Sartre's Reading in His Formative Years in the 1920s

Paper presented at the conference of the UK Sartre Society on July 7^th, 2024.

Scientific study of Sartrean philosophy has reached its fourth stage, the genetical stage. We know that religions and their studies go through four different stages, the prophetic stage, the scriptural stage, the exegetical stage, and the genetical stage. In the prophetic stage, the founders and authors of the holy scriptures formulate their statements. In the scriptural stage, the canons of the holy scriptures are defined. In the exegetical stage, these canons are subjected to an exegesis in which the respective meta-narratives are formulated. Differences in the canon and in the exegesis lead to the formation of various denominations. The last stage of religious studies is the genetical stage. In this stage, the results of the previous three stages are scrutinized and deconstructed.

This system of four stages can also be applied to meta-narratives in politics, science, and philosophy, to e.g. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Sartre studies are slowly entering this fourth stage. Perhaps some of you have read Grégory Cormann’s Plea for a Collective Genetics in last year’s issue #1 of Sartre Studies International or François Noudelmann’s radical critique Un tout autre Sartre and my review of this book entitled “Deconstructing Sartre” published two years ago, also in Sartre Studies International.

In the following twenty minutes, I will focus on Sartre’s formative years in the 1920s. The prevailing meta-narrative is that Sartre’s philosophy has its roots in Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel. There is no doubt that Sartre adopted certain concepts of these philosophers. But as Beauvoir wrote, Sartre had a tendency to interpret the concepts of other philosophers according to his own schemes. In January 1940, Sartre wrote in a letter to Beauvoir that his ideas no longer bore any resemblance to those of Heidegger and Husserl and that his new philosophy was closer to his old ideas, i.e. the ideas from before 1933. The question that immediately arises is: what were his ideas in the years before 1933?

The years to focus on are the decade between 1920 and 1929. Sartre returned to Paris from La Rochelle in 1920 and attended the Lycée Henri IV for two years. From 1922 to 1924, he went to the khâgne, preparatory courses, at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. The following four years, until 1928, he studied and lived at the ENS. And after a year spent at the Cité universitaire, he passed the exam for the agrégation in 1929. As Beauvoir only met Sartre in 1929, she can tell us only little about the years in question. And Sartre’s own account in The Words only covers the years, until his family moved to La Rochelle in 1917. When interviewing Sartre in 1975, Michel Rybalka rightly described the years between 1920 and 1929 as a period concerning which we know relatively little.

Fortunately, a whole series of documents have been published over the last fifty years that tell us more about this time. The most important and most objective document is the list of books Sartre borrowed from the ENS library, published by Dassonneville in 2018. A second important source is his 1927 master’s thesis. And the document that ranks third are the notes of Kuki Shuzo. Kuki, a young Japanese philosopher who had studied with Husserl and Heidegger, presents a list of important philosophers and works that Sartre introduced him to in 1928.

Furthermore, there are several texts written by Sartre in the 1920s: Theory of the State in Contemporary French Thought, the first of Sartre’s scientific contributions to be published. Most of Sartre’s unpublished early texts were issued in Écrits de jeunesse in 1990. The major exception was the novel L’empédocle with its Chant of Contingency, which was published in 2016. To these we have to add the letters Sartre wrote to his girlfriend Simone Jollivet in the years from 1926 to 1928. Autobiographical texts written by Sartre about his years in the 1920s can be found in Sartre’s War Diaries and the Cahier Lutèce, a preparatory work for The Words written in 1954.

In addition, there are several interviews in which Sartre spoke about his years in the 1920s: the 1975 interview with Rybalka, Pucciani, and Gruenheck, his conversation with Michel Contat on the occasion of his 70^th birthday, the film about him released in 1977, and above all the talks with Beauvoir in Rome in 1974. Special mention should also be made of the autobiographies of Raymond Aron and Henriette Nizan. In total, we come up with more than 1100 references to what Sartre most probably read in the 1920s.

As we all know, at the beginning Sartre was almost exclusively interested in literary works. He read the French classics, Proust, Giraudoux, Stendhal, Gide. What is more exciting is what he did not read, at least not to such an extent that it had a strong influence on him. Those falling into this category are particularly left-wing authors like Romains Rolland, Barbusse, and the surrealists. This is an indication that Sartre was quite far away from socialist and communist thought in the 1920s.

Of particular interest are writers in whose works we can already identify the first traits of what would later become Sartre’s philosophy. In a 1969 interview with the New Left Review, Sartre stated that his goal always was a realistic philosophy that combines the freedom of the subject and the reality of the outer world, avoiding both determinism and idealism. Indeed, in literature, Sartre detested the naturalism of Flaubert and he liked the Symbolists, writers like Mallarmé and Baudelaire, who emphasized the human psychological life.

