What Sartre Read in His Formative Years in the 1920s

Some thirty years ago, the metanarratives of Sartre's thinking entered their fourth stage, the genetical stage. An important subject of genetical study has become the period prior to the publication of L’être et le néant . This article examines what Sartre read in the 1920s and what formed his philosophical matrix, into which he later incorporated concepts from Husserl, Heidegger and Hegel (3Hs). An important result is that Sartre's main focus in the 1920s was already on the subject's freedom and the contingency of the world. In this respect, philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Arthur Schopenhauer, the pragmatists and Karl Jaspers were more influential than the 3Hs, who were prominently present mainly in the writings of the 1940s. We can observe the importance of psychology and sociology for Sartre at that time, which later manifested itself in his psychological works of the 1930s and his biographies and socio-anthropological texts of the 1950s to the 1970s.