Epigraph taken by Sartre from Celine, legend of the pre-existential period French literature, sounds like this: “This is a person who has no significance in the team, he is just an individual.” The romantic dialectic at the “man-crowd” level suggests itself. But Sartre’s hero cannot break with society, nor can he be part of it. Sartre's hero cannot simply exist. Sartre's hero can be, precisely BE, for something. This is what the novel “Nausea” is about.

The novel is written in the form of a diary of a thirty-year-old French writer Antoine Roquentin. “...He had already settled in Bouville [a provincial French town] for three years to complete his historical research dedicated to the Marquis de Rollebon,” writes Sartre in the “publisher’s” preface to the diary. By the way, the Marquis himself is in many ways reminiscent of Roquentin: travel, sometimes adventurism. So, what we have: a small town and a person living in it and writing a book on historical topic, close to him. On top of that, the person keeps a diary. The question immediately arises: is there an attempt to find oneself in this stream of reflexive experiences?

Let’s wait a while with the answer and follow what is happening in Roquentin’s life. In the first few days reflected in the diary, he, overcoming his indifference, tries to work on the biography of the Marquis. But the work is not going well, Roquentin has no interest in it and, in the end, he writes in his diary: “I am mortally tired of the Marquis de Rollebon.” Antoine quits his job and never returns to it. But this does not bring satisfaction to the hero, because he experiences Nausea. Nausea is by no means a metaphor, it is a physiological feeling of mental unrest that rolls over the hero at the most unexpected moments. “Something happened to me, there is no longer any doubt,” he writes in his diary. - This thing came out... like a disease. It penetrated into me on the sly, drop by drop...” And a direct description of Nausea itself: “Nausea overtook me, I collapsed on a chair, I didn’t even understand where I was; All the colors of the rainbow slowly circled around me, vomit rose in my throat...”

What is the reason for its appearance? Perhaps its source is in the environment? Roquentin experiences Nausea in the hotel where he lives, on the street, in the library, in the museum, in the cafe “Shelter of Railwaymen”, almost everywhere... No, it’s not a matter of place. Rather, in the atmosphere of what is happening. Whenever Nausea overtakes the hero, he is alone (the only exception is the episode during dinner with the Self-Taught Man, the hero of the novel, symbolizing the classical Freudian emptiness, whose imaginary “humanism” Roquentin despises). But this does not mean at all that Sartre equates Nausea and loneliness. According to Sartre, nausea is the limit of despair of a person who does not see the meaning in his own existence. “I only have my body, I am a lonely person with my lonely body... I wanted one thing - to be free,” says Roquentin. In this case, loneliness is a prerequisite for freedom. It is important to consider that loneliness in the existential sense is the most important category of freedom. But what is “freedom”? “Freedom is nothingness,” writes Sartre. Of course we're talking about about external freedom, which is ephemeral and unreal, freedom that leads nowhere. The awareness of this freedom is nauseating. “Dazzling obviousness,” as Sartre writes. Can Roquentin, an idle writer living on an inheritance, unencumbered by any earthly cares, call himself “unfree”? Maybe. And it is precisely this “obviousness” that makes him unfree. Deprived of connections with anything, he feels the world around him more acutely. Nausea is a physiological reaction of the body - the last barrier separating the fragile inner world from the dangerous and huge outer world. This is primitive loneliness in the fight against the elements. To gain full freedom, the hero does not need to get rid of loneliness, although this is exactly what he initially thinks, he needs to find a justification for his existence. But it is very difficult to achieve this while experiencing Nausea, because Nausea is, among other things, contempt for objects, for nature, for the people around us. To verify the validity of our assumption, let's look at Bouville through the eyes of Roquentin: the architecture of a hostile city, in which there is not a single straight street, comes to life to the horror of the hero; nature, crawling into the squares like a green octopus and capturing them with its long sticky tentacles; crowds of insignificant people who live in this city, not knowing anything.

Antoine Roquentin is free using metaphysical terminology Albert Camus, from everything, but for nothing. This “for nothing” is the cause of Nausea. “I myself have no troubles, I am rich as a rentier, I have no boss, no wife and no children; I exist - that’s my only trouble...”

The feelings experienced by the hero, who finds himself in a reality alien to him (and any reality in the concept of Sartre’s romantic existentialism is alien to the human spirit), are intensified by the deadly force of reflection with which Antoine exhausts himself (this is confirmed by any page from his diary). The only salvation from Nausea is going into the depths of one’s own “I”, which means that Nausea is also the inability to adequately respond to the environment, it is a pathological alienation that scares away the people around us.

The prospects for a hero obsessed with such a “disease” look absolutely bleak. He himself does not expect anything from life, assigning himself the role of a “critical contemplator,” wandering aimlessly around Bouville all day long.

Probably nothing would have changed if he had not received a letter from Annie. She is a woman who was very close to him, with whom he had not seen for four years and from whom he had had no news all this time. She will be passing through Paris. With an abstract anticipation of the “new,” something that will destroy the everyday meaninglessness of life, Roquentin awaits her arrival. A couple of days before this, he decides to finally leave Bouville.

Their meeting and the conversation that took place between them is the key to understanding the novel.