One who deserves special mention is Jules Laforgue who was Sartre’s favorite writer after his return from La Rochelle. Laforgue was an author strongly influenced by Schopenhauer. In fact, one of the first works Sartre borrowed from the ENS library was Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Not without consequences. The second half of the term “practico-inert” most likely owes its name to Schopenhauer’s “Law of Inertia”. The understanding of the human being as a free subject situated in specific situations prompted Sartre to read works by Proust, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, in the 1930s the Americans Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Hemingway, as well as the French writer André Malraux, whom Sartre – surprisingly – called his Saint John the Baptist.

A second philosophical concept to be encountered in Sartre’s literary reading is the concept of contingency. Long before Nausea, already in 1926, Sartre composed his Chant of Contingency and two years earlier he wrote a note on contingency in his Carnet Midy. Sartre's most important means of learning about the contingency of the world was reading stories set in foreign countries – and later, of course, traveling. As a child, he read stories about America’s greatest detective Nick Carter, and about Buffalo Bill. In the 1920s, these were novels by Paul Morand, Claude Farrère, two French writers hardly known today, and in particular Joseph Conrad. As a young teacher, Sartre read novels by Hemingway, Malraux, and many Soviet authors. Another important writer in this regard was Céline whose Journey to the End of the Night was to have a decisive influence on Sartre’s Nausea. What they all have in common is that they wrote novels set in foreign countries.

With his entry into the ENS, philosophical works became more important than literary ones. At that time, philosophy was understood in a much broader sense than it is today. As a studium generale, philosophy also encompassed psychology and sociology. Of the 633 books Sartre borrowed from the ENS library, 324 were about philosophy, compared with 140 books on psychology and 26 on sociology; 59 were literary works and, astonishingly, 13 on science and math. 

As to psychology, it is not only the number of books that shows that psychology was the subject that interested Sartre the most. His master’s thesis was entitled The Image in Psychological Life. Only a few of the authors mentioned in his thesis are genuine philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Bergson – or, by the way, Husserl, whose name we find there for the first time. Since Sartre made a mistake in writing Husserl’s name, I assume that he had only heard his name, but not seen it in writing. In his master’s thesis, Sartre quotes above all psychologists. And by psychology I do not mean philosophical psychology, but experimental psychology. He knew not only the Americans William James, Titchener, and Watson, but also German psychologists, particularly representatives of the German Würzburg School. This School was important for Sartre’s philosophy because it provided him with the experimental evidence for a realistic philosophy that combines the freedom of the subject and the reality of the outer world.

Sartre wrote his master’s thesis under the guidance of Henri Delacroix, a professor of psychology at Sorbonne. Sartre was one of his favorite students. Delacroix gave him the necessary support to get the scholarship for his studies in Berlin and enabled him to publish his first monograph, The Imagination. As to the book The Imaginary, it was basically the revised master’s thesis expanded to include theories by Husserl and Gestalt psychology. It was to be the doctoral thesis that would have enabled Sartre to become a professor at Sorbonne – no, not for philosophy, for psychology.

Sartre’s third psychological work of the 1930s, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, was also the result of Sartre’s psychological studies at Sorbonne. Just as Delacroix was interested in imagination, as much was Georges Dumas, professor of experimental psychology at Sorbonne and at the Sainte-Anne clinic, interested in emotions.

The most interesting part of Sartre’s reading in his formative years is of course the philosophical section. Who do you think was the philosopher whose works Sartre borrowed most often from the ENS library? It was Plato – and this by a wide margin. He borrowed 52 books by and about Plato, compared to 8 about Descartes, and 15 about Spinoza. Sartre also read a lot about other Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle or the Stoics. This contrasts very much with the philosophy of the Middle Ages, which he almost completely neglected. The question is whether this intensive reading about Plato left its mark on Sartre’s philosophy. My thesis is: Yes, it left traces – in his study of Husserl. One of Husserl’s central concepts, eidetic reduction, is related to Plato’s concept of ideas.

It is no surprise that Spinoza, Descartes, and Brunschvicg, the most prominent philosopher of Sartre's time, are among the top ten philosophers whom Sartre read. But it is astonishing that Bergson is rather at the bottom of the list. After all, it was Bergson’s An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness that prompted him to study philosophy rather than literature. Bergson’s philosophy was the first philosophy Sartre found that treated free consciousness and the determined material world as equal.

