of 1932–3, when three young philosophers were sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, catching up on gossip and drinking the house speciality, apricot cocktails. … This was Sartre’s debonair old school friend Raymond Aron, a fellow graduate of the École normale supérieure. Like the other two, Aron was in Paris for his winter break. But whereas Sartre and Beauvoir had been teaching in the French provinces - Sartre in Le Havre, Beauvoir in Rouen - Aron had been studying in Berlin. He was now telling his friends about a philosophy he had discovered there with the sinuous name of phenomenology - a word so long yet elegantly balanced that, in French as in English, it can make a line of iambic trimeter all by itself. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 8
But one can go the other way, and narrow the birth of modern existentialism down to a moment near the turn of 1932–3, when three young philosophers were sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, catching up on gossip and drinking the house speciality, apricot cocktails. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 8
Categorization
- CANDY: The apricot-cocktail origin story of existentialism is a fun, self-contained anecdote worth telling.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 8
- XREF: connects to: Europe’s 1930s political chaos formed the backdrop for existentialism’s rise — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 399
Broader Connections
- Europe’s 1930s political chaos formed the backdrop for existentialism’s rise
#complicates(0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 399