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It is impossible to separate Alain’s critical work from the change in interests that followed his discovery of journalism in 1900. He found in journalism a new style which transformed the academic philosopher into a writer philosopher, creating a model of the French intellectual that would come into its own with Sartre. Alain’s approach to aesthetics developed while he was serving during WWI and developed after the war through different books on music, sculpture, painting or literature, to challenge the canonical forms of philosophy. To be a critique was for him another way of doing philosophy for a larger audience : to this extent, his critical work reflected the democratic value of writing. This led to a theory of art as an immediate way of seizing the world, and of criticism as the answer to this initial choc.