Sartre on freedom: reflections on philosophy and literature

We are going to analyse in this essay the complex relation between philosophy and literature. I would like to share my ideas about how the literary analysis can lend a useful hand to philosophical research and I am going to prove that focusing on Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) as well as on two of his philosophical works: Being and Nothingness (1943) and Critique of dialectical reason (1960). Sartre's works and plays are the perfect sample of what literature means to philosophy.

Regarding Nausea, the first thing to emphasize is the genre that the main character chooses as vehicle of expression: a personal diary. Roquentin starts writing his diary moved by the numerous loose ends of his life. Something is missing in his life and he is intending to sort this out writing, and writing about himself and his day by day life.By now, Roquentin is not doing anything but the analysis of an existence, his own one, the same that Sartre will make some years later with the general existence of the human being in his philosophical work Being and Nothingness, where he is going to approach an ontology of Heidegger's Da sein (being there), as consciousness, body and action.

Let's stop at this point for a while. What I am saying is that a diary, at last, is nothing else than a perfect ontology of a very particular existence. It could be said that a diary is a perfect self-ontology, and the only real difference between both kinds of works, the diary and the strict philosophical ontology, is a matter of perspective: in the diary, even in a fictitious or literary one, the subject of the analysis is a particular life, with a particular world and very particular relationships, past and history. Is this particular life the one that acts as subject as well as researcher, he is the subject of his own work. In the ontology the subject becomes something abstract and general, is not an existence with name and surname, is the general idea of the existence, the general idea of the world around and the general idea of the different relationships that this existence could experience in life. This is going to be absolutely essential.

In both Sartre's works, the "decision" has always a leading role, as well as the "choice", following the most pure Heidegger's tradition. Let's focus now in Roquentin. His personal situation can be understood as the result of a very particular choice, the breakup with a past that can't be faced by him. Many of the reflections present on his diary are about his past: his travels or adventures, his ex partner Anny..., sometimes the past become so alive that certain confusion can be created in the reader. Roquentin needs to deal with his past. Like in Heidegger's Being and Time, all human life is the answer to a choice, and the truth about our existence relies on these choices and decisions, on a human being's project or, at last, an identity. Is our existence as free will entities which allow us to organize our lives according to projects, choices and decisions. This, of course, is the theory that we can find in Heidegger, but is really that simple? If it is so clear, why Roquenting is going through the nausea? What kind of trouble could be experienced for a human being that lives his own life as a perfect outcome of his true essence (freedom)?

The problems appear in the real life, not in the philosophical essays, because the particular life comes along with an essential contradiction: we think about ourselves as complete free beings but we are living in a world in which very few things depend on us. We think ourselves free in a highly deterministic world. Our idea of the essence (freedom) crashes now with the experience of our existence, and this contradiction that only shows of in the particular experience of life is the very root of the Nausea. Something is wrong with the philosophical theories, Roquentin knows it, or better, Roquentin lives it. This contradiction leads Roquentin to write his diary, he can't find a sense, he can't find a conciliation between essence and existence, between freedom and life, and maybe analysing every detail he can find some way out, who knows.

Let's examine now the nausea, because we have different kinds with different associated feelings. The nausea reveals something to Roquentin, but depending on the emerging truths we have different nauseas. We have the nausea that precedes the discovering of the existence that comes along, after premature upsetting feelings, with an experience of happiness and adventure, all fulfilling emotions. He feels like a novel hero, he is happy.

The existence becomes an intuition that can be only caught in a feeling, as Sartre will explain years later in Being and Nothingness. Now he discovers that human existence means possibility, here comes the main truth. The human being is plain possibility. Our plans and dreams are possibilities and are always threatened by the weight of what really is, the weight of the others and the circumstances. Now appears a new nausea, the one that says that possibility is no necessity, the one that discovers that my existence, as plain possibility, is purely a spare one. Now the feelings are terrible, upsetting and gloomy ones. Now nothing seems real, because there is nothing necessary attached to my existence.

