Sartre's NAUSEA seems, from what I have heard in lecture (though not yet read), to be a depiction, amongst other things, of a protagonist, Sartre-like, coming to terms with what I have called the Sinking House problem. The chief distinction betwixt me and Sartre seems to be that, whilst Sartre seems to find the predicament of Uncertainty confining and unsettling, I find it liberating and empowering in a near- (and no less than) divine way.
I have written hitherto that the Negative Anima impresses upon the individual the same truthsd that the Constructive Anima does. the critical distinction is that, whereas the former will castigate for your innate ineptitude, the latter will console you for your understandably Human weakness.
Is it possible that Sartre suffered from a Negative Anima? From my past experience with his philosophy and what I have read and heard of his own Life, it seems more than likely so. From the troubled view of women to the 'clutched', 'clutching' style of his prose, it seems no great stretch of the imagination to say he suffered from Conscious Cramp. He WAS, according to some speculation, a Judging type rather than a Perceiving type, after all. Judgers will tend to side with their conscious prejudices more than with their Unconscious Depths, which we may only be able to truly fathom by that imagination that he seems to condemn.
Is he not, though, possessed by it? The projection of hostility onto the impersonal Universe souns like an issuer of Subjectivising the Object. Why does he commit the Heidegerrean error of allowing Beings to Impose themselves onto him? Is it out of courage that he finds his experiences with others to be Hell? Or is it out of cowardice, too scared to either tolerate them, at risk of being asked to change, or too proud to admit one's own feebleness* in needing to distance himself in Solitude?
A profound Hypocrisy seems to run through his work. NAUSEA has him categorise every man he meets as either this form of Bad Faith or that. Yet what is the crime he charges them with? Categorisation: Labeling. His own vice.
* Not that this human feebleness should be condemned for even a moment.
Sartre claims to be a Marxist but his characters loathe people. An amateur student might find hope in finding, in the truly Authentic Life, some sense of solidarity or respect. Years after having first encountered his work, I am disappointed.
dm.A.A.
Cont.:
Sartre seems to pride himself in his own hard-nosed Realism, yet he subtly hides a nonetheless very thinly veiled Hope, as Camus had observed, Why bother to dispossess one's self of abstractions? What is to be gained by foregoing Bad Faith? If not the attainment of a future, the perpetuation of an impoverished and constricted Present.
If it is true that Martin Heidegger never read Being and Nothingness beyond a superficial glance, it makes sense. For a prophet of Human Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre has always seemed, to me, to be a dogmatic metaphysician who did not probe the depths beyond the peculiarities of his own somewhat neurotic consciousness. A Sartrean world is one not merely godless but abounding in rules and limitations, any 'Exit' from his Hell would be an act of 'Bad Faith'.
Camus acknowledged Absurdity just as if not more proficiently. His idea of Revolt meant that one ought N*ot* to try to escape the Human Condition that is the knob at the fret-head of which the body of the guitar is the World and the taut string id the Absurd. In Absurdism, one should keep that string taut; by dehumanising the human, Sartre seems to loosen it.
dm.A.A.
Sure: In our World, Certainty may be impossible. Yet must we forego Imagination and Logic like ascetics?
Sure: Each line of Directed Thought over time may collapse as though we were video game protagonists hopping from platform to platform across a chasm, and with each leap the platform we stood upon moments before falls into the chasm as though it had never been there.
Yet it is only cowardice of becoming Stranded that would lead us to forego all such traversals as though they never led to new places.
Why not protest Absurdity like humans rather than accepting it like machines?
Even if the Directed process falls apart, it may be necessary to summon forth Novelty and Inspiration from the Non-directed Depths. So long as our thoughts are Fresh, we are qualified to think them. Our thoughts, expectations, and memories are on loan from the Unconscious. Logic may collape over time, but Novelty is instantaneous. There are never fixed facts, only fleeting moments of discovery, like ulsive Muses. I ask: Who could ask for a more perfect situation?
dm.A.A.
Post-scriptum: Sartre seems also to regard himself as an iconoclast, yet whether he is Conscious of the fact or not, his works seems to be a product of its time and the cynicism of the Herd.
dm.A.A.
Sartre seems to have been right, however, in these respects:
* People do tend to label one's self and to pigeonhole one, whether wittingly or unwittingly.
* People allow themselves to be pigeonholed.
* People want you to behave a certain way, or otherwise they become offended.
My experiences with the Gavrilovs and Mother's ex post facto criticism of my 'behavior' is evidence of this.
Did I create the nausea?
Probably not; I only sought to understand Sartre and to be solitary as I would usually be.
That was why I did not want to tell Leonid what 'kind' of philosophy I enjoyed.
I can also find admiration in him for his nerve to acknowledge the Sinking House and the fallacy of history.
Although I do delight in history at times. As a protest.
dm.A.A.
Another peculiarly endearing aspect of Sartre is his notion of the Gaze. To me, I can speak from experience in having been caught in the Gaze of another. It is a perpetual Appeal to Authority. Where convincing one's self in the absence of others and in Solitude has the qualities of Rapture and Novelty, to project onto the Other one's own personal source of Authority does have a quality of dryness and futility, marked by an arid tension in the throat, a dryness of the skin, and a depressive mood and bearing upon the eyes in general.
One feels cut off from Being, because what had been Being in its Openness takes on the quality of a mental figure: The Authority projected outwards. In this sense, Sartre speaks of what Jung calls participation mistique and subjectivisation of the Object.
dm.A.A.
In this situation, the Sinking House becomes a problem often, and so does the Perpetuation of the Old and Subversion of the New. There is also the sense of division betwixt Internal Monologue and Speech, suggesting the Questioner-Questioned dialectic.
dm.A.A.
One becomes encapsulated in the artifice of the agreed-upon World and is severred from the rapturous Joy of Solitude and Truth.
dm.A.A.
Hypocrisy.
It was only when I tried to pride myself in my own work in the public eye that I felt compeled to change it and to justify it. Sartre's self-conviction made the revision appear imperative. That was ironic; would I change something blindly? No. But to self-justify is not Sartrean.
dm.A.A.
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