Astonishingly, it was Kant who came second on the list. Apart from Sorin Baiasu, few other researchers have published on Sartre’s relationship to Kant. Yet Kant was very influential on Sartre’s philosophy. Aron writes that Sartre’s concepts of free will and fundamental choice were developed under Kant’s influence, relying in particular on Kant’s “intelligible character”. Sartre’s concepts of philosophy as a science of man, of the in-itself and the for-itself, of imagination, of freedom as a criterion of acting ethically, and Sartre’s vision of an ideal society as some kind of Kingdom of Ends are very reminiscent of similar concepts by Kant. Even the term "phenomenon" was most likely first encountered by Sartre in Kant's work, not in Husserl's.

Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, Brunschvicg, they all belonged to the official philosophical curriculum at the ENS at that time. More interesting are those philosophers whom Sartre read, although they were not part of the curriculum. Sartre showed a great interest in American pragmatism, for example. He read James and Dewey. As Sartre had an excellent command of the German language, he also read many German philosophers – some of them even in German (Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche).. I have already mentioned Schopenhauer. In 1927, Sartre corrected the translation of Jaspers’s General Psychopathology into French. It was from Jaspers that Sartre adopted the distinction between explaining and understanding, which became the basis of his metaphilosophy and the regressive-progressive method he developed in the mid-1950s. And last but not least, we must mention Nietzsche, whose morality Sartre followed at the ENS according to his own words. He probably read Nietzsche’s books mostly in the library of his grandfather, who was befriended with Charles Andler, the most influential French biographer of Nietzsche.

Interesting information about who influenced Sartre during his time at the ENS can also be gleaned from Kuki Shuzo’s notes. Their first part is mainly about Brunschvicg. Brunschvicg, a neo-Kantian and the most eminent French philosopher at that time, published books on the philosophy of mathematics, on causality and human experience, as well as on the history of philosophy.

What is rather astonishing is that the largest chapter in Kuki’s notes is devoted to Alain. Almost forgotten today, Alain was a prominent figure in the 1920s – however less as a philosopher, but rather as the ideologue of the French party PRRRS, the left-liberal party his grandfather and stepfather supported. Not only his rather distant attitude towards progressive writers, but also the political values Sartre espoused from the 1940s until his death lead me to assume that Sartre was a supporter of the liberal party in the 1920s and eventually even in the 1930s.

Very exciting is the third part of Kuki’s notes. Among the philosophers Sartre refers to are several who are almost forgotten today: Blondel, Boutroux, Ravaisson, Lachelier, Maine de Biran. What they have in common is that they – more or less – belonged to a current known as French spiritualism, a current that holds that the human spirit is a reality independent of matter. Interesting is also that several of them had a close relationship with William James.

In the last part of Kuki’s notes, the focus is on Paul Valéry, who is better known today as a writer than as a philosopher. But he was probably Sartre’s prime reference for an intellectual who was both a writer and a philosopher.

I hope that you have got an idea about what Sartre could have meant, when he mentioned his “old ideas” in his letter to Beauvoir in 1940. Obviously, these old ideas were highly influential on the philosophy he later developed in and around Being and Nothingness and the Critique. Of course, there were important ideas Sartre only adopted in the 1930s and later: via Husserl Brentano’s concept of intentionality, from Heidegger Dasein/existence, thrownness/situation, authenticity, temporality, historicity, from Gestalt psychology totality, from Alfred Adler fundamental choice and bad faith, from Hegel the lord–bondsman dialectics, from Marx via Henri Lefebvre the term of praxis. In order to embrace the idea of failure, Sartre himself first had to go through a lengthy phase of failures in the 1930s. His interest in ethics, including responsibility and engagement, only emerged in the 1940s and the idea of the social in the 1950s.

But as important as these later concepts are, they all grew on a matrix of philosophical ideas Sartre adopted in the 1920s. It was a matrix of a realistic philosophy that combined the freedom of the subject and the contingency of the world. This matrix contained ideas and concepts Sartre developed on the basis of his reading of philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, Brunschvicg, Jaspers, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and, especially, Kant. In these years, the foundations were laid for his distinction between the for-itself and the in-itself as well as for his metaphilosophy and his regressive-progressive method. This is also true of his rejection of any kind of objective morality and his idea that man is free to define his own values. His later concepts of fundamental choice and free will, too, are based on ideas he adopted in the 1920s.

I hope you got some ideas about what genetical studies are for and what is their potential. It is time for the metanarrative on Sartre’s philosophy, which was so influential in the years from the end of the Second World War to May 1968, to be deconstructed.