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1、【国外英文文学】厌恶nausea jean-paul sartre“NAUSEA”Jean-Paul Sartre“La Nause”Jean-Paul SartreINTRODUCTIONHayden CarruthExistentialism entered the American consciousness like an elephant entering a dark room:there was a good deal of breakage and the people inside naturally mistook the nature of theintrusion. W
2、hat would it be? An engine of destruction perhaps, a tank left over from the war?After a while the lights were turned on and it was seen to be “only” an elephant; everyonelaughed and said that a circus must be passing through town. But no, soon they found theelephant was here to stay; and then, look
3、ing closer, they saw that although he was indeed anewcomer, 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. Noquestion of what it meant; it meant the life re-emerging after the war i
4、n the cafs of the LeftBank: disreputable young men in paint-smeared jeans, and their companions, those blackstockinged,make-up-less girls who smoked too many cigarettes and engaged in who knowswhat follies besides. And their leader, apparently, was this fellow Sartre, who wrote books withloathsome t
5、itles like Nausea and The Flies. What nonsense, the wiseheads concluded. Perfectlysaf to dismiss it as a fad, very likely a hoax.Meanwhile at centers of serious thought the texts of Existentialism, especially Sartres, werebeing translated and studied, with a resulting profound shock to the American
6、intellectualestablishment. On one hand the Neo-Thomists and other moral philosophers were alarmed byExistentialisms disregard for traditional schemes of value; on the other the Positivists andanalytical philosophers were outraged by Existentialisms willingness to abandon rationalcategories and rely
7、on non-mental processes of consciousness. Remarkably violent attacksissued 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-informedabout Existentialism than the attackers, didnt hel
8、p matters.Nevertheless Existentialism, gradually and then more rapidly, won adherents, people who tookit seriously. Someone has said that Existentialism is a philosophy -if a philosophy at all- thathas been independently invented by millions of people simply responding to the emergency oflife in a m
9、odern world. Coming for the first time to the works of Sartre, Jaspers, or Camus isoften like reading, on page after page, ones own intimate thoughts and feelings, expressed withnew precision and concrete-ness. Existentialism is a philosophy, as a matter of fact, because ithas been lengthily adumbra
10、ted by men trained in the philosophical disciplines; but it is alsoand more fundamentally a shift in ordinary human attitudes that has altered every aspect oflife in our civilization.The name, however, like the names we give all great movements of the humanspirit -Romanticism, Transcendentalism- is
11、misleading if we try to use it as a definition. There are somany branches of Existentialism that a number of the principal Existentialist writers haverepudiated the term altogether; they deny they are Existentialists and they refuse to associatein the common ferment. Nevertheless we go on calling th
12、em Existentialists, and we are quiteright to do so: as long as we use the term as a proper name, an agreed-upon semanteme, it isas 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 s
13、hown thatwhat we now call the Existentialist impulse is coeval with the myths of Abraham and Job; it isevident 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, seldomdominant b
14、ut always present, through the central European tradition : the Church Fathers,Augustine, the Gnostics, Abelard, Thomas, and then the extraordinary Pascal and theRomantic tradition that took up his standard a century later. And in the Orient, concurrently,the entire development of religious and phil
15、osophical attitudes, particularly in the Buddhistand Taoist writings, seems to us now to have been frequently closer to the actual existence ofmankind than the rationalist discourses of the West.Yet in spite of these precursors and analogues we would be gravely wrong to deny themodernity of Existent
16、ialism. Philosophical truth assumes many forms precisely because timeschange and mens needs change with them. Thus what we call Existentialism today, in all itsphilosophical, religious, and artistic manifestations, springs with remarkable directness fromthree figures of the last century. Two were ph
17、ilosophers, S?ren Kierkegaard and FriedrichNietzsche, who, although they lived a generation apart, worked and wrote independently. Theyarrived at positions that were in many respects entirely contrary, for Kierkegaard was deeplycommitted to the idea of the Christian God while Nietzsche was just as d
