evidence to criticize positivism, lending support to the spiritualist battle carried
on by his more traditionalist contemporaries while using the weapons of the
newest sciences. After he found a public pulpit at the Collège de France,
Bergson became a full-scale vitalist; his Creative Evolution (1907) and Durée
et Simultanéité (1910) were first delivered to popular audiences who eagerly
received them as a vindication of religion in the age of science.
The same career pattern reappears in the next generation with Jean-Paul
Sartre. He went from the ENS (1924–1928) to teaching at provincial lycées
(1931–1936), then to Paris lycées (1937–1944), finally moving into the Parisian
world of literary publishing, theater and political journalism. The existentialists
inherited some of the popular appeal of the vitalists in their concern to put
something in the place of religion at a time when secularism had flattened into
banal mundanity. But now the French had been transformed by connection
with German academic networks and the new techniques of phenomenology.
French philosophers from Maine de Biran onward were certainly not lacking
in creativity, especially in exploring ontological forces which the dominant
streams in Germany, positivism and Neo-Kantian epistemology, had pushed
into abeyance. But the paths opened up by Maine’s “I will, therefore I am,”
and the deepening of neo-criticism into the dialectical derivation of dynamic
reality, never established a clear and overriding focus in the attention space.
In the eyes of the secularists who dominated public attention, the technical
advances of French philosophy were submerged by their popular implications
for the defense of religion in a scientific age.
Existentialists as Literary-Academic Hybrids
Existentialism as a self-conscious movement appeared in the 1940s in a Pari-
sian circle. It became famous in the fall of 1945, when the mass media turned
their spotlight on Jean-Paul Sartre simultaneously as philosopher, literary
success, and political activist. The existentialist movement retrospectively iden-
tified itself with a much larger body of writings: above all Heidegger (who
rejected the existentialist label), but also theologians, philosophers, novelists,
dramatists, and poets going back to the 1840s. The sociological intuition
underlying this retrospective relabeling was not inaccurate. What was identified
was a tradition of literary-philosophical hybrids. Sartre and Camus were key
formulators of the canon, and themselves archetypes of the career overlap
between academic networks and the writers’ market. The phenomenon of
existentialism in the 1940s and 1950s added another layer to this overlap.
Sartre was the first philosopher in history to be heavily publicized by the
popular mass media.^3 And existentialism was a new kind of movement in the
publishing industry at just the time when cheap paperback editions were first
764 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths