Nausea

Rating:
Summary: Sweet Sickness
Review: Nausea what kind of a name is that for a book? The sick sweetness of existence. This book exudes the rawness and horror of existence. Antonie Roquentin finds himself in a world with no depth; no reality or concreteness Antoine is horrified of his very existence. The book is a process of Antoine coming to this realization. What he discovers is that we live in a world of shadows and illusions, intellectual constructs that we use to explain the world around us. Freedom, justice, love, humanity, we discover have no reality of their own. Antoine discovers that his very identity has no real reality other then what is in his mind at that very moment. He realizes for something to be real he has to decide consciously to focus on it, that his reality as a person is completely reliant on a moment of consciousness. Even then he doesn't know what it means. Let me feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only real thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn lengthily. No one. Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin. . . and suddenly the "I" pales, pales and fades out.

Sartre through out this book tries to make the point that consciousness has no identity. That things are perceived and they exist and nothing more! They are what they are. That by naming something we are changing what it is in our minds. Sartre doesn't believe that a chair is a chair. He asks, is the chair the object in front of us, or is it an idea in our minds? In other words existence proceeds essence. He affirms that we live in a word of existents, not the essences of our language. To get a better idea of what he is saying I quote his famous example of the chestnut the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, nature-could explain it. Evidently I did not know everything, this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of it's extremities. But neither does a circle exist. 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 to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, understand generally that is was a root, but not that one at all."

Many will say that Sartre isn't a true existentialist, because of this dichotomy he draws. Descartes once pronounced "I think therefore I exist". Sartre has changed this in that he has separated the "I" from the think, and pronounced that nothing but consciousness remains, and that the "I" is an essence and not an existent so doesn't exist. So what does this have to do with whether Sartre is a true existentialist? Some would say that by dividing the world into essence versus existence Sartre is contradicting the very point he is trying to make. That by separating the world into existents and essence he is placing an essence on the universe. Heidegger doesn't do that he refers to it all as Dasein or crudely but "a field of being. " Making no claims or imposing some kind of meaning on it. No dichotomy is placed on existence it just is.

In summary I found this book eloquently explained so many of my feelings and doubts as an existentialist. I would recommend it to anybody that was interested in existentialism it makes an excellent introduction. I feel that it is also an excellent exposition of the human condition

Rating:
Summary: Solipsism At Its Worst
Review: In this book, Sartre does a good job of capturing the felling meaninglessness that twentieth century man experiences with great abundance. But even so, the book is faulted by the fact that rather than coming to an intellectual understanding of the world, he gives himself over completely to his emotions and then tries to give intellectual justification for them. And then he deduced that anyone who disagrees with him is deceived and mistaken about the nature of reality. So when Roquentin realises that life has no meaning, he tries to force his own personal conclusion on everyone else, which is not an accurate way to do philosophy. Roquentin does exist, but ad Heidegger points out in "Being and Time", there are varying degrees of existence and Roquentin seems to be on one of the lowest rungs of being. The whole premise of this book is in error; Cartesian dualism (which Sartre accepts whole-heartedly) is an error which Husserl put away several years before this book was written. But when Sartre did away with the unconscious mind and Husserl's "transcendental ego", he took al intentionality out of human consciousness, and thus makes it a contingent. Sartre also fails to analyse Roqeuntin's episodes of happiness to the extent that he should have. He sees only one side of the coin and then he assumes that this one negative side is the whole of reality, much like one who watches only the news might assume that humans are wholly rotten, while ignoring many of the good things that people do. It may be worth noting that Sartre recounts having an extremely negative experience after taking mescalin shortly before writing this book, the after effects were partially that Sartre thought that he was going insane. Thus may also account for the feeling of physical repugnance that appears so often in the book. For a more detailed critique of Sartre's ideas, see Wilson's "The Outsider" and "Beyonf The Outsider".

Rating:
Summary: Not quite
Review: I just finished Nausea and have to say I had trouble penetrating it. In the end, I felt nothing visceral after reading this novel. The protagonist Roquentin's bouts of ennui seemed so self-indulgent. Existentialism is an ailment of our times, and this book helped convince me that it is a philosophy founded on selfishness. Roquentin (Sartre, we assume) is a decent man, but has trouble reaching out because he hates himself and for that reason, hates the world.

Also, There seemed something essential to this book that also is essential to the French, though of course his struggle is ideally universal. The book seems almost inextricably embedded in its context. Sartre seemed to have been taking the next logical step in a philosophical discussion to which I had no access. Maybe if I knew more of French history.

It could be I was distracted, but I had trouble, at what I felt like the book's most important moments, connecting with Sartre's idea that things maintained form only through a collective effort to ascribe meaning to our world through language. It took a giant intellectual leap, and a great deal of loneliness, to break through the last layers of meaning and to arrive at meaninglessness. I respect that effort, because by knowing meaning cannot exist, we value it when it does.

Rating:
Summary: Can we escape solipisim?
Review: The novel gives an insight of most of Sartre's problems discussed in other work such as Being and nothingness .It is an adventure of understanding what is being.

Rating:
Summary: Incomparable; required reading for every human being
Review: I read "Nausea" for the first time 35 years ago, and have read it at least once every year since. The lessons M. Sartre teaches us have been taught before, at least since the time of the historic Buddha. It is a wonder that, even in our time, so few have learned them. This was the author's first work, and undoubtedly his best. Everything he said in "Being and Nothingness" was said here, and in a way that will resist your mightiest efforts to get on with your life, as though nothing had happened. Had M. Sartre written nothing else, "Nausea" would have earned him a place among the greatest thinkers of all time. J. Thacker

Rating:
Summary: An amazing and timeless piece of literature
Review: I consider myself an existentialist, and this book quite accurately profiles my philosophical journey up to this point. I recommend that anyone wishing an introduction to or a summary of Sartre's philosophy read both Nausea and No Exit- both are much easier to take in than Being and Nothingness (unless you're a philosophy major). A novel brilliant enough to affect the way the reader views the world comes along very rarely, and this was one of that sort for me. Oh, and as an afterthought, I have to wonder about the character of the reader who, in his review printed here, chose to insult anyone who enjoyed this magnificent novel.

Rating:
Summary: Everyone should read this book
Review: This book is one of the greatest ever and everyone should read it. The guy before me who said Nausea is for posers just doen't understand what this book is about. I pity him, I really do.

Rating:
Summary: A intriguing retrospect of who we are
Review: I am a highschool student who is reading Sarte and his ideas of extensialism for the first time, and it has had a profound impact on the kind of person i now am. This novel has changed me from a person who looks at everything from a superficial stand point to someone who realize's how exestential many elements of everyday life are. I strongly recomend this book to anyone who needs a wake up call!!!

Rating:
Summary: Nausea - Quite possibly the greatest book I've ever read.
Review: It took me probably about 7 or 8 months to finish this book... Why, I couldn't say. Perhaps it was best.. Perhaps it should be savored, and taken in over such a long period of time. Sometimes, while reading this book, I found myself to almost BECOME Antoine Roquentin... I could see myself strolling aimlessly down the streets of Bouville... I could hears the sounds around me in the Cafe Mably (I do believe that was the name... ?) One of my favorite parts. (Pg. 103) "Tuesday: Nothing. Exsisted." I don't think one can help but analyze their OWN surroundings and being while reading this book. One word sums this book up very well... deep.

Rating:
Summary: The best
Review: The point Sartre shows how to become a human is absolutely clear in this book.He makes the reader think of his own existance.Everybody should read it before going into a conversation about Sartre.