transcendental protentions and retentions of Husserl’s inner time
consciousness, the awareness that conditions and orders our perceptual
world. Sartre will refer to his former confidence in salvation through art
when he announces later in life having abandoned the belief in salvation
altogether.^22 Part of this is doubtless due to his first-hand and vicarious
experience of killing and torture during the war and the Resistance. This
led him to associate the philosophical idealism of his professors, for
example Le ́on Brunschwicg, with the volatilization of evil into the high
atmosphere of abstraction and to insist emphatically: “Evil cannot be
redeemed.”^23 But at this stage, he seems to believe the nauseous experi-
ence and perhaps even its ontological source might be “redeemed,” at
least in the aesthetic realm.^24
Nauseais the archetypical philosophical novel. In the hands of a less
gifted author, it would have worn its conceptual weave on its sleeve.
Though it began as a metaphysical treatise, its command of image and
situation draws us into the experience of what Sartre inBeing and
Nothingnesswill call a “phenomenon of Being.”^25 In an “insert” for the
first edition, Sartre remarks: “Nausea is Existence revealing itself – and
(^22) InWar DiariesSartre reminisces less than two years after the publication ofNausea: “After
this [his bout with depression and break-up with Olga in the mid 1930 s], I devoted myself to
writing with a kind of fury. The sole purpose of an absurd existence was indefinitely to
produce works of art which at once escaped it...It was reallya morality of salvation through
art.” But his passion in the eyes of Beauvoir who was critical of this idea, led to his starting
“to have doubts about salvation through art” (WD 77 – 78 , Dec. 1 , 1939 , emphasis added).
With the acceptance of “The Wall” and ofNauseaby Gallimard, as well as an appointment
to a teaching position in Paris, Sartre’s life turned upward: “And this time life won out over
art” (WD 78 ). But the victory was neither easy nor definitive: an aesthetic morality spread a
patena of futile hope over his existence. “Henceforth, man himself was an absurd creature,
lacking anyraison d’eˆtre; and the big question posed was that of hisjustification...Only the
work of art could give man that justification, for the work of art is a metaphysical absolute.
So, lo and behold!, the absolute is restored – butoutsideman. Man is worth nothing.”
Reflecting his view inNausea, Sartre admits: “It’s at about this moment that my theoretical
23 opposition to humanism was strongest” (CDG^87 ).
The war experience and occupation faced Sartre with the reality of pain and moral evil.
24 Shortly after the war, he concluded: “Evil cannot be redeemed” (WL^180 ;Sitii:^248 ).
That problem never left him. Consider his reference to “that strange hell of beauty” inSt.
GenetBookiii( 355 ff.) and to the “kights of nothingness” inL’Idiot. In a sense, the entire
Sartrean philosophical and literary corpus can be read as a kind of theodicy (Leibniz’s
attempt to justify the ways of God to man) – a failed theodicy, no doubt, but a kind of
theodicy nonetheless. This is one of the reasons why he can insist that even “if God did exist,
25 it wouldn’t make any difference” (EH^53 ).
BNxlviii.
144 The necessity of contingency:Nausea