Sartre’s first and most famous book, Nausea, is a philosophical novel published in 1938. It tells
the story of a disillusioned, lonely historian named Antoine Roquentin who believes that
inanimate objects and the noise of external events make it impossible for him to define himself or
have any independent thoughts. In other words, he cannot separate himself as an autonomous entity
or being. This impasse or intellectual paralysis gives him a feeling of nausea, hence the title.
Antoine has been living alone in Bouville, modelled on a city in Normandy, where Sartre
lived, for the past three years as he is trying to complete his research on an 18th-century
politician. He’s depressed. Not only that he doesn’t have a job, lives in somewhat poverty
and has little human contact. Quote: “Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes,
people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without
rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) His only
preoccupation is his research on some obscure 19th century aristocrat who is long dead. So
you could say his life is not going well. But during one winter, he experiences something
bizarre. He’s so bored that it makes him feel nauseated. To escape his boredom and depression,
he tries to spend time with others but it doesn’t help. He slowly starts to doubt his own existence.
Here we go back to the 16th century when Rene Descartes, the famous rationalist philosopher,
carried out a thought experiment in which he doubted his own existence and then concluded
that even if he didn’t exist at all, the fact that he could doubt his own existence,
it confirms that he does exist. So the famous philosophical experiment has given
us the famous line: I think, therefore I am. Here’s a quote from Nausea: “My thought is me:
that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this
very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am
the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.”—Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
Sartre is interested in the bigger picture so instead of telescopic character development,
the downs and ups of a hero’s journey, he takes a microscopic approach in tackling the most pressing
issue of existence itself. How life itself makes us feel nauseated. He’s a modern man afflicted
with a modern illness. It’s meaninglessness or nihilism that makes him sick. Quote: “Existence is
not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master
you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at
all.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) In other words, the modern condition is when god truly dies inside
us and the decomposition of god in our psyche makes us nauseated or sick. The same theme of
nihilism appears in Dostoevsky’s, Camus’s novels as well as in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s human becoming is very much part of Sartre’s character. Quote: “He is always becoming,
and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
In an attempt to understand, Antoine keeps a diary of his nausea. But things get worse
as days turn to weeks as his sensation is often overwhelming. He writes everything,
including the list of objects he comes across. At one point, he looks himself in the mirror
thinking he’s the 19th century politician he’s writing a book about. In other words,
he doubts if he’s really real or the ghost of the past. Thinking about the past suddenly gives
him an insight that his feeling of nausea has something to do with his existence. Quote: “The
Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it,
it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea). In other words,
his whole existence is like feeling sick and nauseated. Here is another quote:
“The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around
me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
He realises that the very reason for his existence is to think, research, and write about the past.
Quote: “I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance
like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is
fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then
I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea). In
other words, apart from his goal of writing a book about the 19th century politician,
there is no meaning in his life. He has no friends or family. He has nothing else.
It’s the reason he moved to this town in the first place. It’s the reason he wakes
up every morning to write. It’s the reason he keeps on living. In other words, he is totally
detached from the present. This alienation from others or detachment, while good for Buddhists,
makes him feel sick. This revelation happens in front of a chestnut tree which is a famous scene,
like Newton’s apple tree which allowed him to discover gravity for the first time. For Sartre,
the chestnut tree allows his character to discover the emptiness of existence,
the seed of existentialism. A chestnut tree has no essence and it is only us human observers
who assign certain characteristics such as taste, smell, colour, weight to it.
In other words, objects do not project or offer meaning for themselves. Their
meaning only exists inside the observer, i.e. human’s consciousness. Therefore,
it’s incumbent upon us, the conscious being, to create meaning for ourselves too. So life
is just our chance to make something of ourselves, define our colour, taste, smell,
and overall identity. So Sartre’s protagonist discovers a simple yet revolutionary concept
that existence precedes essence. In other words, life comes first and the meaning of it
afterward. There is no god or divine essence inside us from birth. We just made it up.
This epiphany gives him the liberating feeling he’s been waiting for for days and weeks. For the
first time, he is free. At least inside his head. He tries to explain this to others including an
ex-girlfriend and a man in a cafe, but neither of them seems to understand what he’s talking about.
He abandons his history research and decides to live in the present. He also decides to move
to Paris and write a novel, perhaps because his discovery is easier explained through fiction.
Unlike Dostoevsky who favoured the resurrection
of god back to life to counter nihilism, Sartre sees the death of god as an opportunity for us to
create meaning for ourselves. While Nietzsche considered a very select bunch of humans such
as artists and philosophers capable of creating values, Sartre, a socialist and a democrat, tries
to offer the opportunity to everyone to define their own lives. Instead of relying on gods,
it’s our responsibility to make our own essence.
