The first novel by Jean-Paul Sartre seems to be one of the best templates for the Existentialist fiction and philosophy that arose in the mid 1900s. The book was initially published in 1938, and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. The story concerns a man of about 30 years of age named Antoine Roquetin, who is staying in the coastal town of Bouville, France to finish researching and writing a historical nonfiction book. Suddenly he is struck by a lasting sensation which he calls “the Nausea” – in short, a feeling of terror caused by the very concept of existence, and disgust over all things that surround him, living and inanimate.

The novel itself doesn’t present a clear picture of what Sartre’s Extistentialism is really all about. But, conveniently, the introduction by Hayden Carruth does, and so that is the source I use here. Carruth starts by saying that “Existentialism is a philosophy–if a philosophy at all–that has been independently invented by millions of people simply responding to the emergency of life in a modern world” (p. vi).

(Somehow the song “This Is Our Emergency” by Pretty Girls Make Graves comes to mind…). Carruth points out that this outlook has appeared throughout history and literature, as far back Biblical mythology and ancient Greek philosophy. But modern Existentialism was cultivated primarily by Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard, with a bit of help from Dostoevski. However, Carruth claims that Sartre’s Existentialism was unique to the 20th Century, and was in direct opposition to the philosophy of Hegel:

“Hegelianism was the philosophy of history and the mass. By projecting a Final Reality toward which all history flows in a process of ever-refining synthesis, Hegel submerged the individual consciousness in a grand unity of ideal mind. [...] The Existentialist knows that the self is not submerged…and any system of thought that overrides this [individual] suffering is tyrannical [...] From this comes man’s despair, but also, if he has courage, his existential integrity” (p. viii).

Carruth suggests that philosophy is not a progression towards an end point, in the way that human life is a progression towards death. He argues that, if man were to keep on living indefinitely, his philosophy would keep on changing. “Hence his being is never fixed. He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death he would never end. Nor would his philosophy” (p. xiii).

Living this deep in philosophical literature, I can’t help but wonder why so many people take an “all or none” approach to philosophy. It seems that if one system doesn’t explain everything, people eventually pass it off as useless. Why not pick and choose from various schools of thought, in order to synthesize a working philosophy to live by? It seems that Carruth would have agreed with that notion, when he said, “Philosophical truth assumes many forms precisely because times change and men’s needs change with them” (p. vi). Although, for the record, Existentialism is the most valid philosophical realm that I have found thus far in my individual studies.

Another passage reminds me of Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown (which I’ve written about here before). “Man the thinker is a by-product, a nonessential component of reality, and he and all his works cling to existence with a hold that is tenuous and feeble” (p. ix).

“The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning–this is its self-defining cause–and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea” (p. xi).

Nausea can be considered incomplete if only because it doesn’t provide an escape for Roquetin. But if taken in conjunction with Sartre’s play “No Exit,” we could perhaps assume that there is no escape from existence, and that Roquetin’s priority is to find some way to cope. As Carruth puts it, “Sartre has said that genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out” (p. xiv). Roquetin hints at both music and writing (or art in general) as promising elements to include in his future life. And I guess that makes me feel better for being a music junkie and blogger/journalist/aspiring novelist.

Reading the book, I had the sense that Brown was speaking directly to me. It seemed to connect many different ideas, concepts, and experiences in my mind in ways I was unprepared or incapable of doing myself. It was a breath of fresh intellectual air, but it hit me like a tornado–and right from the start, too. The book is the result of Brown’s exhaustive studies of Freud’s psychoanalysis. However, it’s not a biography; it’s a highly interpretive work that connects psychology, philosophy (especially Hegel and Spinoza), history, and literature. Brown hopes to explain and eventually absolve mankind’s “restlessness and discontent.” One of my favorite paragraphs came on page 16:

“Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it seems to be doing is making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”

“Freud’s real critique of religion…is the contention…that true humility lies in science. True humility, he says, requires that we learn from Copernicus that the human world is not the purpose or center of the universe; that we learn from Darwin that man is a member of the animal kingdom; and that we learn from Freud that the human ego is not even master in its own house.”

“History is shaped, beyond our conscious wills, not by the cunning of Reason but by the cunning of Desire.”

This page alone lessened the awkwardness I have felt for being a science nerd first and a reader/writer second. It suddenly made sense: why I was obsessed with astronomy in high school; why I took a history of Darwin class in college; why (also in college) I took a Freud/psychoanalysis class; why I couldn’t shake the knowledge I had accumulated through all three endeavors.

As with most theoretical nonfiction studies, things get extremely messy and somewhat less interesting towards the end. It’s a lot easier to construct the big ideas on page 16 than it is to divide them up into dozens of sub-ideas. Anyways, I highly recommend the book. (Does it seem weird to anyone else that most of the stuff I’ve been writing about is from the late 1950s?)