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Notes
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, Lloyd Alexander (trans.) (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 127. All subsequent quotations and references from Nausea are from this edition. Originally published in French under the title La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).
Ibid., p. 21.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 83.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, Bernard Frechtman (trans.) (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), p. 249. All subsequent quotations and references are from this edition. Originally published in French under the title L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phenoménologique de l’imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1940). Anglo-American readers of Sartre are often not aware that the French educational system historically has taught aesthetics under the rubric of psychology and not axiology. This throws some light on why Sartre’s aesthetics is primarily descriptive as opposed to evaluative. For a detailed account of Sartre’s phenomenological aesthetics see Eugene Kaelin’s An Existentialist Aesthetic: The Theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1962).
Ibid., pp. 174–175.
Ibid., p. 22.
Allen Wood pointed out to me these contrasting descriptive terms.
Ibid., p. 177.
Ibid., p. 178.
Ibid., p. 175.
See The Psychology of Imagination, pp. 275–281.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, J. H. Bernard (trans.) (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1951), p. 59. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. Originally published in German under the title Kritik der Urteilskraft (Berlin, 1790).
Karsten Harries remarks, “Kant ties interest to desire, desire to reality. Thus, hunger can be stilled only by real food, moral outrage satisfied only by real change. Aesthetic pleasure, by contrast, asks nothing of reality and lets it be.... [Disinterested satisfaction] allows us to exist in the present, open to what presents itself. Inseparable from such openness is a sense of plentitude, of being at one with ourselves, that contrasts with our usual cares.” in The Broken Frame: Three Lectures (Washington, D.C.: Catholic university of America Press, 1989), pp. 7–8. Some of the basic comparisons among Kant, Schopenhauer, and Plato taken up here are given detailed consideration in the first lecture of The Broken Frame.
Nausea p. 74. Compare this with the following in Kant, “Every interest spoils the judgment of taste and takes from it its impartiality... That taste is always barbaric which needs a mixture of charms and emotions [Kant’s emphases] in order that there may be satisfaction, and still more so if it make these the measure of assent.” in Critique of Judgement, p. 58.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 Vols., E. F. J. Payne (trans.) (New York: Dover Books, 1969), Vol. 1, p. 186. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. Originally published in German under the title Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Leipzig, 1819).
Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 178.
Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 179.
The Psychology of Imagination, p. 253.
The Broken Frame Introduction, p. xiii. Some of the examples here are mentioned by Harries.
The Broken Frame: Three Lectures, pp. 22–32.
Nausea, pp. 174–175.
“The interest of La Nausee does not lie in its conclusion, which is merely sketched in; Sartre has not developed it sufficiently for it even to propose a solution to the problem.” in Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Bowes & Bowes Publishers, 1953), p. 16.
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 46.
Manser notes, “Sartre’s irony should never be forgotten in reading any of his works. Many of the errors made by critics in discussing him are due to a failure to notice his irony...” in Sartre: A Philosophic Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 16–17.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. I, pt. IV, sect. VII.
Sartre: A Philosophic Study, pp. 17–18. Marie McGinn similarly sees in Nausea Sartre’s autobiographical critique of his former aestheticism. Roquentin criticizes bourgeois values as a flight from meaninglessness, but fails to see his love of the jazz song and his desire to write a novel as similarly motivated. She additionally sees Roquentin’s desire to attain unity with aesthetic objects as strongly Oedipal, “[Roquentin’s aestheticsim] is an expression of his nostalgic desire for a maternal love, which is inextricably linked for him with the beautiful and the aesthetic, that leads him into a life of imagination which defines itself in opposition to the practical values of the bourgeoisie.” in “The Writer and Society: An Interpretation of ‘Nausea,’” The British Journal of Aesthetics 37, no. 2 (1997), pp. 118–129, p. 128. While the psycho-autobiographical undercurrents in the novel are no doubt worthy of emphasis, they should not distract us from the larger philosophical vision at the novel’s core. The erasure of an objective ontology and epistemology summed up in Roquentin’s experience with the chestnut tree provides the metaphysical bulwark for much of the novel’s dark commentary on religion, the social order, human relations, andWestern views of the self. For instance, the novel’s repudiation of bourgeois notions of individual dignity, equality, and natural rights are rooted in its denial of the very notions of a universal human essence and individual personal identity. Roquentin and the middles classes he criticizes have no right to exist if ultimately there is no self, no ‘I’constituting who an individual is. Nausea, p. 170.
Nausea, pp. 176–177.
Ibid., p. 178.
Ibid., p. 1.
Ibid., p. 178. Allen Wood has suggested the almost self-defeating quality of Roquentin’s hopes.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre: November 1939 — March 1940, Quintin Hoare (trans.) (New York: Panteon Books, 1984), pp. 86–88. Originally published in French under the title Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre: Novembre 1939 — Mars 1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). See also Ronald Hayman’s fine biography Sartre: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 75.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, Bernard Frechtman (trans.) (New York: George Brailler, Inc., 1964), p. 251. Originally published in French under the title Les Mots M (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). All subsequent quotations are from this edition.
Nausea, p. 170. The page details Roquentin’s reduction of himself to an anonymous and disembodied consciousness, and this consciousness amounts to nothing but consciousness of its object. While the basic thrust here is a critique of the Cartesian self, nevertheless we are left with the basic skeleton of the philosophical anthropology Sartre develops at length in other works.
The Words, p. 254.
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Weigel, P. (2005). The Aesthetics of Salvation in Sartre’s Nausea . In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Enigma of Good and Evil; The Moral Sentiment in Literature. Analecta Husserliana, vol 85. Springer, Dordrecht . https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3576-4_25
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