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It took five ill-fated conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre before the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo finally broke with French philosophy. Between November 1949 and January 1950, Thảo and Sartre recorded and transcribed their conversations on the relation between Marxism and the new philosophy of existentialism, with the intention of publishing them. Sartre hoped to prove that Marxism and existentialism – of which he was the primary representative – were consistent with one another: reconcilable projects. However, the two men’s exchange of views collapsed before completion, under a series of recriminations. Thảo remained bitter about this, later referring to an ‘insidious campaign’ among Sartre’s ‘disciples’ to paint him as responsible for the failure of this planned project. Today, the conversations are still lost.

For Thảo, their disagreement lay in the fact that Sartre did not recognise Marxism’s philosophical seriousness. For Sartre, traditional Marxism offered an attractive social and political programme but lacked a real or serious philosophical account of being and human nature. Sartre developed his ideas about existentialism out of an ambition to provide the foundations for a new Left-wing philosophy for the 20th century.

At the start of the 1940s, Thảo had the same intellectual project. He had arrived in France from a French protectorate in modern-day Vietnam on a governor-general’s scholarship to pursue his studies in Paris. Influenced by those around him, he became convinced that phenomenology, a new paradigm devised by Edmund Husserl, promised fresh answers to fundamental questions about the human condition. At that time, Thảo enjoyed a reputation in French philosophy as the most important interpreter and critic of Husserl’s thought.

By the 1950s, Thảo had changed his mind. After a decade working with Husserl’s phenomenological approach, he came to believe it was ultimately inadequate to the task of understanding human beings since it could not properly account for history and natural development. Thảo was also taken up and transformed by events. By the end of the Second World War, he was a key spokesperson in France for Vietnamese independence. As he became increasingly involved with the Viet Minh, his philosophical outlook changed. Only orthodox Marxism’s materialist understanding of history, he claimed, could provide a full and demystified account of where people’s ideas about themselves and the world come from.

Thảo came to believe that his French philosophical counterparts had chosen their own comfort and role in the Western bourgeois imperialist regime over the morally superior path of supporting revolutionary communism. In 1951, after the publication of his most celebrated book, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, Thảo departed for Vietnam. He would not return to Paris until 1991, two years before his death.

Thảo’s time in Vietnam was hard: although the country honours him today, in his lifetime he was persecuted and kept in poverty by the state. Therefore, Thảo’s most important work was all produced in France during the 1940s. Its interest lies not only in the originality with which he navigates the prevailing currents in French thought, but how he responds to some of the most important conflicts of the 20th century: the Cold War and the worldwide movements for colonial independence. The result is a body of work that raises important questions about how to understand the relation between who we are, and the history and society that shape us. Additionally, Thảo’s refusal to distinguish between the philosophical, the political and the personal led him to become one of the first theorists of the divide between colonised and coloniser.

Trần Đức Thảo was born in a village in what was then the French protectorate of Tonkin, now Vietnam, in 1917. By a confluence of exceptional circumstances, he received a scholarship to study at the Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV lycées in Paris. In 1939, he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Rue d’Ulm, the most prestigious university for the humanities in France. Since he was from a French colony, and did not have the legal status of a French citizen, he was assigned a so-called ‘number two’ status at the ENS. He studied there during the Second World War: his instructors included the resistance fighter Jean Cavaillès (killed in 1944), and the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

At first a committed Spinozist, Thảo’s encounters with these teachers brought him into contact with the phenomenological system of Edmund Husserl, which proved transformative. Thảo would spend most of the 1940s developing an interpretation and a response to Husserl’s writings: both the published works, and thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts and notebooks smuggled into Belgium during the war under the direction of a Franciscan priest named Herman Van Breda.

Husserl (1859-1938) had begun his career as a philosopher of mathematics, which he theorised as a system of abstract representations corresponding to how reality appears to us in certain situations. A mathematical theorem is not, strictly speaking, true: rather it is a statement of the truth, a kind of roadmap we can follow to reach an objective perception of what it describes. Thảo elaborates on this idea in Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951) where he explains how ‘a theorem of geometry can be the object only of a confused intuition or of a blind or symbolic representation’ (his italics). In the first case, we may only dimly remember or partly understand what the theorem is getting at. In the second, where we understand it perfectly, ‘the only sensible thing to do is to subject it to careful analysis, in which the theorem is presented in the fullness of itself by the performance of the operations which demonstrate its truth.’ The premise of a divide between concrete reality, which can only be experienced, and our representations of it, which........

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