Nausea

Amazon

This is a literary, not a philosophical work, but it deals with issues fundamental to the human quest for meaning and with the question of our relation to being. Sartre paints a portrait of a life lived in reaction to the seeming absurdities underlying the most fundamental metaphysical principles. The reaction is poetic: in place of the romantic poet’s ecstatic embrace of the natural world is found a poetic nausea in reaction to the meaninglessness and unjustifiability of this world. It is not to be taken as a “proof” of any sort, but as brilliant and terrifying artistic vision of a life lived in accordance with the existential option to reject rather than to embrace the whole of Being.