count on your discretion.” He admits to being a member of the Socialist
Party – a man whose sympathy for humankind extends beyond his
personal concerns. He sees party loyalty as fulfilling his vocation in life.
This elicits from Roquentin a less than enthusiastic appreciation of the
man who is imprudently bearing his soul.
Roquentin asks himself: “Is it my fault if, as he speaks, I see all the
humanists I have known rise up? I’ve known many of them.” He then
breaks into a litany of the kinds of humanists he has known and disliked:
the radical humanist (like Sartre’s grandfather and stepfather) who is the
particular friend of officials; the Communist who “has been loving men
since the second Five-Year Plan”; the Catholic humanist, who has
chosen the humanism of the angels: “he writes, for their edification,
long, sad and beautiful novels which frequently win the Prix Femina.”
And there is a swarm of others, evocative of the Lord High Executioner’s
list inThe Mikadoof those who “never will be missed”: the humanist
philosopher who bends over his brothers like a wise elder brother who
has a sense of his responsibilities; the humanist who loves men as they
are, the humanist who loves them as they ought to be, the one who wants
to save them with their consent and the one who will save them in spite
of themselves, and so forth. “They all hate each other,” Roquentin insists
wryly, “as individuals, naturally, not as men” (Nausea 117 ). They are
“humanists,” after all.^36
Like the “digestive philosophy” prescribed by Sartre’s idealist profes-
sors that dissolved the external object (and with it evil) in the white
spittle of consciousness,^37 Roquentin considers humanism as a kind of
homogenizing liquor that melts all differences and dissolves the individ-
ual. Imagining the kind of argument that the self-taught man would
mount were he to accept his proffered label, “Perhaps you are a misan-
thrope?” Roquentin recoils:
It’s a trap: if I consent, the Self-Taught man wins, I am immediately turned round,
reconstituted, overtaken, for humanism takes possession and melts all human atti-
tudes into one. If you oppose him head-on, you play his game; he lives off his
opponents. There is a race of beings, limited and headstrong, who lose to him every
time: he digests all their violences and worst excesses; he makes a white frothy lymph
(^36) See comment by Derrida on this passage: “Le Livre ouvert” (OR 1780 – 1781 ).
(^37) Jean-Paul Sartre, “Une Ide ́e fondamentale” (Siti: 29 ).
150 The necessity of contingency:Nausea