Existentialism — the great twentieth-century philosophy of freedom, absurdity and living authentically — was not born in a lecture hall. It was born, and lived, over drinks: in smoky Parisian cafés, in a famous cocktail, and in a philosophical tradition that had linked wine and truth for thousands of years1.
Quick facts
- Nietzsche made wine and ecstasy — the “Dionysian” — central to his thought.
- Kierkegaard, a father of existentialism, wrote a banquet called “In Vino Veritas.”
- French existentialism was sparked in 1933 over an apricot cocktail.
- Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus philosophised at the Café de Flore.
The god in the glass
The link between wine and deep thinking is ancient. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche — a crucial forerunner of the existentialists — split human experience into the “Apollonian” (order, restraint, form) and the “Dionysian” (intoxication, ecstasy, the wine-god’s wild dissolving of limits)2. Great art, he argued, needs both — and the Dionysian, the spirit of the vine, is what lets us confront the raw terror and joy of existence3.
The father of existentialism himself, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote a whole dialogue on the theme. His “In Vino Veritas” — “in wine, truth” — is a banquet, modelled on Plato’s Symposium, in which the guests must speak on love, but only under the influence of drink4.
The apricot cocktail
Modern existentialism has its own drinking legend. In 1933, at a Paris bar, the young Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir met their friend Raymond Aron, freshly back from Berlin. Pointing at Sartre’s drink, Aron said that with the new German philosophy of phenomenology, “you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it”1. The cocktail was apricot — and the remark, Beauvoir recalled, turned Sartre pale with excitement. From that glass grew French existentialism.
You can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it.— Raymond Aron to Sartre, 19331
Philosophy’s café
Through the 1940s, Sartre and Beauvoir made the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés — above all the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots — their offices, their salon and their second home. Beauvoir drafted The Second Sex at those marble tables; Sartre worked on Being and Nothingness; Albert Camus argued the absurd across a glass of wine5. Philosophy had left the lecture hall for the café terrace, where ideas came with a carafe.
Wine and the absurd
It suited the philosophy perfectly. If, as the existentialists held, there is no pre-written meaning to life — if “existence precedes essence” — then meaning must be made in the living of it: in choices, in the senses, in the shared glass. Camus, raised in the sunlight of Algeria, wrote of wine and sea and sun as answers to the absurd. A drink among friends, fully present in the moment, is about as existentialist an act as there is. Sarah Bakewell called her history of the movement At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails — and the title says it all.
Frequently asked questions
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References
- France Today — Les Deux Magots & Café de Flore in Paris. ↑
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — The Birth of Tragedy. ↑
- The Collector — What Is the Apollonian and Dionysian in Nietzsche’s Philosophy? ↑
- Søren Kierkegaard — The Banquet (“In Vino Veritas”). ↑
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Jean-Paul Sartre. ↑
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