First of all, it is worth noting the striking similarity between Annie and Antoine. Despite the fact that her speech seems fast and easy, she “has aged”, “moves heavily”, “in the light of the lamp ... looks like an old woman.” Roquentin noted the same thing earlier, speaking about himself. However, such similarities, which in Sartre’s case cannot be accidental, do not add ease to their conversation. “The last word gets stuck in my throat... Now she will be angry... And before, when I met with Annie after a break, even if we didn’t see each other for only a day, even if it was in the morning after sleep, I never knew how to find the words that she I was waiting to see what suited her dress, the weather, the last phrases we exchanged the day before...” Antoine writes in his diary. There is a sense of doom in this. Two close people are talking, and this conversation, under quite ordinary circumstances, is so difficult for them. Is this not due to the inability of one person to understand another?

They exchange meaningless remarks for some time, and suddenly Annie declares: “I am the living dead... No one and nothing else can inspire passion in me... Now I live surrounded by my deceased passions.”

It is clear that such statements of hers cannot but excite Roquentin, because he can say the same about himself. But how, how does she manage to live, realizing all this? This is the question that torments Antoine.

And Annie dedicates him to the intricacies of her theory of “winning situations” and “perfect moments.” Its essence lies in the fact that in a person’s past there is some situation that makes him happy in the present. Several similar situations from the past are put together in a row - and a whole story is obtained, which can be played hundreds of times in your mind, resurrecting “dead passions” within yourself.

Annie leaves again, and the hero is left alone. But something has changed in him. It is still unknown what, but the nausea does not return to him.

On the last day of his stay in Bouville, saying goodbye to all his acquaintances, Roquentin enters the cafe “Shelter of Railwaymen” and hears his favorite song. At this moment he understands everything.

Music (creativity) showed him the future path. Annie's ideas found their embodiment in the most unexpected way. In the end, in order to resurrect passions that have long cooled down in oneself, they must be experienced.

You need to create something in the present so that in the future there will be something to justify your existence through memories from the past (the existence of the possibilities of being, in the terminology of Martin Heidegger). “Can I try?” - Roquentin asks himself.

He will begin to write a book - a novel, but not a historical one. Antoine considers his attempt to resurrect the Marquis de Rollebon to be his mistake: he needs to resurrect himself. Resurrect in order not to be burdened own existence. This situation in philosophy is called the existence of possible existence: the hero requires not just existence - a certain actualization is existentially important to him (in the case of Antoine Roquentin, a written book).

Roquentin leaves Bouville and gets to work. To a job that will finally make him free. Free to come to terms with yourself through creativity. The concept of “creativity” in Sartre’s system of existentialism is generally a universal module for achieving freedom. After all, only in creativity does the Creator, hiding from the eschatological “glaring evidence,” take upon himself the burden of ALL responsibility. Note that, suffering from attacks of Nausea, Roquentin does not blame anyone for this, except himself. This is a typically Sartrean point: a person is responsible not only for his troubles, deeds and actions, but also for the whole world in general (see Sartre, “The Devil and the Lord God”). By the way, this also intersects with the humanistic philosophy of that time. “If you eat over-salted soup, it is stupid to scold the seller or manufacturer of salt because it is tasteless,” wrote Sartre, who among the first existentialists called Jesus Christ (it is no coincidence that the same parallel is in Camus in “The Stranger”), who taught to take everything upon oneself and who atoned for the sins of all people with his death. Of course, Roquentin is not Christ, but he also acts alone. And the fact that Antoine Roquentin, an individualist by nature, is left to himself throughout the novel, ultimately helps him, after a long search, find the only way out of the complex psychological labyrinth, whose name is Nausea. Having started to write a novel, he takes on an obligation, losing external - illusory, like the humanism of the Self-Taught, freedom, i.e. his “non-existence” becomes being. Inner freedom is achieved through creativity, in which he - Antoine Roquentin - is the Creator, on whose train of thought absolutely everything depends.

