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nausea

Since Sartre is always lumped in with Camus as one of the great literary figures and moral leaders of war-time and post-war France, I thought I should read more by and about Sartre — if only to learn yet another perspective on Camus. “Pick up some of the easy stuff,” I thought. “I’ll read some of his fiction.” Beginning with some of my favorite provoking lines (where he calls dogs, men, and all living things “flabby masses which move spontaneously”), Nausea lives up to its name as well as its reputation. Not only is the character’s egomania obnoxious, but Sartre’s pedantic emphasis on recording the mundane details of a bourgeois existential crisis, the confrontation with the absurdity of our everydayness, is well done. He seems to have accomplished what he set out to do: he wrote a book that is almost as painful to read is it is to live the protagonist’s life. Being and Nothingness is almost more interesting; almost, though much longer and therefore more painful.

What is most interesting to me is to try and derive moral theory from ostensibly amoral existentialist writings. Sartre restructures morality to issue from the “I” rather than from the “they” or even the “us”. From the realization “that I am myself and I am here,” Sartre thinks that we learn to accept full responsibility for our actions, even if we are not ultimately responsible for the causes of them. I’m not sure whether I agree with his moral psychology, but I do agree with the conclusion that, more often than not, we ought to take responsibility for our actions whether or not we ultimately have the resources to demonstrate our physical (causal) responsibility. It is only by embracing responsibility for our condition and the condition of the world around us that we care enough to improve both.

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