Nausea was first published in 1938, by Gallimard Editions, at a time when the author was still unknown. Sartre’s book is generally considered by both critics and admirers a classic of 20th century literature. Still, its publication was at first considered with skepticism and only accepted after approval from Gaston Gallimard, who read the book with enthusiasm. The title (Sartre opted for Melancholy, a reference to Albert Durer’s engraving) resulted from Gallimard’s request to which Sartre fortunately agreed.

The book would undergo several changes and it was eventually turned into a novel, although it was initially envisioned as a philosophical essay. The idea was Simone de Beauvoir’s. Sartre had given it the structure of a diary and launched himself back to work.[1] A new version was drafted in Berlin, where Sartre remained during the 1933-34 academic year under a scholarship granted by the French Institute to study the relationship between psychism and physiology.

However, Sartre’s immediate goal was Husserl’s phenomenology, a philosophical current then little publicized in France, and of which he would soon become one of the best-known representatives. He interrupted his activities as a philosophy teacher at Le Havre’s high school, a coastal town in Normandy whose traits served as the setting for the book,[2] and traveled to Berlin.    

For the following ten months, Sartre spent the mornings reading Husserl in German and part of the afternoons reworking the manuscript of his novel. He had not an easy task ahead of him. Turning into literature a philosophical essay on contingency would eventually prove to be a huge challenge. Philosophy is an austere discipline, and this feature, which seems to exclude dramatism and emotion for the benefit of abstraction, does not always fit well with the art of novel. Despite the revisions to which the text was submitted, the impression that this difficulty has not always been overcome remains. But, all things considered, its virtues (which are various) easily exceed its few flaws.

Although the initial version was written before Sartre discovered Husserl’s philosophy, phenomenology provided him with the conceptual framework he needed for his theme, in addition to—and this is not of minor importance—of a narrative method focused on phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness (what Husserl called Erlebnis and Sartre would refer as the vécu—the lived experience). However, we would not find in it, as it often happens in a certain literature, the endless exposure of the inner life of the protagonist, which appears in the novel reduced to a point without thickness or psychology. Nausea is written from a first-person perspective (as phenomenology requires) but goes beyond Husserl and, at crucial points, opposes him.  

In the novel, the main character, Antoine Roquentin, finds himself immersed in a world populated by objects that simultaneously attract and repel him—the nausea—and that seem to have a life of their own, an unexpected and disturbing experience he has difficulty controlling. Roquentin is an example of what has long been called an asocial being: this solitary and unstable man will confront himself, through his wanderings, perplexities and inconsequence (he is writing the biography of another adventurer, the Marquis of Rollebon, who met Marie Antoinette, the Republic, the Empire and, finally, the Restoration, and to whom Sartre ascribes a certain number of his own traits—the ugliness, the pleasure in the company of women and a taste for travelling, but not for political intrigue—and which he eventually abandons), with the fact that, by the end, he has no right to exist, since ultimately, as there is no God, nothing could justify existence. 

But how to describe contingency? The answer, once again, lies (at least in part) in Husserl’s phenomenology. His starting point could not, at first, be stranger to Sartre’s concerns: he wants to know how knowledge is possible and to identify the foundations—that is, the most basic truths on which it is grounded. For this, he uses the intentionality of consciousness and the epoqué. The epoqué allows him to suspend judgment about the existence of the external world and reveals the structures of consciousness that make phenomena an object of experience; it is, according to Husserl, a return to things as they are and to the way they manifest themselves to consciousness.  Sartre will eventually throw away the epoqué, but he keeps what he considers to be Husserl’s greatest achievement: the intentionality of consciousness. It is intentionality that will allow him to break with the Cartesian heritage in the conviction that consciousness exists only to the extent that it transcends itself towards its objects. Devoid of all interiority, it is a nothingness.

Everything is out there: a cat that passes by, the body that hurts, and even, oddly enough, the self that only by reflection makes itself known.[3] This lack of interiority is a mark of intentionality: consciousness, Sartre will later write in Being and Nothingness, is always awareness of something other than itself.

But what does this mean? Husserl noted that objects (the pencil I hold on my fingers, etc.) appear to consciousness as existents, i. e., as something independent of the perception we have of them. And even if we decide to bracket the very existence of the external world and voluntarily suspend all our judgments about its effectiveness (the epoqué), nothing fundamentally important changes: we still experience them as something that exists even though the world is not really there. Let us consider more closely what this might mean.

A pencil, when we look at it, offers us a different experience from the one we might have had using only our imagination. However, the difference between a perceptual act and an act of imagination remains present in our experience whether the pencil really exists or not. Therefore, existence must be a feature of objects as they are given in perception or, if you like, of what they mean when manifesting themselves to us. For this reason, due to the epoqué, Husserl not only takes existence as a component of a specific class of phenomena, but as something that would be best considered a part of its essence. This point is far from trivial. Since the essence of a pencil is constituted by those features that make the pencil the type of phenomenon that it is—let’s say: of what it means to be a pencil—we must conclude that existence and meaning are strictly on the same level. And this is what Sartre disputes.