Sartre's novel Nausea has become a kind of example and symbol of existentialist literature. It is written in the form of a diary, allegedly belonging to the historian Antoine Roquentin, who came to the seaside town, to the library where the archives of the French nobleman of the late 18th century were kept. early XIX V. The life and fate of the Marquis de Rollebon initially interested Roquentin. But soon the adventurous adventures of the Marquis (by the way, according to the historical plot, he visited Russia and even participated in a conspiracy against Paul I) ceased to interest Roquentin. He writes a diary - with a vague hope of understanding the disturbing thoughts and sensations overwhelming him. Roquentin is sure that a radical change has occurred in his life. It is not yet clear to him what it consists of. And he decides that he will describe and explore the states of the world, of course, as they are given, transformed by his, Roquentin’s, consciousness, and even more so these states of consciousness themselves. In terms of meaning, there is a kinship with Husserl's phenomena. But if Husserl identifies and describes the phenomena of consciousness in order to capture their impersonal universal structures, then Sartre - in the spirit of Jaspers, Heidegger, Marcel - uses a description of the phenomena of consciousness to analyze such existential states as loneliness, fear, despair, disgust and other truly tragic worldviews of the individual . At first they are fixed under a single Sartrean existential symbol. This is NAUSEA, and nausea is more likely not in the literal sense, but in the existential sense. Roquentin, following the example of the boys throwing pebbles into the sea, picked up a pebble. “I saw something that made me feel disgusted, but now I don’t know whether I was looking at the sea or at a stone. The stone was smooth, dry on one side, wet and dirty on the other,” Roquentin wrote in his diary. The feeling of disgust then passed, but something similar was repeated in another situation. A beer mug on the table, a seat on a tram - everything turns on Roquentin with some incomprehensibly creepy, disgusting side. In the cafe, his gaze falls on the bartender’s shirt and suspenders. “His blue cotton shirt stands out as a joyful spot against the background of the chocolate wall. But this also makes me sick. Or, rather, THIS IS NAUSEA. The nausea is not in me: I feel it there, on this wall, on these suspenders, everywhere inside me. She is one with this cafe, and I am inside."20. So, first of all, things seem to be rejected from a person - and not only truly disgusting things, but also things that are considered beautiful, well made by man or that arose along with nature itself, which is admired by many. Roquentin sees a plush bench on the tram - and he is overcome by another attack of nausea. This prompts Roquentin to pronounce an indictment on the world of things: “Yes, this is a bench,” I whisper, like a spell. But the word remains on my lips, it does not want to stick to the thing. And the thing remains what it is with its red plush, which bristles with a thousand tiny red paws, standing upright with dead paws. A huge belly turned up, bloody, swollen, baring its dead legs, a belly floating in this box, in this gray sky - this is not a seat at all. It could just as well be, for example, a dead donkey, which, swollen with water, is floating along a large, gray, wide-spread river, and I am sitting on the belly of the donkey, with my legs dangling into the clear water. Things were freed from their names. Here they are, bizarre, stubborn, huge, and it’s stupid to call them seats or even say anything about them. They surrounded me, alone, speechless, defenseless, they were below me, they were above me. They do not demand anything, do not impose themselves, they simply are." This philippic against things is not just a description of states of morbid consciousness, which is what Sartre was great master, with stunning power depicting the varied shades of confusion in the mind and feelings of a lonely, desperate man. Here are the roots of that part of Sartre’s ontology, epistemology, psychology, concept of society and culture, where man’s dependence on the first and second (i.e., modified by humanity itself) nature is depicted in the most tragic, negative light

The matter does not end with a rebellion against things - and at the same time against the blissful and poetic depictions of nature outside of man. “Nausea” and other works of Sartre contain an expressive, talentedly executed indictment against the natural needs, human impulses, and his body, which in Sartre’s works often appear in the most unsightly, animal form.

The situation is no better with the world of human thoughts. “Thoughts are what make it especially painful... They are even worse than flesh. They drag on, drag on endlessly, leaving some strange aftertaste.” Roquentin’s painful separation from his own thoughts essentially turns into an accusation against the Cartesian cogito, which is written as every person’s feeling of the inseparability of “I think” and “I exist,” which, however, turns into another deep painful tear: “For example, this painful chewing gum - the thought: “I EXIST”, because I chew it, I myself, the body, having once begun to live, lives on its own. ... If I could stop thinking! ... My thought is me; that’s why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think, and I cannot stop myself from thinking, because even at this moment it is monstrous. - I exist BECAUSE I am horrified that I exist. It is I, I MYSELF, extracting myself from the non-existence to which I strive: my hatred, my aversion to existence are all different ways of FORCING ME to exist, to plunge me into existence. Thoughts, like dizziness, are born somewhere behind, I feel them being born somewhere behind my head... as soon as I give in, they will appear in front of me, between my eyes - and I always give in, and the thought swells, swells , and becomes huge and, filling me to the brim, resumes my existence." And again, before us is not only and not so much a description of what could be called Roquentin’s confused state of mind. In fact, here and in similar passages of Sartre’s works there is a significant correction of the complacent traditional rationalism, for which the endowment of man with the ability to think acted as a good, as the greatest advantage granted to man by God. Sartre uses all the efforts of his brilliant talent to show that the movement of reasoning from “I think” to “I exist,” and in general the processes of thinking can become a real torment from which a person cannot get rid of.

In Nausea and other works, Sartre similarly tests the strength of deeply absorbed European culture values - love, including love for one's neighbor, communication and sociability. Even the seemingly holy relationships between children and parents loving men and women, Sartre dissects truly mercilessly, exposing to the light of day those hidden mechanisms of rivalry, enmity, betrayal, which supporters of the romanticization of these relationships prefer not to pay attention to. Perhaps the world of communication, as depicted by Sartre, is most clearly captured in his dramaturgy.

Sartre discovered his gift as a playwright quite late. While in captivity, he wrote the play “Flies” for an amateur theater. All the main categories of existentialist philosophy - love-enmity, fear, betrayal, guilt, repentance, the inescapability of suffering, existence devoid of God - were embodied in Sartre's stylization of the myth of Orestes, Electra, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus. Orestes, who kills his mother, plays a different role in Sartre’s drama than the same character in Aeschylus. “Orestes, according to Sartre, is the herald of the twilight of the gods and the imminent coming of the kingdom of man. And in this he is a direct negation of Orestes of Aeschylus. He killed contrary to the ancient maternal right, but killed at the behest of the divine oracle and in the name of the gods, only others - young, patrons emerging statehood. It is not for nothing that it is not he himself, but the wise Athena who saves him from the Erinyes, and justifies revenge for his father. Sartre’s Orestes does not look for any justification outside of himself. That is why the tragedy about him bears an Aristophanian-style comedy title: “Flies” - yet. one departure from ethics, which derives its norms from impersonal, divine plans."