18、eeply divorced from it;but in other respects they were alike. They shared the same experience of loneliness, anguish,and doubt, and the same profound concern for the fate of the individual person. These were thedriving forces too in the work of the third great originator, the novelist Dostoevski, fr
19、om whosewritings, especially The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground, springs virtually thewhole flowering of Existentialist sensibility in literature.Our own century has devoted much labor and intelligence to the elaboration of thesebeginnings. It is customary to say that the principal Ex
20、istentialist philosophers of our time areMartin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, and of course Sartre. But many others,including thinkers as diverse as Jose Ortega, Martin Buber, Nikolai Berdyaev, and A. N.Whitehead, have been influenced by the main factors of Existentialist concern. In lite
21、raturemany, or even most, of the chief modern authors have been, consciously or not, Existentialists;certainly the tradition is very strong in the line of development represented by Kafka,Unamuno, Lawrence, Malraux, Hesse, Camus, and Faulkner. Even a writer as far removed asRobert Frost from the cen
22、ters of self-conscious Existentialism joins in this alignment, as we seewhen we reread such poems as “The Census-Taker” and “Stopping by Woods.” Then what is it,finally,that has produced such wide effects?Nobody knows. That is, nobody can pin it down in a statement, though a number of people,includi
23、ng Sartre, have tried. Simply because Existentialism is not a produce of antecedentintellectual determinations, but a free transmutation of living experience, it cannot be defined.Nevertheless the important tendencies are evident enough.In the first place, Existentialism is a recoil from rationalism
24、. Not that Existentialists deny therole of reason; they merely insist that its limits be acknowledged. Most of them probably like tothink that their speculations are eminently reasonable, yet not rational; and they emphasizethe distinction between the terms. In particular, Existentialism is opposed
25、to the entirerationalist tradition deriving from the Renaissance and culminating, a hundred-odd years ago,in the “cosmic rationalism” of Hegel. Hegels writing is difficult and often obscure, but hispurpose was to unite Final Reality with Ideal Reason in a system that sublimated all negative oropposi
26、tional tendencies. It was a magnificent work, symphonic in its harmonies and variations,and it took hold on mens imaginations so compellingly that today its effects are dominanteverywhere, both in the academic and “practical” worlds. But for a few men, notablyKierkegaard, this apotheosis of the mind
27、 did not account for human experience. Pain andecstasy, doubt and intuition, private anguish and despair -these could not be explained interms of the rational categories. Long before Freud, Kierkegaard was aware of the hidden forceswithin the self, forces that, simply by existing, destroyed all rati
28、onal, positivistic, and optimisticdelusions.Hegelianism was the philosophy of history and the mass. By projecting a Final Reality towardwhich all history flows in a process of ever-refining synthesis, Hegel submerged the individualconsciousness in a grand unity of ideal mind. But for the Existential
29、ist, who insists that realityis only what he himself knows and experiences, this is meaningless. Not only that, it is crueland coercive. The Existentialist knows that the self is not submerged, it is present, here andnow, a suffering existent, and any system of thought that overrides this suffering
30、is tyrannical.“A crowd is untruth,” Kierkegaard repeats with choric insistence. Only in the self can thedrama of truth occur.Yet when the Existentialist looks inside himself, what does he find? Nothing. Looking backbeyond birth or forward beyond death, he sees the void; looking into his own center,
31、thrustingaside all knowledge, all memory, all sensation, he sees the chasm of the ego, formless andinconceivable, like the nucleus of an electron. And he is led to ask, as philosophers throughouthistory have asked: why is there anything instead of nothing, why the world, the universe,rather than a v
32、oid? By concentrating all attention on this nothing within himself andunderlying the objective surface of reality, he gradually transforms nothing into the concept ofNothingness, one of the truly great accomplishments of human sensibility. Nothingness as aforce, a ground, a reality - in a certain se
33、nse the reality. From this comes mans despair, butalso, if he has courage, his existential integrity.From this comes, too, the Existentialists opposition to humanism. Not that he is inhumane;quite the contrary, his entire preoccupation is with the sanity and efficacy of the individualperson. But he
