1933

1933 is identified as the year Jean-Paul Sartre began studying Edmund Husserl, then still little known in France, by reading Ideas in the original. The date marks the start of an engagement that informed the phenomenological method behind The Imaginary: attending to how an image is given to consciousness rather than treating it in advance as an inner object requiring a causal explanation.

Sartre’s Study of Husserl

Sartre’s reading of Husserl supplied a radical philosophical point of departure. The book presents phenomenology as a discipline of describing what appears evidently, and associates its method with suspending the natural positing of the world. In the study of images, that orientation directs attention to reflective experience: when consciousness turns from the object it images to the way that object is given, it can recognize that it has an image.

Method and the Image

This emphasis on reflection also establishes a distinction between description and theory. Sartre argues that reflective awareness of having an image is immediately certain, whereas hypotheses about the image’s nature remain probable. Psychology should therefore first describe and classify the image’s distinctive characteristics, rather than substitute explanatory conjecture for the evidence of reflection. The year 1933 locates the beginning of the Husserlian study associated with this methodological priority.

Continuing Intellectual Engagement

Sartre’s study of Husserl did not end with the initial reading. The book says it continued while he wrote The Imaginary, and cites a February 1940 statement in which Sartre described taking four years to exhaust Husserl by thinking within his perspectives and developing his own ideas through them. The account presents 1933 not as an isolated episode, but as the beginning of a sustained philosophical engagement that accompanied the work’s development.