In the play “Behind a Closed Door,” Sartre seems to be anatomizing human relationships. In a room like a cell, without windows, with a tightly closed door, there are two women and one man. They have nothing but communication. And it turns into real torture. In the end it turns out that the seclusion of these people is voluntary; they can leave their “prison” at any time, but prefer to stay in it. And so the hero of the drama concludes: hell is not what Christians talk about; hell is other people and communication with them. For Sartre's heroes, life within four walls is suffering, but in a certain sense desirable, like monastic asceticism. This way you can atone for your worldly sins and, more importantly, take refuge and isolate yourself from the world. In his novels and plays, Sartre seems to collect unusual, namely borderline situations, and deliberately turns them into some general models. For he believes that in such situations a person is able to acutely perceive and comprehend the meaning of his existence. Roquentin's nausea is the path to understanding existence. “Now the word Absurdity is being born under my pen - just recently in the park I didn’t find it, but I didn’t look for it, I had no use for it; I thought without words about things, together with things... And, without trying anything formulate clearly, I realized then that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nausea, to my own life. Indeed, all that I was able to understand later boils down to a fundamental absurdity... But now I want to capture the absolute nature of this absurdity."

Sartre's critics, including those from the Marxist camp, tried to prove that he and other French existentialists “raised into absolutes” the contradictions, the absurdity of bourgeois existence, as well as the features of truly tragic situations - like world war or occupation. But Sartre and Camus stubbornly insisted that the tragedy of human existence is universal and knows no historical or national boundaries. Depicting the dramatic relationship between man and nature, between the individual and other people, Sartre created small literary “horror films”, which, in the light of the events of the late 20th century. turned out to be quite realistic warnings. People live their daily lives. “Meanwhile, the great, wandering nature crept into their city, penetrated everywhere - into their houses, into their offices, into themselves. It does not move, it hides, they are full of it, they inhale it, but do not notice... And I, I SEE her, this nature, I SEE..." What will happen if she suddenly wakes up? Sartre’s terrible naturalistic fantasies are fantasies of warning, but some of them (like a child’s third eye) come true in a terrible way in the Chernobyl era. They end with accusations - against traditional humanism and rationalism. “I will lean against the wall and shout to those running past: “What have you achieved with your science? What have you achieved with your humanism? Where is your dignity, thinking reed?" I will not be afraid - at least not more afraid than now. Isn't this the same existence, variations on the theme of existence? ... Existence is what I am afraid of."

By the end of the 20th century. - in an era of numerous wars, local conflicts, national-ethnic strife, constant threat to life due to radioactive disasters, environmental crisis, terrorism, in an era of unprecedented tension of human spiritual forces, devaluation moral values and other disasters - criticism by Sartre and other existentialists of human existence, the “philosophy of fear and despair” is by no means outdated. Sartre's darkest descriptions of the confused states of existence have not lost their meaning. And therefore, readers, recognizing themselves in the characters’ experiences, are looking for an answer to the question: what is the way out? How should a person behave?

Sartre's answer to these questions was discussed earlier. The key to existence is human freedom. But unlike traditional philosophy, which glorified Reason and Freedom, Sartre recommends that a person not have any illusions. Freedom is not the highest and happiest gift, but a source of suffering and a call to responsibility. Man is doomed to freedom. The meaning of existence as the essence of a person is to withstand, to withstand, to still take place as a person. In Nausea, Sartre describes not only states of despair and confusion, but also moments of enlightenment. Such days and minutes are like a flash. “Nothing has changed, and yet everything exists in some other quality. I can’t describe it: it’s like Nausea, only with the opposite sign, in a word, an adventure begins for me, and when I ask myself why I got this , I understand what it’s all about: I FEEL MYSELF AND I FEEL THAT I’M HERE; IT’S ME cutting through the darkness, and I’m happy, like a hero in a novel.”

Roquentin listens to a black woman singing in a cafe, and the music allows him to think: there are people who are saved by inspiration and creativity “from the sin of existence.” “Can’t I try? Of course, it’s not about melody... but can’t I do it in another area?... It would be a book - I can’t do anything else... That was my mistake , that I tried to resurrect the Marquis de Rollebon. No, the book should be of a different kind, I don’t know yet exactly - but it is necessary that behind its printed words, behind its pages, something that would not be subject to existence should be guessed. would be above him. Let's say a story that cannot happen, for example a fairy tale. It should be beautiful and solid, like steel, so that people are ashamed of their existence." So, freedom, choice, responsibility, hope, creativity - these are the fundamental concepts of Sartre’s philosophy, inseparable from despair and suffering.

The tragic concept of existence, embodied in Sartre's literary works, spilled over into the abstract forms of philosophical ontology.

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Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation

South Ural State University

Department of Philosophy

on the topic: The problem of the meaning of human life in the novel by J.P. Sartre "Nausea"

Completed:

Kotlyarov A.S.

Chelyabinsk 2005

Jean-Paul Sartre. Encyclopedias call him a philosopher and writer, but this definition is not flawless. The philosopher Heidegger considered him more like a writer, than a philosopher, but the writer Nabokov, on the contrary, is more of a philosopher than a writer. But everyone would probably agree with the capacious definition - “thinker.”

Jean-Paul Sartre rose to fame after publishing his first novel in 1938. Until that time, he studied and taught philosophy, published his first philosophical works - and worked hard on a novel, considering this activity to be his main one. He lived a long life and wrote many works, many of which were published only after his death, but this essay will discuss his first work of art- the novel “Nausea”.

