"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."
"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."
Trần Đức Thảo and Jean-Paul Sartre held five recorded conversations between November 1949 and January 1950 about the relation between Marxism and existentialism; the conversations aimed for publication but collapsed and remain lost. Thảo broke with French philosophy after these exchanges and later accused Sartre's disciples of campaigning against him. Thảo argued that Sartre failed to recognise Marxism's philosophical seriousness. Sartre held that traditional Marxism lacked a philosophical account of being and human nature and developed existentialism to found a new Left-wing philosophy. Thảo originally embraced Husserlian phenomenology but later rejected it as inadequate for understanding human beings.
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