Le Havre

Le Havre is the biographical setting in which Jean-Paul Sartre began his work on imagination: in 1934, while teaching pupils preparing for the baccalaureate, he undertook to write on the subject. The book gives the city this specific intellectual significance, linking Sartre’s teaching to a project that would examine imagination not merely as a topic in psychology but as a problem about consciousness and its relation to the world.

Sartre’s Teaching in Le Havre

Jean-Paul Sartre was a young schoolteacher in Le Havre in 1934. Imagination belonged to the psychology he taught, alongside perception, memory, attention, the association of ideas, and emotions. In the French school curriculum described by the book, psychology was conventionally treated as a positive science of psychic facts and their laws, set apart from practical or aesthetic concerns and from ontological or normative questions. The account places Sartre’s undertaking within that teaching context, while noting that the meaning he gave to facts and laws would depart from the official handbook conception.

The Work Begun in 1934

The project undertaken in Le Havre led to The Imagination, a short work published in 1936. The Imaginary was written at the same time and published four years later; the introduction notes that it could have served as Sartre’s doctoral thesis. The city’s documented connection is therefore to the beginning of this paired inquiry, rather than to a described episode in either book’s later publication history.

From Psychological Topic to Philosophical Problem

The wider inquiry distinguishes ordinary perception from imaging consciousness. In its account of schematic figures, a group of lines can first be perceived as simple forms and then apprehended as a face when the intention changes and the viewer’s eye movements and bodily attitude organize the marks differently. The analysis also separates such image-making from perceptual effects such as the Müller-Lyer illusion, where eye movements contribute to the perception of a line’s potential extension. In the book’s later discussion of art, a painting’s real canvas and pigments are distinguished from the aesthetic object apprehended through them: the artwork’s material support makes an irreality available to imaging consciousness. These arguments show the breadth of the project begun while Jean-Paul Sartre taught in Le Havre, although the text supplies no further description of the city itself.