Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea

Sartre, Jean Paul. Nausea. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964.

I

Antoine Roquentin is a man with a problem: he sees things. Not exactly strange things, or unusual things. In a sense, he sees the same things that we all see, day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. It’s just that he sees too much of things. He sees them exist. Everything exists for him, including himself. And apparently this is a problem. “I have no troubles, I have money like a capitalist, no boss, no wife, no children; I exist, that’s all. And that trouble is so vague, so metaphysical that I am ashamed of it.” (105)

Yet it is a problem. Nausea is about a metaphysical problem, the sort that most people would never bother themselves about; and those who ever have, have probably never done so except in the abstract, which is to say, they haven’t. The fact that things exist, that, for Jean-Paul Sartre, they exist absolutely, beyond, behind, and before all of our attempts to think through and thereby categorize them, to organize and thereby mollify or control them, is a problem that is of the most extreme order, at least if you are a person like Antoine Roquentin. Roquentin is a man with no connections to anything: there is only one person in the world he almost cares about, someone now just a memory he can hardly grasp. He has no mission, no purpose besides writing a book about a dead Frenchman, a task he comes to abhor with time. He has no serious financial troubles, no enemies, nothing to challenge him. At the same time, he has no home (he spends the entirety of the novel living out of a hotel room, one he has lived in for years), no one close to him, nothing to give direction. He has no concerns, no ties. He just is; he just, as he says, exists.

And that’s the problem. Existence, that is. When you spend enough time apart from everything that binds, you risk becoming unbound yourself. The story of Nausea is the progressive unbinding of Roquentin, as he becomes more and more separated from the human world around us, more and more disconnected, and for that reason more and more clearly recognizes the true nature of existence. For what Roquentin finds, and what Sartre wants to argue, is that, when one strips away all the layers of meaning and significance that are placed onto the world by ourselves, everything we build into our meaningful world, one finds existence plain and simple. That is to say, before all names, before all designations, there is what is, and that means everything. This is the reality that Roquentin finds himself in the middle of, the reality that Sartre thinks is our own, behind the scenes: raw existence, complete plenitude literally without definition. The distinctions, the names, are products of ourselves, of our social mores, our language, our little shortcuts through life. The world around is divided into concrete objects by the way in which we have chosen to make our way through it, the designations we have as individuals taken on. But the designations are not the things themselves. What Roquentin is coming to see is reality itself, existence freed of human meaning. In these states “[t]hings are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things.” (125) In such moments Roquentin finds himself unable to act, think, or speak; he is afraid to touch anything; everything forces itself upon him in its total selfness, its total existence. It is, and this fact is something deeply unsettling.

What are we supposed to think about this problem? What is the nausea, really? And who is the man who can see what we apparently cannot? Nausea is a novel about seeing the world as it really is; though he certainly acts like a crazy person at many points, the point seems to be that Roquentin is the sane one, the one who understands. But why should we believe this? What should we think of the nausea that reveals reality? Is such an experience believable, even possible at all? Does Sartre have something here, or is this all just pretend?

II

To understand the nausea, and our connection to it, we need to understand the man who lives it, Antoine Roquentin. As I said before, Roquentin is a man with no connections to anything, which is to say that there is nothing driving him, nothing possessing him or compelling his day to day life. He has no passions, no interests, no real motivations. Most of his days are spent sitting around cafés or walking down streets. His only recognizable project, and the only reason he is in the town he is in, is a biography of the Marquis de Rollebon. But over time this project, too, suffers from a lack of passion, until it is finally given up altogether. But take away Rollebon and there really is nothing. No reason to do anything or be anybody. Roquentin is simply left with his existing.

What would happen to such a person? Certainly it’s not a normal sort of thing, and not even unusual; is there one man or woman that actually lives a life so absent of interest? Without friends, without passions, with hardly even a will to survive? Roquentin has, to a degree virtually unimaginable, shed any connections to outside sources of value, of meaning. In this sense, he is importantly different from any of us who read or think about him, much less those who just go about their lives. Only this inhuman perspective can allow a proper view of the world, for the world we know is an impure one. The world we look at for every moment of our lives is a world full of names, of significances, of tasks which need to be done and ways through which those tasks are accomplished. The light, the chair, everything takes on a significance in accordance to the systems we set up. This is not a revolutionary point, either now or when Sartre wrote Nausea in the 1930s (by that point Heidegger’s Being and Time had already presented an existential conception of worldhood, one where the world is a collection of significances rather than an objectively defined thing). But what had been missing from such discussions is the real feeling of such a claim. To say that the world has no significance in itself is an abstract claim; to see it is something else altogether, a task that is much more difficult. For we cannot simply throw away the meaning that we find in the world; it must be broken down, degenerated, ripped out like teeth one at a time (to understand this point, simply ask: who among us can just “unsee” meanings, unsee the way the world is organized at our most basic levels of understanding?). Our ‘world’ is a conceptual thing, then; the world in the sense of the actual, existing world is something else.

