From Socrates to Sartre EP26 ⟩ “Sartre II: Nausea”
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These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
Sartre II: Nausea
Welcome to Sartre’s version of mind-exploding, stomach-turning, Lovecraftian horror. Come and risk your sanity by staring straight into the nauseating blobs of raw existence, by looking them directly in their maximally alien eye. In this, the first proper episode on Sartre, Thelma will fly you on her broomstick right into middle of a good bad acid trip by way of her Dreams in the Witch House brew.
She begins by sketching the “They” into which baby Sartre was thrown, from pink flesh, ooze, and slime and into the bourgeois family apartment where he was imprisoned, spoiled, and trained up as a tiny god, a prodigy who would later smash his own idol. This is Sartre’s primal scene: a childhood whose hypocrisy becomes the seedbed of his later rage against essences. “I must change my life!”
Then the philosophy. Sartre turns away from empiricism (mere sensory bookkeeping) and also from deduction and rationalism (empty geometric cogwheels). And Sartre gathers his weapons from the armories of five Germans, one Frenchman, and a Dane. As follows —
- Descartes — subjectivism, the Cogito, the absolute certainty of consciousness knowing itself.
- Husserl — analysis of consciousness as intentional, not a substance but a directed act. Consciousness is always of something.
- Heidegger — being-in-the-world, thrownness, absurdity, the projective making of oneself toward the future, the razor’s edge between authentic and inauthentic life.
- Hegel & Marx — the dialectic, negation without synthesis, alienation, and the master–slave drama; then Marx’s entire system, bent around Sartre’s existential pivot.
- Kierkegaard & Nietzsche — dread, existence before essence, the death of God, the law of the overman who revalues all values.
All of this prepares the ground for Nausea, Sartre’s answer to the problem of how to preach self-making: through fiction. Nausea was a hit, and Roquentin is now a type as durable as Hamlet, Joyce’s Bloom, Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, or William Goldstein’s Anton Phibes [Happy Rosh Hashanah!]. He is man who discovers that existence is hideously, pointlessly there — a writhing, slimy Thing on the Doorstep of consciousness — and then undertakes the project of constituting himself ex nihilo, as an ontological Outsider, in defiance of contingent cosmos and opaque logos.
Thelma takes us to the park bench, where Roquentin’s eyes lock on the chestnut roots:
“I looked at them—those roots—and suddenly I had the impression that they were swollen, suffocating, full of life in a way I had never felt before; that they were alive in some obscene way and that being itself was stretched like putty.”
This is best ingested by trance induction. Try it out. Open yourself to an encounter with The Unnameable. Language fails here. Names no longer stick. Being is completely indigestible. The familiar world becomes a Nameless City, revealed as actual slime:
“Slime is the agony of water … fixed instability in the slimy discourages possession.”
Out of the murk something takes shape — a pasty-fleshed blob, obscene and grinning, as if existence itself had oozed into a single lump to mock you.
By the end, even the self dissolves: there is no “Roquentin” beyond the stream of perceptions. No Cartesian soul. Just this thin, quivering membrane of consciousness stretched over the abyss like one of the flying blastoneurons from “Operation – Annihilate!” — and beneath it the pulsing, indifferent thing that should not be.
And yet out of this nightmare Sartre resolves to create—to write. To transmute this black ichor into art, to sing back against the cosmic indifference like a man whistling in the (Haunter of the) Dark. Thelma leaves us here, at the terrible threshold where Sartre the philosopher-poet stands blinking, ready to re-enchant the void with a novel — a forbidden text tittered into being at angles that are all wrong and channeled from Beyond the Wall of Sleep.
Stand by to lose your categorial mind, shed long-borrowed essences, and laugh like the protagonist in The Outsider — at the terrible freedom in which the world hangs suspended, without reason, without ground, but stubbornly, blindly, is. Come and affirm with that great soul,
“Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.”
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.