224
PARTISAN REVIEW
petit camarade," the tenderness of their years at the Ecole, their
philosophical intimacy, their friendly jousting, as well as their dif–
ferences over Saint Anselmus' ontological argument - so harshly
criticized by Aron in Leon Brunschvicg's class - and the notion of
freedom in Kant, all these memories came flooding back into Aron's
mind and erased the rest.
Behind Sartre-the-reveler, who likes parties and bawdy jokes,
there is Sartre-the-worker, devouring some three hundred books a
year, Plato, Schopenhauer, Kant and Spinoza, Chretien de Troyes
and Mallarme, Nerval and Cervantes, Aristotle, Bergson, Shake–
speare and Tolstoy, Maine de Biran, Erasmus and Giraudoux,
Seneca, Lucretius, Saint Augustin, Casanova, Ramuz, Stendhal,
and Cicero.19 He was "a thousand Socrates," insatiable, produc–
tive, scandalous. In
1926
alone he wrote, in white heat, songs,
poems, short stories, novels-including a mythological one about
Ganymede and his sister Hebe, with an account of the Titans attack–
ing Mount Olympus-and literary and philosophical essays. He
even developed a "complicated theory about the role of the imagina–
tion in the artist," the prelude to a complete esthetics. And, finally,
he discovered the concept of contingency.
To prepare for his exams, he studiously adopted a technique of
textual assimilation popular at the time: he copied down everything.
In his hurried scrawl, letters overlapped, mingling notes from his
readings of Kant, Plato, Descartes, or thoughts on freedom. In
1928,
he obtained certificates in Psychology and in the History of
Philosophy, and the next year in General Philosophy, Logic, Ethics,
and Sociology. He attended his courses without much enthusiasm,
failed to recognize himself in Brunschvicg's tradition of idealist ra–
tionalism, found himself totally immune to positivist scientism, and
continued the exploration of the author who had first attracted him
to philosophy: Henri Bergson. He tried to find a third way for
himself, somewhere between spiritualism and positivism, groping
toward ideas on creativity and becoming, and he invented piecemeal
a philosophy based on the notion of a totally secular freedom.
Following the intuition of his own intellectual needs, he associated
with great works just as, when a child, he had associated with great
men. Finding his professors lacking in breadth, he addressed his
19. Archives of the Ecole Normale Superieure.
