At the Existentialist Café Read Online Free PDF

were simply born that way. In any case, existentialist philosophy offered gay people encouragement to live in the way that felt right, rather than trying to fit in with others’ ideas of how they should be.
    For those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or for those fighting against colonialism, existentialism offered a change of perspective — literally, as Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the civil rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German-American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich.
    No one could argue that existentialism was responsible for every social change in the mid-twentieth century. But, with its insistence onfreedom and authenticity, it gave impetus to radicals and protesters. And when the waves of change rose and broke into the students’ and workers’ uprisings of 1968, in Paris and elsewhere, many of theslogans painted on city walls echoed existentialist themes:
– It is forbidden to forbid.
– Neither god nor master.
– A man is not ‘intelligent’; he is free or he is not.
– Be realistic: demand the impossible.
    As Sartre remarked, the demonstrators on the 1968 barricades demanded nothing and everything — that is to say, theydemanded freedom.
    By 1968, most of the torn-shirted, kohl-eyed night-owls of the late 1940s had settled down to quiet homes and jobs, but not Sartre or Beauvoir. They marched in the front line, joined the Paris barricades, and addressed factory workers and students on picket lines, even though they sometimes found themselves perplexed by the new generation’s way of doing things. On 20 May 1968, Sartre spoke to a gathering of about 7,000 students who had occupied theSorbonne’s magnificent auditorium. Of all the eager intellectuals who had wanted to get involved, Sartre was the one chosen to be wired up to a microphone and led before the melee to speak — as always, so diminutive that he was hard to spot, but in no doubt about his qualification for the role. He appeared first at a window to address students in the courtyard outside, like the Pope on the Vatican balcony, before being led into the packed auditorium. The students had piled themselves everywhere inside, climbing over the statues — ‘there were students sitting in the arms of Descartes and others on Richelieu’s shoulders’, wrote Beauvoir. Loudspeakers mounted on the columns in the hallways transmitted the speeches outside. A TV camera appeared, but the students shouted for it to be taken away. Sartre had to bellow to be heard even through the microphone, but the crowd slowly calmed down to listen to the grand old existentialist. Afterwards, they kept him busy with questions about socialism and about postcolonial liberation movements. Beauvoir worried that he’d never get out of the hall again. When he did, it was tofind a jealous group of writers waiting in the wings, annoyed that he’d been the only ‘star’ (as Marguerite Duras allegedly grumbled) whom the students wanted to hear.
    Sartre was then just short of his sixty-third birthday. His listeners were young enough to be his grandchildren. Few would have remembered the end of the war, let alone those early years of the 1930s when he had begun thinking about freedom and existence. They would have seen Sartre more as a national treasure than as truly one of themselves. Yet they owed even more to him than they could have realised, in a way that went beyond political activism. He formed a link between them and his own generation of dissatisfied students in the late 1920s, bored with their studies and longing for ‘destructive’ new ideas. Further back, he connected them to the whole line of philosophical rebels: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and the rest.
    Sartre was the bridge to all the traditions