Nausea and Sartre's Pep Talk

I've had Jean-Paul Sartre's "Nausea" on my reading list for years and at last acquired a loaned copy.  Honestly, this read was a struggle at points, and to find any good discussion of the book in layman's terms a near impossibility -- I barely recall Descartes and Marx, and haven't read Nietzsche, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Heidegger. Let's be real, I'm not a philosophy major, so I apologize in advance for any over-simplifications and misconstructions that result from these earnest efforts. In my opinion, the best description of Sartre's philosophy comes from the man himself ("Existentialism is a Humanism": full or condensed) and general biography/context via the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here.

"Nausea" was the blueprint for Sartre's bigger project, "Being and Nothingness", and so tries to lay out his philosophy through the fictional character Antoine Roquentin.  Throughout the short novel, Roquentin goes through a kind of existential midlife crisis of despair but rather than end on a "what's the point of it all" note, I thought the book actually had quite an uplifting and hopeful conclusion.

So, the nuts-and-bolts basics:
1) Existence precedes essence.
2) Being in-itself, or non-conscious: it "IS", it just EXISTS, like a rock or a tree root
3) Being for-itself, or consciousness: create yourself from nothingness; there is no predetermined essence

In the course of laying this out and Roquentin trying to articulate it in his diary, there's a secondary theme on the absurdity of language and attempting to communicate, particularly with the tree root and Anny episodes. The sensation that a tree root just simply exists and IS and thus unable/non-conscious of changing itself, is pretty difficult to put into coherent words (and probably why portions were so hard to follow!).

One of the parts I really enjoyed and had a "yes!" moment with was Sartre/Roquentin's discourse on feeling adventure (see also one of my favorite quotes from "To the Lighthouse"):

"Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure. [...] You suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated ... and then you attribute this property to events which appear to you in the instants." (p.56)

"The feeling of adventure would simply be that of the irreversibility of time. But why don't we always have it? Is it that time is not always irreversible? There are moments when you have the impression that you can do what you want, go forward or backward, that it has no importance; and then other times when you might say that the links have been tightened and, in that case, it's not a question of missing your turn because you could never start again." (p.57)

The book concludes with Roquentin listening to his favorite jazz record and realizing he too could create/contribute something during his existence; "Can you justify your existence then?" (p.177) -- YES!  No more pity partying, Roquentin, get out there and get writing! Writing for Roquentin is ACTION and a social responsibility that then can help him justify his existence, sort of a variation of 'be the change you wish to see in the world'. And this is Sartre's pep talk:  "You can always make something out of what you've been made into" (Situations 9:101).

To expand on that: "Quietism is the attitude of people who say: 'let others do what I cannot do'.  The doctrine that I present is precisely the opposite: ... there is no reality except in action ... man is nothing else but what he purposes ... nothing else but what his life is." (Existentialism is a Humanism)  And Sartre isn't taking any excuses either; Roquentin can think about writing his novel all he wants but what's going to count is if he actually DOES write the novel.  Not 'oh, I coulda done it if I just had the time' -- I am what I do with my life, not my wishes/dreams/hopes!  So, we've gone from 'what does it matter' boo-hooing to 'seize the day' optimism. 

Side note: compare Sartre's focus on the self/individual versus Foucault's power/society (and no 'individual').  I would love to go more in-depth on that, but the essays I found were 20,000 leagues over my  head.

Side note 2: Nabokov's hilarious review of "Nausea"

Bottom line: Adventure is time passing, life is what you make of it, Sartre's essay is better than his novel.

Post-Hiatus

First, this: Can great literature really change your life?
(I don't care for the article, but I do agree with the comments.)

Which I counter with this: For better social skills, scientists recommend Chekhov
(Full text here: Reading Fiction Improves Theory of Mind)
"... we selected literary works of fiction by award-winning or canonical writers and compared their effects on [Theory of Mind] with reading nonfiction, popular fiction, or nothing at all."