The experience of nausea, on the contrary, show us that “existence precedes essence.” This formula, which eventually became famous, was not always well understood. Its roots date back to the Middle Ages, where the distinction between essence and existence is explicitly thematized by the scholastics. The essence of a thing is the set of features we use in order to define its concept. A triangle is defined as a three-sided polygon and it is this set of features (being a polygon and having three sides) that constitutes its essence. But it is not only geometric figures that have an essence. The same might be said about the physical objects or the objects created by our imagination: Pegasus, Ali Baba’s cave, a mermaid, and the like. Although Pegasus does not exist, we know what he is. We can talk about it, describe it (the winged horse) and, knowing how to use its name, we also learn the basic features of its referent. This leads us to the conclusion that objects might have an essence and still be nonexistent. But what is existence? Let me rephrase this point: what would be needed for Pegasus or a mermaid to exist? The answer is this: both have to be present in the world. To exist is nothing more than being present in the world. Sartre’s novel gives us the dramatized display of this abstract distinction, and uses it to define human beings.     

But what does it mean to say that existence precedes essence? It means, first and foremost, that before the world acquires any meaning at all, what consciousness captures is existence; secondly, consciousness does not constitute the world (as Kant and Husserl both defended) but, on the contrary, reveals it. It is exactly this revelation that explains Roquentin’s predicament.  

In fact, the revelation of existence has a double character. On the one hand, the world is apprehended in its nakedness, stripped of all meaning. Consciousness would allow us to directly capture the objects as existents and not just their features, their meaning or essence. This world, in all its primordial opacity, is inhuman (or, if we will, pre-human): it is there, in front of us, without us being able to untangle ourselves from it, compact and immobile, precisely as if it were in excess. But, since what we know in this experience is only bare existence, then, whether we want it or not, it is the very existence that is in excess. The contingency is simply this: nothing justifies or can justify the fact that something exists. Nausea is the discovery of the absurd.        

On the other hand, the feeling of strangeness that affects us in such an experience is an invitation to commit ourselves to the world. If all things are contingent and quickly pass from being to non-being, all that matters is still to be done: contingency will also be the discovery of freedom. If it is useless to expect the world to reveal its reason for being there, something that ultimately it does not possess, and along with it, so the story goes, the key to understanding existence is that we are responsible for its creation. In just one blow we have become hopelessly free and responsible for what the world is.   

In a famous passage, Sartre described this discovery in the following manner:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of “existence.” I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, “The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,” but I didn’t feel that it existed or that the seagull was an “existing seagull”; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can’t say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must believe that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word “to be.” […] I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that the green was a part of the quality of the sea. […] If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder-naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. […]

The word absurdity is coming to life under my pen; a little while ago, in the garden, I couldn't find it, but neither was I looking for it, I didn’t need it: I thought without words, on things, with things. […] And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity. […] Evidently I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. […] This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain to repeat: “This is a root”—it didn’t work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was . . . below all explanation. Each of its qualities escaped it a little, flowed out of it, half solidified, almost became a thing; each one was In the way in the root and the whole stump now gave me the impression of unwinding itself a little, denying its existence to lose itself in a frenzied excess. I scraped my heel against this black claw: I wanted to peel off some of the bark. For no reason at all, out of defiance, to make the bare pink appear absurd on the tanned leather: to play with the absurdity of the world. But, when I drew my heel back, I saw that the bark was still black.

This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless and icy, plunged in a horrible ecstasy. But something fresh had just appeared in the very heart of this ecstasy; I understood the Nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. […] But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float, as the other evening at the “Railwaymen’s Rendezvous”: here is Nausea; here there is what those bastards […] try to hide from themselves with their idea of their rights. But […] no one has any rights; […]

I sank down on the bench, stupefied, stunned by this profusion of beings without origin: everywhere blossomings, hatchings out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning. It was repugnant. But why, I thought, why so many existences, since they all look alike? […] I began to laugh […] (Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea (356-75). Robert Baldick (trans). London: Penguin Classics, 2000)

It is in this inhospitable world, stripped of all meaning, a world that seems incapable of being justified, that freedom suddenly breaks out. For a consciousness to exist is to project itself beyond itself, to loose itself in what transcends it. Man is what he will intend to be—i. e., what at every moment in history he can do of himself and the circumstances that bind him to other men. Without untangling existence from all its gratuitousness—something that, of course, we are unable to do—human beings can turn the world to which they were thrown (the expression is Heidegger’s), into a world of meaning and achievement. In the absence of any aprioristic design and, in consequence, of a being capable of justifying existence—God—it is freedom that defines us.

