Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

Jul 6, 2026

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Introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea situates Existentialism in the American postwar context of 1946–1947, portraying early misunderstanding, media-like dismissal, and eventual serious intellectual engagement. It contrasts concerns from Neo-Thomists and positivists/analytical philosophers, describes how the movement spread through major writers, and argues that Existentialism is both a philosophical tradition and a broad shift in everyday attitudes. It also traces predecessors from Abraham and Job to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevski.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages144

Reading Time3 h 42 min

Introduction

Early American reception of Existentialism

Intellectual controversy and attacks

Definition and cultural shift

Precursors and historical analogues

Modern origins in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevski

"NAUSEA" Jean-Paul Sartre INTRODUCTION Hayden Carruth Existentialism entered the American consciousness like an elephant entering a darkroom: there was a good deal of breakage and the people inside naturally mistook the nature of the intrusion. What would it be? An engine of destruction perhaps, a tank leftover from the war? After a while the lights were turned on and it was seen to be "only" an elephant; everyone laughed and said that a circus must be passing through town. But no, soon they found the elephant was here to stay; and then, looking closer, they saw that although he was indeed a newcomer, an odd-looking one at that, he was not a stranger: they had known him all along. This was in 1946 and 1947. And in no time at all Existentialism became a common term. No question of what it meant; it meant the life re-emerging after the war in the cafes of the Left Bank-disreputable young men in paint-smeared jeans, and their companions, those black-stockinged, makeupless girls who smoked too many cigarettes and engaged in who knows what follies besides. And their leader, apparently, was this fellow Sartre, who wrote books with loathsome titles like Nausea and The Flies. What nonsense, the wiseheads concluded. Perfectly safe to dismiss it as a fad, very likely a hoax. Meanwhile at centers of serious thought the texts of Existentialism, especially Sartre's, were being translated and studied, with a resulting profound shock to the American intellectual establishment. On one hand the Neo-Thomists and other moral philosophers were alarmed by Existentialism's disregard for traditional schemes of value; on the other the positivists and analytical philosophers were outraged by Existentialism's willingness to abandon rational categories and rely on nonmental processes of consciousness. Remarkably violent attacks issued from both these camps, set off all the more sharply by the enthusiasm, here and there, of small welcoming bands of the avant garde. That the welcomers were no less ill-informed about Existentialism than the attackers, didn't help matters. Nevertheless Existentialism, gradually and then more rapidly, won adherents, people who took it seriously. Someone has said that Existentialism is a philosophy - if a philosophy at all - that has been independently invented by millions of people simply responding to the emergency of life in a modern world. Coming for the first time to the works of Sartre, Jaspers, or Camus is often like reading, on page after page, one's own intimate thoughts and feelings, expressed with new precision and concreteness. Existentialism is a philosophy, as a matter of fact, because it has been lengthily adumbrated by men trained in the philosophical disciplines; but it is also and more fundamentally a shift in ordinary human attitudes that has altered every aspect of life in our civilization. The name, however, like the names we give all great movements of the human spiritRomanticism, Transcendentalism-is misleading if we try to use it as a definition. There are so many branches of Existentialism that a number of the principal Existentialist writers have repudiated the term altogether; they deny they are Existentialists and they refuse to associate in the common ferment. Nevertheless we go on calling them Existentialists, and we are quite right to do so: as long as we use the term as a proper name, an agreed-upon semanteme, it is as good as any, or perhaps better, for signifying what unites the divergent interests. It is nothing new. William Barrett, in his excellent book Irrational Man (1958), has shown that what we now call the Existentialist impulse is coeval with the myths of Abraham and Job; it is evident in the pre-Socratic philosophies of Greece, in the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides, and in the later Greek and Byzantine culture of mystery; and it is a thread that winds, seldom dominant but always present, through the central European tradition : the Church Fathers, Augustine, t

FAQs

How did Existentialism first enter American consciousness according to the introduction?

It spread rapidly after the war and was initially misunderstood and mocked, treated like a destructive intrusion before people gradually recognized it as a lasting movement.

What kinds of criticism does the introduction attribute to American philosophers?

Neo-Thomists and other moral philosophers were alarmed by the movement’s disregard for traditional value schemes, while positivists and analytical philosophers objected to its abandonment of rational categories in favor of nonmental processes of consciousness.

What does the introduction claim about the origins and meaning of Existentialism?

It argues that Existentialism is both a widely expressed human response to modern life and a tradition shaped by major thinkers of the last century—especially Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevski—despite earlier precursors across cultures and literature.

Jul 6, 2026

Upload by Riley