“Nausea” affects the reader from the first moments of reading, and even before. Eco argued that the title should not be connected in any way with the text, so as not to confuse the reader and prevent his creative associative activity in a certain direction. In this case, the vague, restless feeling evoked by the name is necessary. It creates that initial impulse, which, from the very first lines, is picked up by the text and carries the reader’s feelings (not thoughts, just feelings!) to that very feeling of nausea that must be experienced in order to fully understand the author, to understand his thoughts. One of characteristic features of this text- this is the fact that all the main philosophical reasoning, all the thoughts expressed by the author, are located in the text immediately after the points of sensory influence, causing the necessary state in the reader and bringing him into close emotional contact with the hero, which allows, following the feelings, to feel how his thoughts, the problems that concern him, allows him to feel the importance and genuineness of these problems. Only the man who, together with Roquentin, felt the sweetish taste of saliva in his mouth, which cannot be gotten rid of, felt the hot warmth of his body, enveloping him in a sultry halo, the soft heaviness of his hands, the sticky moisture of his skin. Only a person imbued with a sense of his own thingness can correctly understand and realize Sartre’s thoughts, caused by Descartes’ phrase - “I think, therefore I exist.”

But enough about the mechanism of influence of “Nausea” on the reader... Still, my work is not on the “theory of the text.” Let's talk better about the characters. There are only four characters in this book - Antoine Roquentin, Annie in Antoine's memoirs, the Self-Taught Man, Annie in the hotel, and the rest - walking, talking scenery that appears in the field of view, lingers for a short time, and disappears, leaving the feeling of a dissipated mirage.

Although, no, not a mirage - a person met on a cloudy rainy evening. Just now, he was walking towards you, real, alive... and now, he’s already behind, and I can’t even remember the features of his face, just some general characteristics- height, gender, clothing color. These characters, individually, do not carry ideas, but together, they seem to represent the fifth - invisibly present character - the Ordinary Man.

It is against the background of these people that the four I mentioned stand out - those who are looking for their own meaning in life.

Actually, now I have come close to the problem that I put in the title of the essay - the problem of the meaning of human life. All four heroes come to this problem. In different ways, at different points in my life. You can talk a lot about any of them for a long time, but in this essay I will consider only one.

Antoine Roquentin is, in fact, the main character of the novel. This man, who for six years traveled Central Europe, North Africa and Far East. A person who follows the impulses of his own soul is led to the question of the meaning of life by his inner freedom. He is rich, not bound by the everyday money problems that oppress most people. He is not bound by the internal moral and ethical laws of society (at least he feels free and can calmly do what he wants, for example, pick up a dirty piece of paper, without thinking about the reaction of others and without fear of getting dirty). He's not religious. He is not interested in power and politics. He is not in love and is not burdened by it. He has no children. Just think about it, he is free from all the shackles that bind that same Ordinary Man! And this freedom latently oppresses him. He is free, which means that he is deprived of those illusions that usually replace the meaning of life. He is deprived of local goals with which the majority are satisfied, and the ghost of a global goal stands before him (Even writing a book about the Marquis de Rollebon does not save him as a local life goal; on the contrary, studying the life of this materialist to the marrow of his bones, Roquentin unconsciously compares him with himself and this only makes his situation worse). Roquentin is not used to thinking about his actions - he does what he wants, and, as a result, the absurdity of existence comes to him not formalized in his thoughts, but in the form of spontaneous, overwhelming feelings that create the necessary mood in him and stimulate his movement. thoughts in the right direction. He feels his thingness, he realizes that he exists. But he doesn't want to EXIST, he wants to BE.

This internal problem leads Roquentin into a state of alienation from the world of people, but he is not as inert as Monsieur Meursault, the hero of A. Camus’s novel “The Stranger,” and he is not satisfied with this situation. He persistently continues to look for those threads that can reconnect him with the world of people; he continues, often without realizing it, to search for his meaning in life. And he finds his meaning. In creativity - in music, in painting, in literature, he sees a reflection of true being, purified from existence. Listening to his favorite blues, he realizes not only that this music does not exist, but does exist, but also that along with it there are also its authors - those who created what exists and thereby, at least partially, justified their existence, cleared of thingness.

Antoine Roquentin decides to write a novel.

“And there will be people who will read the novel and say: “It was written by Antoine Roquentin, the red-haired guy who wandered from one cafe to another,” and will think of my life as I think of the life of the Black Woman - as something precious , almost legendary.”

Here are his thoughts. He found his own way to deceive nausea, his own way to join the desired world of things that exist. He found his purpose in life, and, living through the last lines, literally permeated with calm, a warm evening and the smell of future rain, the reader physically feels how the tension leaves him, the nausea recedes, and a feeling of harmony comes. sartre nausea fate life

In this work, Sartre very closely connects the problem of the meaning of human life and the dualistic approach to being and, in fact, to man. The human body exists, and it is easy to realize. It is so easy that this awareness becomes dominant and through this bodily awareness it is very difficult to realize oneself as the second, spiritual component of a person. As a result of this, the meaning of life, according to “Nausea,” can be established as awareness of one’s spiritual component and bringing it into a certain equilibrium state with the physical one. For what is nausea if not satiety with the bodily awareness of one’s own existence and a deficiency of spiritual awareness? And the final harmony is the result of bringing these awarenesses into balance, the desire to create something that does not exist, the desire to create is spiritual awareness that has found a way out.

