human reality, the human condition, the being-in-the world of man and his being-in-
situation. The notion of human species has made incredible ravages.^40
( 21 – 22 )
The ontology Sartre constructs inBeing and Nothingnesswill merely
confirm this individualist suspicion of social solidarity. Yet his experi-
ence of the communal in the military, of solidarity in the stalag and of
what in theCritiquehe will call “fraternity” in the Resistance, will
challenge the sufficiency of the initial model of the social that he will
start to fashion in hisWar Diaries, formulate conceptually inBeing and
Nothingnessand articulate in his playNo Exit. Another set of social
relations is starting to dawn on him and with it, another kind of
humanism to guide it. We shall examine that new social ontology,
founded on the primacy of “praxis” and the mediating third party when
we address hisCritique of Dialectical ReasoninChapter 13. By that time,
the log-jam produced by the looking/looked-at model of interpersonal
relations at work inBeing and Nothingnesswill have been broken and the
initiation of a properly social philosophy made possible.
The experience of nausea
Perhaps no other concept exhibits the anti-Cartesian character of
Sartrean metaphysics so graphically as does that of nausea, though the
concept of the “viscous” (the slimy) briefly mentioned inNauseabut as
analyzed inBeing and Nothingness(EN 661 – 674 ) might compete well for
this distinction. Sartre is not using the term metaphorically; nausea is
not a symbol of some transcendent entity. He is referring to the sweet-
ness that invades someone’s mouth as they are starting to get sick to their
stomach. It is a quasi-automatic function of our embodiment. Just as
angels don’t smile, the Cartesiancogitodoes not vomit. Neither, for that
matter, does HeideggerianDasein. But the Sartrean individual does and
the experience is both physical and metaphysical in the sense that it
constitutes, along with boredom, what Sartre will call a “phenomenon of
(^40) WD 21 – 22. As part of the same remarks, Sartre reveals their inspiration: “Nothing shows
better the urgency of an undertaking such as Heidegger’s, and itspoliticalimportance [!]: to
determine human nature as a synthetic structure, a totality endowed with essence...We
posit as the objects of our interrogation not the mind, nor the body, nor the psyche, nor
historicity, but the human condition in its indivisible unity” (WD 21 ).
The experience of nausea 153