Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
  • Home
Chapter
  • Print publication year: 2014
  • Online publication date: December 2014

3 - Teaching in the lycée, 1931–1939

Export citation

Summary

From the time he left the army to replace an ailing instructor in the lycée at Le Havre till September 2, 1939, when he was recalled to active duty during the “phoney war” of 1939–1940, Sartre made his living as a high-school teacher, first in Le Havre, then in Laon, and finally at the Lycée Pasteur in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly. His reputation in the early years was that of a student-friendly, lax disciplinarian who didn’t wear the usual necktie, who would invite interested pupils and two or three colleagues to share in amateur boxing practice (he used to box while at the École), and so it was reported, would even join some of the older students in visiting a local bordello. But his students’ most memorable impression was of a brilliant mind, anxious to get them to think for themselves as he had done to his own detriment on the first agrégation exam, rather than merely to “play the game” that had won him victory in the second. One of these students and fellow pugilists, Jacques Laurent Bost, would become a member of Sartre and Beauvoir’s “family,” their inner circle of close friends.

Sartre was nothing if not unorthodox. Asked to deliver the lecture for the prize day at the close of his first term in Le Havre, on July 12, 1931, he eschewed the standard praises of a liberal education in favor of an exciting but shocking disquisition on the cinema as a liberal art. This was not what the teachers or parents had expected, since the movies were commonly regarded as frivolous entertainment rather than as a genuine art form. But Sartre had something of importance to say on a subject that had fascinated him since childhood, and he said it.

Related content

Powered by UNSILO
de Beauvoir, Simone and Bost, Jacques-Laurent, Correspondance Croisée. 1937–1940, ed. de Beauvoir, Sylvie le Bon (Paris: Gallimard, 2004)
Contat, Michel and Rybalka, Michel (eds.), The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, 2 vols. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), ii:55
Cohen-Solal, Annie, Mathieu, Anne and Piat, Julien in Les conférences du Havre sur le roman, Études sartriennes no. 16 (Paris: Ousia, 2013)
Rybalka, Michel, Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987]
Goldthorpe, Rhiannon (La Nausée [London: HarperCollins, 2001] 2
Rybalka, Michel et al., for the volume on his thought in the Library of Living Philosophers series, Sartre remarked that what distinguished him from the Marxists was his ongoing concern with questions of Being, “which is wider than class.” In effect, Sartre was an ontologist in addition to being a moralist throughout his career (“Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” in Schilpp, Paul A. [ed.], The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre [Carbondale, IL: Open Court, 1981], 14
Aron, Raymond, German Sociology trans. Mary, and Bottomore, Thomas (London: William Heinemann, 1957)
Aron, Raymond, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Irwin, G. J. (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1961
Jaspers, Karl, Existenzphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1938
Flajoliet, Alain, La Première philosophie de Sartre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 351
Sartre, ’s diplôme and his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (December 1939)
Husserl, Edmund, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. Kersten, F. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), §§ 48–55
Flach, Auguste, “Ueber symbolische Schemata in productiven Denkprozesse,” Archiv fuer die gesamte Psychologie, vol. LII (1925)
Noudelmann, François, L’Incarnation imaginaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 220–224
“Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” trans. Fell, Joseph P., Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology 1, no. 2 (1970): 4–5
Gurwitsch, Aron, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), ch. 11
Levinas, ’s The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Paris: Alcan, 1930
Sirinelli, Jean-François, Sartre et Aron, Deux Intellectuels dans le siècle (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1995), 117, n. 42
Aron, Raymond, Histoire et dialectique de la violence [Paris: Gallimard, 1973], 19
HDV. History and the Dialectic of Violence, trans. Cooper, Barry [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975], 5
Mill, J. S. is recognized as having defended such a reductionist view of mathematics in his influential Systems of Logic (2 vols., 8th edn., London, 1872)
Brunschvicg, ’s Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 35, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1928)
Janicaud, Dominique, Heidegger en France, 2 vols. [Paris: Albain Michel, 2001], i:25–26
“De la nature de la cause” in Recherches philosophiques, ed. Koyré, Alexander, Puech, H.-C. and Speier, A (Paris: Bovin, 1931–1932), 83–124
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Magazine Littéraire no. 384, 2000 (1975): 40–47
Brentano, Franz, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint [1867], ed. Kraus, Oaker, trans. Rancurello, Antos C. et al. [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973]
White, Heyden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 24
Fink, Eugene’s famous essay on the three egos in Husserl’s thought: “Die Phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik,” Kant-Studien 38 (1933): 319–383
Fink, Eugene, “Husserl’s Philosophy and Contemporary Criticism,” in Elvelton, Roy O. [ed.], The Phenomenology of Husserl [Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1970], 90
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, Norman Kemp [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965], §16
Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self,” trans. Ellen, Mary and Lawrence, Nathaniel, in Readings in Existential Phenomenology, ed. Lawrence, Nathaniel and O’Connor, Daniel [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967], 120
Fichte, JohannIntroduction to the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. and ed. Breazeale, Daniel (Indianapolis, MA: Hackett, 1994), 20
Kaptan, Tomis, “The Ubiquity of Self-Awareness,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 57 [1999]: 17
Husserl, Edmund, Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness, trans. and ed. Brough, John B. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991)
Churchill, James F. as The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964 [Marburg, 1928]
Sartre, ’s failure to elaborate on “protentions” in this work but allows that Sartre does discuss this dimension of temporal consciousness in The Imaginary (L’Imaginaire [Paris: Gallimard/Collection folio, 2005], 149–150