How does one show the world in its purity, then? For that, you would clearly need someone who either never was or no longer is operating under the conditions that seem basic for any functional human being. But how could such a person even survive without grasping the world in the way that we typically do from moment to moment? Even in Roquentin’s case, the way that the world is understood is by and large the way that we ourselves understand the world. A café is a café, his hotel room is his hotel room. This is the ordinary way of experiencing the world, and the one that we are in basically all the time. Yet there are times when, for Roquentin, it all collapses at once. Everything loses its purpose, its alignment, and it all becomes an oppressive force, a massive fact pushing on him. His ability to function virtually ceases in these moments; he is afraid to even touch anything. And this, the recognition of existence, is the nausea.

III

What is the nausea? It is the moment when all distinctions brought about by human endeavor collapses. The world, as has been stated, is there independently of us, before our names for it and utilizations of it for ends. But the world without us is one without meaning, without significance. All facts, all understandings fall to the wayside. Things don’t exist with purposes, to fulfill function, they are just there. It all just exists. Roquentin’s nausea is the moment in time when the scales over his eyes fall and he sees things as they are, which is to say, things which are nothing more than “are.” What are things, after all? Are they colors, like black?

Black? The root was not black, there was no black on this piece of wood—there was . . . something else: black, like the circle, did not exist . . . . I did not simple see this black: sight is an abstract invention, a simplified idea, one of man’s ideas. That black, amorphous, weakly presence, far surpassed sight, smell and taste. (130-1)

The tree root that Roquentin is looking at, is focusing on with all his effort to the point of being possessed, is not a thing that is black; there is no colorless substance which has the ephemeral characteristic ‘black’ that clings to it. There is only the root, its being there as it is: “It looked like a colour, but also . . . like a bruise or secretion, like an oozing—and something else, an odour, for example . . . .” (130-1) It does not mean something, it is not a sum of parts; all of that is our coloring of the existent. This root is reality; but more significantly, this moment is the seeing of reality, reality without filters, without concepts, just pure seeing. It’s a bit disconcerting, to say the least.

But it’s certainly not something I’ve seen, and I doubt you have. Why not? Because we live and die by our concepts, in a world organized (not created, not shaped, but organized) by our minds and reflecting a permanent, solid, graspable and ordered structure. This way of living ignores the existence of things, existing in the sense recognized by the nausea, instead simply treating existence as a predicate, a checkbox below such categories as “black,” “solid,” and so on. The existence of things is buried by our categories; the existence of persons, the fact of one’s existing just as free of purpose as the tree root, is covered up by one’s projects: “Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists; there isn’t one of them who doesn’t believe himself indispensible to something or someone . . . . But I know. I don’t look like much, but I know I exist and that they exist.” (111) We follow through on our tasks, our objectives, with a constancy that doesn’t once allow us to stop and recognize existence. Sure, we exist; everyone knows that. But that’s just as empty as the admission that trees and chairs exist. They exist, but for us they are just ordered parts of an ordered world, where things have significances which we can see the moment we look at them. If Sartre is right in this interpretation, then we can confirm that people today are less likely than ever to recognize existence. So much activity, so little time. Everything we see either is or is not part of our purpose, be it completing a job, getting something to eat, meeting a friend, avoiding harm, and so on; the significance of something is understood immediately according to one’s purposes. The resistance of things, their existence pressing on us, is a property to be dealt with, rather than a fact to be marveled at. Heidegger’s question, “Why is there being rather than nothing?” is metaphysical speculation, the occupation of idle minds (who themselves are no more cognizant than anyone else of what existence really is). Roquentin himself was one of these people, even during the time of the novel, insofar as he still sought purpose in the Marquis de Rollebon:

M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist, I needed him so as not to feel my existence . . . . I did not notice that I existed any more, I no longer existed in myself, but in him; I ate for him, breathed for him, each of my movements had its sense outside, there, just in front of me, in him . . . . (98)

What makes Roquentin so special is that all of the significances which we normally accrue from our absorption in a world of projects is missing for him; there is nothing, absolutely nothing, which requires a world of significance, and so it all starts to fall apart. This is the nausea; the loss of all meaning, awareness of existence qua pure existence, naked reality. And this is why only Roquentin can see it, why it takes a novel to tell us about it, and why even then we will likely never see it ourselves.

IV

But if we will never see it, what good does a novel do? Not much, one would think. Certainly Sartre, even through the medium of Roquentin, can’t directly portray the true nature of experiences which by definition are beyond description. But what Sartre can do, or at least attempt to do, is to show the process by which one discovers these experiences, the sort of person who would see them, and how she would come to a recognition of them. It takes a person who can separate herself from all projects that assign importance (a task much more involved than just quitting your job), from all driving desires; someone who can live outside of the procedures of daily life itself. Roquentin is this person, or at least a chance. But even this is not enough to let us see. That is something we have to do on our own.

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