34、insists that men must confront Nothingness. In a universe grounded inNothingness, the anthropocentric vision of reality that characterized rational humanism fromthe Renaissance to the nineteenth century is clearly untenable. Mankind, instead of being thecentral figure on the stage of reality, the ra
35、tional creature for whom the non-rational worldexists, is actually an accident, a late and adventitious newcomer whose life is governed bycontingency; and the proof, paradoxically, comes from rationalism itself, from the Darwinianidea of evolution. Whatever may be the case with trees and stones and
36、stars, man the thinker isa by-product, a nonessential component of reality, and he and all his works cling to existencewith a hold that is tenuous and feeble.Beyond this, generalities must cease. Each of the great Existentialist thinkers pursues hisseparate course toward the re-establishment of the
37、individual person in the face of Nothingnessand absurdity. Sartre is only one of them. But clearly Existentialism, the confrontation withanguish and despair, is a philosophy of our age. No wonder the time and place of its greatestflowering has been Europe in the middle decades of our century. It has
38、 deep significance forthose who have lived through social chaos, uprootedness, irrational torture, and this accountsfor the pessimism and nightmarish imagery that pervade much Existentialist writing. But it isworth remembering that if Existentialism flowered in the world of Graham Greene, AndreMalra
39、ux, and Arthur Koestler, it originated in the world of Dickens, Balzac, and Pushkin.Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche lived in circumstances that outsiders would judge to be inthe least uncomfortable. The aspects of the human condition that they discovered in their innersearching are far more deeply
40、 rooted than the particular catastrophes of history.“Suffering is the origin of consciousness,” Dostoevski wrote. But suffering is anywhere in thepresence of thought and sensitivity. Sartre for his part has written, and with equal simplicity:“Life begins on the other side of despair.”To Existentiali
41、sm Sartre has contributed a classically brilliant French mind. If he is not theleader that Americans first took him to be, he is certainly one of the leaders. And hisforthrightness, his skill as a writer, his acuity and originality, have won him a wider audiencethan any philosopher, probably, has ev
42、er enjoyed in his own lifetime. He has brought to hiswork a characteristically French mentality, viz., attuned less to metaphysical than topsychological modes of reasoning. Paradoxically for Descartes was a leader of RenaissancerationalismSartre is an Existentialist who operates in the Cartesian tra
43、dition; at thebeginning of any investigation he poses the cogito, the self-that-is and the self that observes theself-that-is. From this duality, in almost endless brilliant progressions, he moves through otherdualities: knowing-doing, being-becoming, nature-freedom, etc. Only the professionalphilos
44、opher can follow all the way. But Sartre would undoubtedly subscribe to Nietzschesremark: “I honor a philosopher only if he is able to be an example.” He himself is an example,and has been at great pains to define and enforce his exemplitude: in journalism, in fiction, indrama, in political activity
45、, and in teaching. The question naturally arises: who is this Sartre?Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. Brought up chiefly in his mothers familytheSchweitzers; Albert Schweitzer was his older cousinthe boy was educated by his grandfather,who had invented the Berlitz method for teaching lang
46、uages. In fact Sartre spent so much timein his grandfathers library that he began writing, he said later, out of sheer boredom.Eventually he studied philosophy at French and German universities, and taught at Le Havre,which he took as the model for Bouville in Nausea, his first full-scale work. When
47、 it waspublished in 1938 it was condemned, predictably, in academic circles; but younger readerswelcomed it, and it was far more successful than most first novels. Then came the war. Sartreentered the army, was captured and sent to prison camp, then released because of ill health.He returned to Pari
48、s. There, under the Occupation, he wrote several plays and his first majorphilosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943). By the end of the war he was known as aleader of the entire war-bred generation of Parisian intellectuals.Since then Sartres activity has been intense. He has produced novels, short stories, plays,literary and philosophical essays, biographies, many political and journalistic works,pamphlets, manifestoes, etc. He has been called the most brilliant Frenchman of our time; andno wonder. For wit, le