Bourget’s account reduces the literary temperament to a few simple psychic elements

Evidence

In this passage there is an effort to reduce the complex personality of an adolescent to a few basic desires, as the chemist reduces compound bodies to merely a combination of simple bodies. The primitive givens will be grandiose ambition, the need of violent action and of intense feeling; these elements when they enter into combination, produce a permanent exaltation. Then—as Bourget remarks in a few words which we have not quoted—this exaltation nourished by numerous well chosen readings, is going to seek to delude itself by self-expression in fictions which will appease it symbolically and channel it. There in outline is the genesis of a literary “temperament.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1318

Categorization

• XREF: Sartre’s critique of reductive ‘composition’ psychology here connects to his broader rejection of substantialist accounts of the psyche, which Beauvoir’s ethics questions in turn. — connects to: Augustine’s hermeneutics reduces all reading to enjoying or using
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Augustine’s hermeneutics reduces all reading to enjoying or using

Broader Connections

• Augustine’s hermeneutics reduces all reading to enjoying or using #exemplifies (0.72)