Roquentin is stuck between the past and the present, his literary work is about the past, M. de Rollebon. Rollebon is a death figure, he needs Roquentin to be kind of a living, and Roquentin needs him to escape from his life. The Roquentin's problem is that he is trying to fund his existence in something that is not there, the past, he is trying to avoid the mandatory necessity of acting in the present. The mankind is forced to act constantly in the present. Sartre's ethics are pragmatic, the main category is the action, and there is no way of hiding from this fact, so, at the end, Roquentin must act and must decide. These are his choices:

-To give up his research about M. de Rollebon. Now the existence is surrounding him. He is bidding for the present, and now the present is overcoming him.

-The close of his past.Now he needs to face the most important loose end of his life, and this is Anny. Does he want Anny in his life or not? Here or gone, but not both, Roquentin must make up his mind about her. After meeting her, he realizes that she is definitely settled down in the past, and he, on the contrary, has decided to move on and to live and act in the present.

His journey from the past to the present is finished now. The diary finish with a new choice, now his life is first and he is going to be the hero of his work, the protagonist of his writing.

Sartre in Being and Nothingness make a diagnosis, a right diagnosis about the essential contradiction between essence (freedom) and existence, a contradiction that is a real no way out in Sartre first philosophy, but lets look twice, Is that the same idea that appears in Nausea? I say no. In Nausea, Roquentin finds the solution to this contradiction. In Nausea, Roquentin realizes that he can act and decide and live, even when he can't design every detail of his life. Roquentin discovers that his freedom is not a fake freedom, is not a freedom that relies in a pure acting and deciding in the mere nothingness, his freedom is a real one, a freedom that must have placed in the real world and immersed in lots of different realities and existences. Roquentin overcomes the Nausea, he overcomes the existentialism, he overcomes Sartre's theories in Being and Nothingness. Roquentin make the journey from Idealism and existentialism to Marxism or, better, dialectical Materialism, even when Sartre is not ready yet to make the same journey in the philosophical theory. His philosophical work is already left behind by his play, five years before publishing.

In Nausea we have the way out when Roquentin realizes that his freedom resides in living and acting in the present, it is true that the present is never custom made, but we can tailor our own life even we can't change our circumstances. We must act in a deterministic reality, but we must and we can act. Our projects, dreams and actions can have sense in a world that is not under our control. We can control the way we move and act in the moment we are forced to live. As Roquentin says, maybe is possible to justify our own existence, maybe we can dare to be a little more happy...

Roquentin now understands: the nausea was a necessary stop in the journey from idealism to the design of an authentic existence, a present one, meaningless like all the eventualities, but full of meaning for ourselves and for the others, depending on how many of our projects we get to turn real. The ones that avoid or reject the nausea are living fake lives (professionals, lawyers, there are several samples in Sartre's novel), because they are living the dream of the idealism, they think about their lives in terms of the pure free will and unconditional choices. Lies and illusions. The nausea opens our eyes to the real freedom and the real choices, those that occurs in an otherwise deterministic world. In Nausea we have the overcoming of idealism, as I said, but we have as well the journey from ontology to ethics, from theory to action.The diary finish with a choice, with a commitment to action.
Nausea and Being and Nothingness are works from the same period in Sartre's philosophy, but in Nausea Sartre's idea of freedom is more similar to the one that he is going to explain in a 20 years after work: Critique of Dialectical reason (1960). This is an amazing anomaly, a wonderful one. How can it be that Sartre showed ideas in his 1948 play that he wouldn't be able to identify theoretically until two decades after? Looks like the literary approach (personal, biographical) to the idea of freedom put him on a path that he would not realize in theory till several years later.

At last, I have my answers. It seems that the relations between philosophy and literature are not only important regarding the impact in the public/receptor, as Plato, Aristotle and Schiller analysed before. The relations between philosophy and literature are something more essential, more deep, because the literature can really help to bring light to some of the darkest philosophical ideas. The difference between philosophy and literature is the difference between ontology and biography, between the being there and the existence of a named being one, even if is a fictional one. The literature not only makes more clear the philosophical ideas, moreover literature helps to shape philosophical ideas, and there is no better sample than the idea of freedom, as I will see in further articles, being this idea the one that I focussed on my Ph.D.