Literature

1. Sartre J.-P. Nausea: Novel / Trans. from fr. Yu. Yakhnina. - St. Petersburg: ABC-classics, 2004. - 256 p.

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Introduction

Existentialism is a philosophical movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that highlights the absoluteness of human freedom and attempts to seriously deal with the consequences of this fact for the everyday life of people - this tradition is most often associated with the name of Jean-Paul Sartre. Encyclopedias call him a philosopher and writer, but this definition is not flawless. The philosopher Heidegger considered him more of a writer than a philosopher, but the writer Nabokov, on the contrary, was more of a philosopher than a writer. But everyone would probably agree with the capacious definition - “thinker”. The existential direction in psychology and psychotherapy, which has gained enormous popularity over the past half century, goes back to his ideas about the nature and purpose of man.

Jean-Paul Sartre rose to fame after publishing his first novel, Nausea, in 1938. Until this time, he studied and taught philosophy, published his first philosophical works - and worked hard on a novel, considering this activity to be his main one. He lived a long life and wrote many works, many of which were published only after his death. In the novel Nausea, Sartre expressed his philosophical concept, his version of existentialism, which he, unlike many, considered optimistic; the writer emphasized the importance of freedom, the difficulties that it brings to human existence, and the chances to overcome them. Sartre depicts the struggle of every person trying to cope with existence. “Nausea” turns out to be part of this struggle.

The philosophy of existentialism in the novel by J.-P. Sartre "Nausea"

“Nausea” affects the reader from the first moments of reading, and even before. Eco argued that the title should not be connected in any way with the text, so as not to confuse the reader and prevent his creative associative activity in a certain direction. In this case, the vague, restless feeling evoked by the name is necessary. It creates that initial impulse, which, from the very first lines, is picked up by the text and carries the reader’s feelings (not thoughts, just feelings!) to that very feeling of nausea that must be experienced in order to fully understand the author, to understand his thoughts. One of the characteristic features of this text is that all the main philosophical reasoning, all the thoughts expressed by the author, are located in the text immediately after the points of sensory influence, causing the necessary state in the reader and bringing him into close emotional contact with the hero, which allows, following behind his feelings, to feel how his thoughts, his thoughts, the problems that concern him, allows him to feel the importance and genuineness of these problems.

The novel is a diary of Roquentin, the cause of which was his peculiar “illness”. The disease approached Roquentin gradually, now rolling in, now retreating, until it was in full swing. It started with something that can’t even be called an event. “On Saturday, the boys were making pancakes, and I wanted to throw a pebble into the sea with them. But then I stopped, dropped the stone and walked away. I must have looked lost, because the boys laughed at my back.” Roquentin experienced a strange feeling of fear, “some kind of nausea in his hands.”

What happened to the hero? He has disappeared holistic perception peace; objects have lost their usual, “tame” character, their proportionality with human ideas about them. “Existence suddenly revealed itself. It lost the harmless appearance of an abstract category, the variety of objects, their individuality turned out to be only an appearance, an outer shine. When the shine disappeared, what remained were monstrous, flabby, disorderly masses, naked masses, frightening in their obscene nakedness.” And I - lethargic, weakened, obscene, overwhelmed by gloomy thoughts - I, too, was superfluous."

The conclusion that he is “superfluous” involuntarily leads the hero to the thought of suicide and turns out to be the most dramatic moment of his revelation, but the hero unexpectedly finds a saving loophole into which he rushes with the agility of a lizard: “I vaguely dreamed of my destruction in order to eliminate at least one of the superfluous existences. But my death would also be superfluous. My corpse would be superfluous, my blood on these stones, among these plants… I would be superfluous for eternity.”

The knowledge of the “excess” of his existence leads the hero not to death, but to the discovery of the “fundamental absurdity” of existence, determined mainly by the fact that “existence is not a necessity.” Those who hide from these truths, believing that they have a special right to exist, Roquentin defames with the word “scoundrels.” The life of the “scoundrels” is also meaningless, they are also “superfluous,” because any human existence resembles “the awkward efforts of an insect thrown over on its back.”

Love is a proven means of saving the hero from metaphysical “neurosis.” Sartre suggested that Roquentin test it on himself. The knight of “nausea” once had a lover, Annie, with whom he broke up, but for whom he retained the most tender feelings. She lives on the other side of the English Channel. Annie is a minor theater actress in London. When Roquentin fell ill with “nausea,” thoughts of Annie began to visit him often. “I wish Annie were here,” he admits in his diary. The meeting in a Parisian hotel evoked in the hero a melancholy feeling of nostalgia for earlier times, which intensified the more he realized that the past could not be returned. The spiritual life, or rather spiritual non-existence, of Roquentin and Annie has a lot common features. One could even say that Annie is Roquentin’s double in female form, if it were not for their conversation that it became clear that Roquentin followed Annie along the path of comprehending the “truth” rather than vice versa. Annie lives surrounded by dead passions. Roquentin, who came to “save himself,” it turns out, needs to “save” himself, but “what can I tell her? Do I know the reasons that motivate me to live? Unlike her, I don’t fall into despair, because I didn’t expect anything special. I rather... stand in surprise before a life that has been given to me for nothing.”

