42
" In an essay almost entirely about sex, Montaigne cites the wisdom of Aristotle: “A man … should touch his wife prudently and soberly, lest if he caresses her too lasciviously the pleasure should transport her outside the bounds of reason.” The physicians warned, too, that excessive pleasure could make sperm curdle inside the woman’s body, rendering her unable to conceive. It was better for the husband to bestow ecstasy elsewhere, where it did not matter what damage it caused. “The kings of Persia,” relates Montaigne, “used to invite their wives to join them at their feasts; but when the wine began to heat them in good earnest and they had to give completely free rein to sensuality, they sent them back to their private rooms.” They then brought on a more suitable set of women. "
― Sarah Bakewell , How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
49
" Of all the perplexing things about ‘being’, Heidegger goes on, the most perplexing of all is that people fail to be sufficiently perplexed about it. I say ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘I am happy’, as if the little word in the middle were of no interest. But when I stop to think about it, I realise that it brings up a fundamental and mysterious question. What can it mean to say that anything is? Most philosophers had neglected the question; one of the few to raise it was Gottfried von Leibniz, who in 1714 put it this way: why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? For Heidegger, this ‘why’ is not the sort of question that seeks an answer from physics or cosmology. No account of the Big Bang or divine Creation could satisfy it. The point of asking the question is mainly to boggle the mind. If you had to sum up Heidegger’s opening sally in Being and Time in one word, that word might be ‘wow!’ It was this that led the critic George Steiner to call Heidegger ‘the great master of astonishment’ — the person who ‘put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious’. "
― Sarah Bakewell , At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
51
" He made the arrangements, the summer passed, and he went to Berlin to study. When he returned at the end of his year, he brought back a new blend: the methods of German phenomenology, mixed with ideas from the earlier Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and others, set off with the distinctively French seasoning of his own literary sensibility. He applied phenomenology to people’s lives in a more exciting, personal way than its inventors had ever thought to do, and thus made himself the founding father of a philosophy that became international in impact, but remained Parisian in flavour: modern existentialism. The "
― Sarah Bakewell , At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
57
" I am a psychological and historical structure. Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style. All of my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold upon the world, which is all he is. And yet, I am free, not in spite of or beneath these motivations, but rather by their means. For that meaningful life, that particular signification of nature and history that I am, does not restrict my access to the world; it is rather my means of communication with it. This "
― Sarah Bakewell , At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
