After a very productive first meeting, we agreed for our first reading to be Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. As an influential Existential text, it should stimulate some very intense discussion about the human condition and the implications of what it means to be free in life which holds no ultimate purpose or meaning.
Here’s the blurb from the Penguin cover:
“Nausea is both the story of the troubled like of a young writer, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times – existentialism. The book chronicles his struggle with the realization that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning; a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices. A seminal work of contemporary literary philosophy, Nausea evokes and examines the dizzying angst that can come from simply trying to live.”
The intention is that we use this site in order to post comments and reactions to the book whilst reading it, so it will be an evolutionary process as we encounter different aspects
of the literature.
So please, get posting…
(Next meeting is Tuesday 6th November – venue to be confirmed)
Okay, I’ll start this comment board off…
I was struck by a passage on p22 of my book (Penguin Modern Classic, 2000 version):
“Objects ought not to touch, since they are not alive. You use them, you put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it’s unbearable. I am afraid of entering in contact with them, just as if they were living animals.”
Roquentin’s confrontation by the presence of objects, after attempting to pick up a piece of paper, seems to be an acknowledgement of what Heidegger would call ‘presence-at-hand’ or ‘ready-at-hand’. In other words, the way that we divide the world up into objects that exist to be used and manipulated by us as individuals. As Roquentin finds; being no longer able to (sub-consciously) consider objects in this way, emphasises the very fact that we normally do so. Sartre’s intention here appears to be to get us to change our perspective on the world and the way we have constructed it as if it existed purely for our own ends.
I agree that Sartre here is influenced by Heidegger, but one should also have in mind Sartre’s great opposition to Heidegger’s Phenomenology, as found in Being and Nothingness.
Thanks!,