he continued to employ the method of “eidetic reduction” (the free
imaginative variation of examples to arrive at the immediate grasp of
an “essence or intelligible contour”) in his psychological studies of the
emotions and imaging consciousness.^15 In fact, Sartre seems never to
have read anything Husserl published after his return from Germany.
Having completed his studies at the ENS and the Sorbonne, Sartre
stood for theagre ́gationexamination that would enable him to teach in
one of the lyce ́es in the country. This difficult exam, which comprised a
written and an oral portion, was graded according to the number of
positions that were available in the lyce ́es that year. The number of those
passing was limited to the number of free slots in their respective fields
at the time. In the competition of 1928 , Raymond Aron achieved first
place while Sartre, to everyone’s amazement, failed the written portion
of the exam and so was not admitted to the second, oral part. It was
rumored that Sartre had used the three essays of the written examination
to exposit his own interpretation of the assigned texts, to the dismay of
the examiners, who expected something more traditional. Having
learned how the game was played, as Aron notes, Sartre came in first
the following year with Simone de Beauvoir a close second.^16 By then
Sartre and Beauvoir, whom Maheu had introduced in July of that year,
had become close friends. It was Maheu who gave her the name “Castor”
(Beaver) both because of her industry and because of the similar sound
between her family name and the English word. From then on she bore
that label among her circle of friends. Sartre often began his numerous
(^15) As evidence of his continued interest in Husserlian phenomenology, consider his three
studies in phenomenological psychology:The Imagination( 1936 ),Sketch for a Theory of
the Emotions( 1939 ), andThe Imaginary( 1940 ) to be studied inChapters 4 and 5 below.
(^16) Me ́moires 37. The written portion consisted of three examinations each of seven hours in
length. The first was a general philosophical essay, the second an essay on a subject taught in
the philosophy programs of a lyce ́e, and the third on a topic in the history of philosophy
focusing on one of four philosophers designated in advance. The oral part comprised four
examinations: the first was a class lecture (unelec ̧on) to be delivered for about an hour before
a jury after five hours of preparation; the next three were expositions of texts in Greek, Latin
and French on a similar topic and presented for forty-five minutes each after an hour of
preparation for each. Interestingly in view of Sartre’s philosophical concerns for the next two
decades, the topics for the three written exams for 1929 , the year where Sartre ranked first,
were: “The Ideas of Contingency and Freedom,” “The Respective Role of Intuition and
Reasoning in the Deductive Method,” and “How do the ethical theories of the Stoics and of
Kant resemble each other and how do they differ?” (Michel Rybalka, “L’Agre ́gation de
1929 ,”L’Anne ́e ́Sartrienneno. 15 [June 2001 ]: 135 – 137 ).
An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher 25