A review by jpwright87
Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre
3.0
Not nearly as depressing as some might have you believe, Nausea is an exercise in purging yourself of all fakery. However, that there seems to be precious little left at the end of this exercise doesn’t exactly bode well for the philosophy Sartre spent his life expounding. I couldn’t help but compare it to the earlier work of Descartes, breaking down all knowledge until finding a reliable basis in the famous “I think, therefore I am”. At one point Sartre makes a parody of this line and clearly sees himself needing to take the idea much further.
There are a handful of sequences where the writing is particularly engaging, usually involving the arrival of a fit of “nausea”, an existential angst that seems to both be a feeling of your existence dissipating into the environment or the overflowing oppression of the world on your self. That may sound like a bunch of what Joe Biden calls malarkey, but in simpler terms, it’s a feeling we get when we can see that the conceptual framework we use to see the world is arbitrary and that reality is a more chaotic and unorganized experience (as if it was possible for humans to think chaotically).
There’s a great deal that is still relevant, even though existentialism’s best days are behind it. Social media would seem to be the most obvious source of today’s fakery about ourselves. As the narrator says, “people who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.” Our creation of fake selves coincides both with how people see us and how we see ourselves, and these are actions that reinforce each other. From here, it’s not too hard to see why Sartre would famously say “hell is other people” (this quote should probably be given context, but it’s much too fun of a quote not to decontextualize). It’s also not too hard to see why Sartre would be relevant to today’s age, in which social constructivism is experiencing its heyday in the US.
On that note, the worst passage of the book is when Sartre lets his politics through in a criticism of the bourgeois elite who fool themselves into thinking their lives were meaningful. To Sartre, those who act but don’t think are living a lie. They are hiding from the truth that their existence is meaningless. To understand their essence: “I do not think, therefore I am a moustache.”
This in itself is a fine critique, but he spends extra time condemning their hypocrisy and effect on society in a way that betrays what was supposed to be his ultimate project of, you know, questioning everything. So, he comes off a bit like a political hack of his time and not an artist, unfortunately. The great thing about Dostoevsky’s existentialism, for example, was that one gets the feeling that he has no idea what the real answers are, but that he holds nothing back in his search.
One might also raise an eyebrow at Sartre making the only sympathetic character in the book, the “self-taught man”, into a pedophile at the end, out of nowhere. Given what I’ve read about the support of pedophilia amongst '60s French intellectuals, I’m more inclined to feel this was shoe-horned in not because it made sense from the character’s perspective, but that it would be a woke showing of the ultimate supremacy of Authenticity over the Good (which is repression of Authenticity).
Indeed, to think you are doing a good or are good would seem to be a deception, as these are merely categories we layer over reality. Perversely, being “truly” good would seem to imply one should do nothing because good IS nothing (OR, that if there is no good, there IS a bad: being inauthentic, and all action [which is by definition unreflective] would seem to fall into that category). Replacing Good with Authenticity doesn’t seem to help the main character out, either. He rots in his room, paralyzed by fear because there is no “real” structure by which he can live his life. In the end, we are left with a vague sense that the way out is to be an artist, bringing things that don’t exist into existence. That’s as close as we come to truly existing. But after the roller coaster of mental breakdowns and fantasies the narrator has created throughout the novel, I didn’t have much faith that he would hang on to that conception for long.
There are a handful of sequences where the writing is particularly engaging, usually involving the arrival of a fit of “nausea”, an existential angst that seems to both be a feeling of your existence dissipating into the environment or the overflowing oppression of the world on your self. That may sound like a bunch of what Joe Biden calls malarkey, but in simpler terms, it’s a feeling we get when we can see that the conceptual framework we use to see the world is arbitrary and that reality is a more chaotic and unorganized experience (as if it was possible for humans to think chaotically).
There’s a great deal that is still relevant, even though existentialism’s best days are behind it. Social media would seem to be the most obvious source of today’s fakery about ourselves. As the narrator says, “people who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.” Our creation of fake selves coincides both with how people see us and how we see ourselves, and these are actions that reinforce each other. From here, it’s not too hard to see why Sartre would famously say “hell is other people” (this quote should probably be given context, but it’s much too fun of a quote not to decontextualize). It’s also not too hard to see why Sartre would be relevant to today’s age, in which social constructivism is experiencing its heyday in the US.
On that note, the worst passage of the book is when Sartre lets his politics through in a criticism of the bourgeois elite who fool themselves into thinking their lives were meaningful. To Sartre, those who act but don’t think are living a lie. They are hiding from the truth that their existence is meaningless. To understand their essence: “I do not think, therefore I am a moustache.”
This in itself is a fine critique, but he spends extra time condemning their hypocrisy and effect on society in a way that betrays what was supposed to be his ultimate project of, you know, questioning everything. So, he comes off a bit like a political hack of his time and not an artist, unfortunately. The great thing about Dostoevsky’s existentialism, for example, was that one gets the feeling that he has no idea what the real answers are, but that he holds nothing back in his search.
One might also raise an eyebrow at Sartre making the only sympathetic character in the book, the “self-taught man”, into a pedophile at the end, out of nowhere. Given what I’ve read about the support of pedophilia amongst '60s French intellectuals, I’m more inclined to feel this was shoe-horned in not because it made sense from the character’s perspective, but that it would be a woke showing of the ultimate supremacy of Authenticity over the Good (which is repression of Authenticity).
Indeed, to think you are doing a good or are good would seem to be a deception, as these are merely categories we layer over reality. Perversely, being “truly” good would seem to imply one should do nothing because good IS nothing (OR, that if there is no good, there IS a bad: being inauthentic, and all action [which is by definition unreflective] would seem to fall into that category). Replacing Good with Authenticity doesn’t seem to help the main character out, either. He rots in his room, paralyzed by fear because there is no “real” structure by which he can live his life. In the end, we are left with a vague sense that the way out is to be an artist, bringing things that don’t exist into existence. That’s as close as we come to truly existing. But after the roller coaster of mental breakdowns and fantasies the narrator has created throughout the novel, I didn’t have much faith that he would hang on to that conception for long.