Roquentin returns to Bouville. In the atomic port city, he is overcome by a feeling of endless loneliness. “My past has died. Mr. Rollebon died (Roquentin abandoned work on the book. - V. E), Annie arose only to take away all hope from me. I am alone on this white street, which is surrounded by gardens. Lonely and free But this freedom is somewhat reminiscent of death."

“Nausea” gave rise not only to Roquentin’s new relationships with trees, fountains or pieces of paper on the street. She put him in new relationships with people, developed new look on them. The essence of novelty is revealed in Roquentin's conversation with the Self-Taught Man, who invites the hero to dine together at a restaurant.

The self-taught man, an acquaintance of Roquentin's from the library, spends his time reading books on the humanities. It looks like a warehouse of “illusions” discarded by Sartre. His thesis is extremely simple: life has meaning because “after all, there are people.” For a Self-Taught Man, a person is an axiom value that does not allow doubt. For the sake of serving this value, the Self-Taught Man signed up for the socialist party, after which his life became a holiday: he lives for others. The refutation of this thesis in the novel comes through an ironic attitude towards the ideal model of a person - a value that is contrasted with a real, “everyday person”. Roquentin rejects humanistic abstractions, but: “I will not commit stupidity by saying about myself that I am an “anti-humanist”. I am not a humanist, that’s all.” In the end, the conversation about humanism causes a real crisis in the hero, he is shaking: Nausea has come. The nausea that visited him is a state that combines loss of direction, lightheadedness and even disgust, caused by the awareness of the uncertainty characteristic of a person's fundamental life situation. At the heart of this situation lies primordial freedom.

Over time, Rocantan realized that his nausea was largely due to his sense of freedom. Indeed, our existence condemns us to freedom. Unasked by anyone, we are thrown into life - we have to live with others and for others - and we shape it according to our choice. However, Rocantan is not at all delighted with such freedom - he perceives it as a heavy burden. Even though freedom allows creativity, Rocantan realized that the nausea caused by the struggle to cope with existence will always be somewhere nearby. Even controlled, suppressed, or temporarily forgotten nausea will come back and require him to redefine his attitude towards the alternatives that confront him.

Roquentin is in a state of alienation from the human world - this is well reflected in one of the episodes of the novel. Watching one evening from the top of a hill at people walking along the streets of Bouville, loving their “beautiful bourgeois city,” Roquentin feels that he belongs to a “different breed,” and he is even disgusted to think that again, having descended, he will see their thick, self-confident faces. Buvilians firmly believe in the inviolability of the laws of existence, perceiving the world as a given that does not tolerate any transformations. This confidence in the world gives rise to social and everyday stability: “They make laws, write populist novels, get married, and commit the supreme stupidity of having children.” But Roquentin knows: the current form of existence of nature is only a random habit that can change, like the fashion for hats with ribbons. The world is unstable, it has only the appearance of stability, and Roquentin, not without pleasure, paints a picture of the world betraying its habits. The betrayal will be cruel and unexpected. A mother will be horrified to see new eyes sprouting through her child's cheeks; a modest average person's tongue will turn into a living centipede moving its legs, or something else: one morning he will wake up and find himself not in a warm cozy bed, but on the bluish soil of a monstrous forest with phallic trees reaching into the sky, etc.

The hero admits his own powerlessness to change, prevent, or save anything. Moreover, it is not clear why to awaken people, to take them out of such lethargic sleep, if they have nothing to tell each other, if they are immediately paralyzed by a feeling of loneliness. The goals of Roquentin's rebellion are purely negative.

With all that, the hero’s position on the hill, above the senselessly scurrying residents of Bouville, is very symbolic and corresponds to Roquentin’s ideas about his position in the world. At first, Roquentin turned away from man-divine ideas as a worthless illusion. Now the cold despair, obtained as a result of cleansing from all illusions, gives him a feeling of superiority over those not initiated into the order of “nausea”. A feeling of superiority - but this is a whole capital! In any case, it is so significant that Roquentin can already live on the interest from it. Roquentin believes that "nausea" is an infallible criterion for testing any movement of the soul. This faith turns him into a dogmatist of despair, and, like any other, the dogmatism of “nausea” deprives him of freedom. That is why any manifestation of feeling independent of “nausea” is perceived by him as inauthentic, deceitful, and he hastily rushes to expose it. He cannot help but hurry: from a knight he turns into a gendarme of “nausea.”

By the end of the book, the reader perceives Roquentin’s devotion to “nausea” as a substantial trait of the hero: the hero gives every reason for this. Having ultimately decided to move to Paris from the unbearable Bouville, Roquentin enters the cafe for the last time and there he feels the final reconciliation with the “nausea”, “modest as the dawn.” There are five pages before the end of the book, and the reader is fully confident that nothing can change ideological position hero. And suddenly - complete surprise. A grandiose coup de theater takes place, which is like something out of an adventure novel. No, the cafe door did not open, Annie did not enter and did not rush into Roquentin’s arms. Actually, no one noticed what happened except Roquentin himself. Outwardly, everything remained in its place; the phallus-shaped trees did not grow through the floor. But Roquentin secretly committed a betrayal: he betrayed “nausea.”