No wonder that even to the most distracted reader nausea emerges as the symptom of a malaise without remission: the death of God, to use an expression taken from Nietzsche, is, precisely like freedom, not a reason to be grateful but a burden that must be carried along the way. However, as free beings, we must also be able to turn the situations in which we find ourselves into what we intend to become, not only for ourselves, but for all men alike. This point in particular, where Kant’s influence could not be more conspicuous, will not be dealt with until a decade later, at the conference that gave rise to Existentialism is a Humanism; however, the result leaves Sartre dissatisfied.[4]

This is also, of course, the tragedy of Abraham, as Kierkegaard saw it: there is nothing out there to prove him that the voice he thinks he hears and that demands him to kill his own son Isaac is the voice of Yahve or only a hallucination. Be it as it may, the outcome is inescapable: knight of faith or simply a lunatic, he is bound to choose.[5] For an atheist like Sartre, matters are not easier: partly because what we choose for ourselves is tantamount to committing to what we intend for all men (an idea inherited from Kant and pivotal in Existentialism is a Humanism), and partly because nothing, from the outset, will point us the way, each choice is a bet, not a destiny. If we do not use freedom to commit ourselves, we are condemned to hover above the world like a beautiful soul or—what might be even worse—a spectrum; we become alienated, and freedom will fade away. On the contrary, if our commitments bring us down to earth one more time, they also overwhelm us with its weight and, precisely because they do so, reveal what we are.

Roquentin still hesitates. Undecided about abandoning a solitude that does not make him feel uncomfortable to commit himself to history, this unsociable man, who at times fears for his mental wealth, behaves like he was facing a dead end. Is Roquentin a nihilist? It is unlikely. The facts are these: the discovery of the absurd seems to have made of him an esthete (if he was not one already), and not a compagnon de route, a businessman, or a mere employee. In the Rendez-vous des Cheminots, for example, at a time when nausea settles in and threatens to swallow everything around, the music calms him down. Gradually, things return to normal: through art, the irremediable disorder of the world retreats, and, even if just for a few moments, becomes tolerable. Is it a return to Nietzsche, for whom without music life would have been a mistake? Nothing compels us to put that hypothesis aside.

It is possible that Sartre, at one time or another, found comfort in the therapeutic conception of art. With Roquentin, however, something more is at stake: he is inconsequential. Like Moses facing the Promised Land, he discovers freedom but does not know what to do with it. Mathieu Delarue, another alter ego of Sartre and the main character of The Road to Freedom, a tetralogy that began to be published shortly after the Liberation (only three volumes were completed), finds himself in the same situation. However, despite the pleasure he got from playing the piano (mainly Beethoven and Chopin), and which seems to be a family heritage, Sartre ended up following another path.

However, there is a lot in Roquentin to make him exemplary. The value of art and literature (like the diary he starts in an effort to understand the nausea that plagues him), can only be explained by the desire that impels each man in the search for a meaning for his life and, simultaneously, to find an answer (however tentative, limited and naive as it may be) to the problem of existence in general. Without these efforts, philosophy would be poorer.

[1] Sartre acknowledges that without the extensive revision by Simone de Beauvoir his manuscript would never have reached publication. Later, at the age of seventy, in an interview with Michel Contat, he stated that Nausea is one of his books (alongside the ten volumes of Situations and The Critic of Dialectical Reason, his second major work of philosophy) he would like to be read after his death.

[2] Le Havre appears in the novel under the name Bouville, literally mud city, a secure indication of Sartre's not so much harmonious relationship with the place where for some years he taught philosophy until obtaining a new post in Paris, and where Nausea was in part written (the first version), before he went to Berlin.

[3] See The Transcendence of the Ego, a work written almost at the same time as Nausea and in which Sartre takes his distances from Husserl’s philosophy, in particular, from the idea of ​​an ego considered as an internal structure of consciousness, whose unifying function allows the personal and integrated character of experience.

[4] Existentialism is a Humanism is the only book that Sartre later regretted having published. Although it is acknowledged as a good introduction to his thinking—there were times, now remote, that the book was frequently used by high school philosophy teachers in their classes in Portugal—his informal tone does not prevent some of the theoretical difficulties Sartre would face when writing his ethics to be apparent. Despite Sartre’s failure in concluding it, the preparatory work was published posthumously by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (Notebooks for an Ethics). The conference took place in Paris, at the Club Maintenant, in October 1945.

[5] Knight of faith is an expression used by Søren Kierkegaard that, when referring to Abraham (but not only to Abraham) lends it a celebratory and edifying tone. The choice imposed on Abraham, reported in the Old Testament, is, according to the author, beyond the limits of reason (see, for example, Fear and Trembling).