There is fierce debate as to whether Nausea is a philosophy text or a novel. Whether it’s artistic
or philosophical. It appears that Sartre wrote this novel in response to Celine’s masterpiece,
Journey to the End of the Night, published some 6 years before, which is very bleak and despairing
but also incredibly artistic and was immensely successful in the 1930s. So Sartre ends the novel
on a positive note because he wanted to liberate us from the despair of modern empty existence,
depicted in Kafka’s novels of alienation and despair as well as Celine’s novels. Sartre
also makes a political statement that we are responsible to change ourselves
as well as society and history. As a Marxist, he wanted to give people hope
that we have the freedom to change things. Sartre also considered humanism problematic
because it assumed a universality of all humans having the same rational faculty. In other words
humanism is similar to religion in assuming that we are preinstalled with some essence from birth.
For Sartre individual choice came first. Another point of contention with humanism is that Sartre
thinks humanists pedestalises certain humans as being better humans than others. Certain humans
can become sages or superhuman as Nietzsche pointed out in his ubermensch theory. For
Sartre everything or every value or norm is man-made, therefore nothing is sacred. His
anti-establishment and anti-tradition views made him very popular among young people
who felt alienated by society so they wanted topple statues and break with all traditions,
especially in university campuses.
Another important novel to compare it to is Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time,
in which Proust actually saw bits and pieces of our own past stored in objects. For Proust,
our senses allow us to reclaim our past selves stored in certain food, music, or even solid
objects. Sarte, who politically was very much against Proust for not speaking out about the war,
wanted to remove us from the objects. Proust says that we are like animals that urinate on rocks,
trees and bushes, leaving pieces of themselves for others to notice, but also for ourselves
when we return to those objects. For humans, our sense of smell, taste and touch involuntarily
takes us back to a piece of ourselves in the past that we had forgotten. For instance,
you smell a food or listen to a song, you’re suddenly transported to your past life.
Sartre, however, says, this Proustian notion that we exist outside, in objects and people,
makes us feel sick and nauseated. Quote: “Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You
use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more.
But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were
living beasts.” —Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) It takes away our freedom and sense of autonomy. So
Sartre tries to give us freedom but most crucially responsibility to claim our existence as ours.
It’s our job to make something of it. Do not rely on others or objects to define you. Only you can
define yourself. Only you can carry the load of your existence. Do not engrave yourself on some
rock. Or trees because they don’t care and don’t keep you. Only by taking the responsibility of our
existence, we can fight nihilism and despair.
Sartre’s character finds his essence hanging in trees or such objects on the outside. In
some way it is similar to Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time in which the protagonist’s memories
or sense of being are triggered by sensory information in the objects he encounters.
In other words, we store part of our being in the objects or people or relationships we
experience and when we see those objects, people we remember bits and pieces of our own past lives.
While Proust sees it as beautiful and artistic, Sartre, however, sees it as nauseating because our
existence can only be meaningful by external objects. In other words, we do not have an
essence. Everything is on the outside. In Nausea, Sartre formulated his central existentialist
philosophy that existence comes first and essence is built upon it. From a religious
and even philosophical point of view, our essence or humanity comes first, but Sartre reverses it.
We exist, therefore we acquire an essence of who we are. In other words, we are born as a
clean slate and as we grow up, we become someone. We have the freedom to carve a statue of our own
being. By the end of the novel, the protagonist’s nothingness or emptiness liberates him to create
his own meaning. But this comes at a price, now he is responsible for his actions and choices.
Also Sartre saw Proust
as a snob bourgeois man who lived in bad faith or an inauthentic life that relied on social status
more than their achievement. I have to disagree. I think Proust was a genius artist who as snobbish
as he was, was also a fantastic writer, producing one of the most beautiful novels of the 20th
century. For Proust, the biggest enemy of man was not nihilism but time. Time makes us feel
empty because we foresee our demise long before we die. No matter how much you take responsibility,
you have nothing against the slow decay or decomposition of life through time.
While Proust acknowledges human nature,
at least biological facts such as physiological sensory organs influencing our memory of
being. Sartre however, appears to deny human nature by bundling it with god and the unconscious
and then rejecting them all. In other words, since there is no god, we have the total freedom to be
who we want to be. There is the implication that you can also change your biological nature. If not
in reality, at least inside your head.
Subjectivity and objectivity runs at the heart of the novel. Humans as conscious beings shine lights
on objects, a Kantian torch-like mental structure which allows us to understand,
organise and categorise the outside world. But Sartre, just like Nietzsche, thinks the human
itself is not a solid being, instead constantly becoming or changing. So the concrete external
world is like an anchor that we try to keep ourselves afloat and stable. So the self is like
a floating ghost that tries to become solidified as a self. So outside objects are like a gyroscope
that keeps us stable.This instability of being, for Sartre, is freedom to make whatever you like
to be but also destruction as it causes anxiety as Kierkegaard pointed out a century before Sartre.
In fact it was Kierkegaard who said that freedom causes us dizziness and anxiety. As we know,
dizziness is associated with nausea so Sartre’s title and main idea in this novel can be traced
back to Kierkegaard. Having the free choice causes us anxiety as seen in choice paralysis.
For example, what video to watch on YouTube or Netflix. So to sum up, Nausea tells the story of
a man confronted with his own existence for the first time which not only terrifies him but also
makes him nauseated and sick. But he does come out of it liberated to become whoever he wanted
to become. He was in charge, nobody else. No god or human nature or society. Only him. Him alone.