The betrayal occurred seemingly for an insignificant reason. She was summoned by the melody of an American jazz song, beloved by Roquentin, which Madeleine played on the gramophone in honor of a departing client. Listening to a well-known melody, Roquentin suddenly discovers that the melody does not exist, it cannot be “grabbed” by breaking the record; it is outside of things, outside the incredible thickness of existence, there is nothing superfluous in it, everything else is superfluous in relation to it. It doesn't exist - it exists. And thanks to her non-objective existence, two were saved: American Jew from Brooklyn, who composed it, and the black singer who performed it. Thanks to the creation of the song, “they were cleansed from the sin of existence.” Roquentin is overcome with joy. “So, you can justify your existence? Just a little? I feel terribly intimidated. It’s not that I have much hope. But I look like a completely frozen man who has made a journey through a snowy desert, who suddenly enters a warm room.”

But how does Roquentin intend to “justify his existence”? Among the paths to “justification,” the idea of writing a novel seems to him the most tempting and realistic. To write a novel that would be "beautiful and strong as steel" and that would "make people ashamed of their existence." Roquentin dreams that he will have readers who will say about the novel: “It was written by Antoine Roquentin, the red-haired guy who hangs around the cafe,” and they will think about my life, as I think about the life of a black woman: how about what - something precious and half legendary."

At the same time, the hero is quite legitimately concerned about the question of his own talent: “If only I were sure that I had talent...” Well, what if there is no talent? According to Roquentin, only the creator of works of art can be saved; the consumer is denied salvation. Roquentin sneers at those who seek solace in art, “like my aunt Bijoy: “Chopin’s Preludes were such a help to me when your poor uncle died.”

Roquentin was clearly in a hurry to announce the possibility of “salvation”: the story of his “resurrection”, described on last pages The novel was indeed a story of failure. Roquentin did not escape - he gave in to his own ambition, the existence of which we began to suspect when he climbed to the top of the hill: even then “nausea” was a sign of chosenness. But the height of the hill was not enough for him. He wanted to rise above the “nausea,” and in this impulse he expressed himself as a “leap” (out of the absurd) towards a certain aesthetic version of the Nietzschean concept of “superman.”

Composition

The main problem of the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre is the problem of choice. The central concept of Sartre's philosophy is “being-for-itself.” “Being-for-itself” is the highest reality for a person, the priority for him is first of all his own inner world. However, a person can fully realize himself only through “being-for-others” - various relationships with other people. A person sees and perceives himself through the attitude of the “other” to him. The most important condition of human life, its “core”, the basis of activity, is freedom. A person finds his freedom and manifests it in a choice, but not a simple, secondary one (for example, what clothes to wear today), but in a vitally important, fateful one, this decision cannot be avoided (issues of life and death, extreme situations, problems vital to a person ).

Sartre calls this type of decision an existential choice. Having made an existential choice, a person determines his destiny for many years to come, moves from one existence to another. All life is a chain of different “small lives”, segments of different beings, connected by special “knots” - existential decisions. For example: choice of profession, choice of spouse, choice of place of work, decision to change profession, decision to take part in the struggle, go to war, etc. According to Sartre, human freedom is absolute (that is, irrespective). A person is free insofar as he is capable of wanting. For example, a prisoner sitting in prison is free as long as he wants something: to escape from prison, to continue to serve, to commit suicide. A person is doomed to freedom (in any circumstances, except in the case of complete submission to external reality, but this is also a choice).

Along with the problem of freedom comes the problem of responsibility. A person is responsible for everything he does, for himself (“Everything that happens to me is mine”). The only thing a person cannot be responsible for is his own birth. However, in all other respects he is completely free and must responsibly manage his freedom, especially when making an existential (fateful) choice. The first novel by J.-P. Sartre's Nausea (1938) embodied the existentialist thought about dizziness, the “nausea” that grips a person from the awareness of his loneliness in an alien and absurd world. “Nausea” is a story about several days in the life of Antoine Roquentin, the novel is written in the form diary entries, as a reflection of the protagonist’s consciousness, is permeated with a keen sense of the absurdity of life.

Roquentin avoids looking at objects and people, because he experiences incomprehensible anxiety and strange attacks of nausea. Roquentin “choked” on things, the evidence of their existence falls on him with an unbearable weight. The situation is no better with the world of human thoughts. “Thoughts are what make it especially painful... They are even worse than flesh. They drag on, drag on endlessly, leaving some strange aftertaste,” says the hero of the novel. Nausea arises from the fact that things “are” and that they are not “I”, from the duality of the world and consciousness, which can never become a harmonious community. The novel depicts Antoine Roquentin's illness of consciousness - disgust for absurd world and the hopelessness of the nihilistic rebellion of the intellectual Roquentin, who feels superfluous in a “godless world.”

Main character novel Antoine Roquentin, finding himself in the small provincial town of Bouville, writes a book about the Marquise Rollebon. Roquentin keeps a diary, the main content of which is the “insights” experienced by the hero. This series of “insights” forms the plot of the novel, the main theme of which is the discovery of the absurd by the individual. Roquentin's discovery of the absurdity of existence occurs as a result of his collision with surrounding objects. The world of things and natural existence turn out to be hostile to human subjectivity. The subject’s immersion in this natural “mush”, in formless and dead objectivity, causes him to feel nauseated. Sartre sees dignity and freedom of the individual in a sober recognition of the absurdity of existence. Roquentin overcomes the feeling of nausea, introducing a subjective, personal element into the natural world hostile to humans.

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