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Nausea
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Background
Philosophical Context: Existentialism
The word “existentialism” was coined by Gabriel Marcel around 1945. Marcel was naming a style of thinking concerned with existence, but not just any kind of existence. The concern of existentialists is human existence, understood to be distinct from the way that objects or even animals exist, because humans are, they claim, fundamentally concerned with their own existence. Heidegger wrote that human beings are the only beings for whom being is a problem. Kierkegaard wrote that an individual does more than merely exist, that an individual is “infinitely interested in existing,” and the philosopher Karl Jaspers had gone so far as to call his philosophy Existenzphilosophie. Of course, despite their shared concerns, existentialists are not all alike, and existentialism’s key figures either lived before Marcel coined the term (like Kierkegaard) or bristled at its application to them (like Sartre initially did). In general, however, we can say that existentialism focuses on human beings embedded in the world as humans—that is, with such things as moods and bodies and fundamental concerns about their own existence—and that existentialists approach problems familiar from the history of philosophy, such as epistemology, cognition, and ethics, from this perspective.
The famous existentialist slogan that “existence precedes essence” is another way of expressing the basic existentialist concern: The human has no essential nature but is always becoming, always on the way to realizing itself as something that it isn’t yet. The phrase “existence precedes essence” appears often in “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” a talk that Sartre gave in late 1945 that was later turned into a short book.
This lecture is the first time Sartre applies the term “existentialist” to himself, a term he had previously rejected. In the lecture, he outlines existentialism and defends it from various critiques, stating that it is perhaps the most optimistic outlook one can have on human life. Sartre claims in the book that meaning for our lives, thoughts, and connections is only determined by our own actions and choices. Meaning, or “essence,” always comes after the fact of doing, or existing. This is why existentialism is also a humanism for Sartre: It insists on a high vocation for the human being.
Existentialism flips generally held assumptions about existence upside down. Most schools of philosophy and worldviews tend to view essence and existence as one and the same: The essence of a book is inherent to the existence of a book. For an existentialist, a book is a nonsensical collection of materials that we apply “essence” to after the fact of its existence. The words of this guide exist as pixels on a screen and strings of letters, but the essence of their meaning is conjured up after the fact by the reader’s understanding of language and English syntax. The nonsensical and meaningless existence underneath essence is what Antoine discovers and is horrified by in Nausea. It is important to add, however, that at the time Sartre wrote Nausea, he had not yet fully developed the ideas presented in “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” In particular, the Sartre of Nausea is more interested in exploring the realization that existence by itself is meaningless; this realization comes prior to and necessitates the essentially ethical task of making meaning for oneself.
Historical-Philosophical Context: Humanism and the Cogito
Humanism is the broad philosophical umbrella of the Age of Enlightenment. Humanism states that humans are rational actors whose ability to think and reason objectively make us dignified and destined for social and technological progress. The emphasis on empirical science and research during the Age of Enlightenment reinforced European notions of the supremacy of rationality and the scientific mind over other worldviews and philosophies. Early modern humanists believe that knowledge does not come from supernatural sources, happenstance, or other ways of interacting with the world. Knowledge instead comes from methodical and empirical questioning of the world that assumes humans are privileged observers of the natural world, which Europeans believed were exclusively European methods during a time of global European colonization.
A well-known example of this kind of humanism is René Descartes’s assertion, “I think, therefore I am,” from his 1637 Discourse on the Method. Descartes, the father of modern philosophy and science, considered this idea to be a bedrock principle. Because the phrase was originally written in Latin (cogito, ergo sum) the “cogito” has since been used in philosophy to refer to Descartes’s idea of the thinking subject radically separate from the world around it and whose defining feature is its rationality and conceptual grasp of the world.
Traditional humanism and such a cogito go hand in hand. If our existence as individuals is built on our capacity for rational thinking, then humanism becomes self-evidently justified.
A direct descendant of the Cartesian subject is found in Husserl’s transcendental subject. Sartre was captivated with Husserlian phenomenological description in the 1930s, the period that produced Nausea. Sartre’s friend Raymond Aron is said to have brought Sartre to a swoon when he described the possibility of a phenomenological description of the apricot cocktail—they were in a bar—in front of them. Aron meant not the raw sense data or the concept, but the thing as it is manifest to consciousness. Husserl’s influence on Sartre is complex. First, Husserl’s dictum “back to the things themselves” and the emphasis on phenomenological description were powerful positive influences. However, Sartre rejected Husserl’s own account of what he was doing (as Heidegger had so before him). Husserl’s philosophy claimed that a “transcendental subject,” a sort of idea of an “I,” was established in any phenomenology, but Sartre recognized that this was unnecessary. This is why, in Nausea, objects sometimes take over (the tree roots in the park is the most famous example) while subjects can be reduced to negative spaces and possibilities.
At one point after his argument with the Self-Taught Man about humanism, Antoine fantasizes about the world suffering from grotesque and absurd changes, like people sprouting dozens of new eyeballs on their bodies. While a traditional humanist would see in such outlandish and bizarre transformations deformities, or movements away from ideal forms and order, Antoine sees these changes as “variations on existence.” Furthermore, they are variations that exceed the capacity of a “transcendental subject” that could ground the experience of their appearance. In this fantasy, Antoine shouts, “What’s the matter with your science? What have you done with your humanism? Where is your dignity?” (160). Sartre’s existentialism challenges the traditional humanism that dominated European thought into the 20th century by rejecting both the Cartesian and the Husserlian subject.
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