Nausea, Bad Faith, and the Search for the Meaning of Life
The question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.
Viktor Frankl, Yes to Life
I continue my discussion of the problem of meaning that I started in my last post. Here, I give a brief summary and commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialist masterpiece, Nausea. This is not, however, an exhaustive summary or review of the novel. Rather, I see Nausea as a beautiful example of what happens when a person stumbles into the Absurd and refuses responsibility for their own life. For that reason, it’s a helpful jumping-off point when it comes to the problem of meaning. I also discuss my own experiences with nausea and what they have taught me. Finally, I conclude with a meditation on meaning, inspired by the works of Viktor Frankl.
Nausea
At first, Nausea struck me as very similar to Albert Camus’ The Stranger, only longer and with less plot. In fact, I was a bit bored by the first half or so of the book. For those who haven’t read it, Nausea is a fairly simple story about a young writer named Roquentin. Roquentin lives in a mid-sized French city, where he researches an obscure historical figure. His social life is barren—he doesn’t have what could be considered friends—and he spends his days writing, visiting the library, or loitering in cafe booths and bars. Over the course of the book, not much happens in the way of a traditional plot. Nonetheless, the reader witnesses firsthand Roquentin’s spiral into the Absurd, and the result is what he calls nausea.
Really, the book is a chronology of Roquentin’s daily life told through fictional journal entries. The entries jump around tonally and thematically, from mindless chatter to obsessive elucidation of the features of mundane objects. Occasionally, Roquentin interrupts his stream-of-consciousness narrations with philosophical musings on the meaning of life, essence, existence, and love. Comprising the main thrust of the novel, however, is Roquentin’s battle with nausea.
For Roquentin, nausea is a kind of decoherence from reality as it is usually perceived. It’s not psychosis—the objects themselves haven’t changed, and he doesn’t see anything that isn’t there—rather, the underlying meaning that objects used to possess no longer exists. When he looks in the mirror, he sees a stranger. With no identity attached to it, his face presents itself to him as a grotesque assortment of oily skin, unruly red hair, and cartilaginous stubs. The ordinary behavior of others often shocks him, makes him laugh, or saddens him for no good reason and according to none of the usual social conventions.
Roquentin’s stumble into nausea is neither permanent nor gradual. Instead, his episodes come on abruptly and abate just as suddenly. The length of an episode is unpredictable, sometimes lasting for seconds and sometimes days. Importantly, Roquentin is aware that the change is happening inside of him rather than out in the world. In other words, the world isn’t losing its meaning—he is.
Bad Faith
As Roquentin’s journal entries escalate in their desperation and frenzied attempts to make sense of his experiences, the reason behind his descent into nausea reveals itself, little by little. The reader learns that Roquentin has invested himself so fully into his research that he has forsaken his own individuality. In Sartre’s philosophical works, he calls this kind of behavior “bad faith.” For Sartre, bad faith is any attempt to escape from responsibility and from the innate freedom at the heart of the human experience. In shying away from his own responsibility as a human being with the ability to act, Roquentin epitomizes bad faith. As a result, his cowardice renders his life meaningless. Put differently, he has become a passive person.
In shifting to an external source of meaning, Roquentin inadvertently engages in bad faith. As a consequence, everything around him becomes as meaningless as his own life. And when we read these passages, it is as if Sartre is speaking to us, reminding us that nothing can make our lives meaningful except our own agency. For me, this was a powerful reminder of my own struggle to take responsibility for—and, thus, find meaning in—my life.
Confronting Nausea
Even before reading Nausea, I was familiar with Existentialist literature. In fact, Camus’s The Stranger has been one of my favorite books since my second year of college. The short novel enthralled me so much that I devoured it in a single evening. Although I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it until recently, I’ve always felt an intimate connection with the Absurd and with the nausea that accompanies it. Ever since I was a child, I felt a pervasive and crushing sense of meaninglessness all around me. It was like I was trapped in a world of nameless, purposeless things. The objects around me were virtually indistinguishable from one another, and I couldn’t tell where one object ended and another began.
But everybody else seemed to know what everything was and what it was used for. Nobody seemed to notice that their whole world was a castle of sand. It didn’t bother them that the metaphorical table they were eating at had no legs—in fact, they never even bothered to check. All the while, I was so mortified by the levitating table that I forgot how to eat. I don’t think this is a very good analogy, but I’m going to stick with it because, frankly, I’m stubborn.
Myself as Other
My experience of nausea reached its zenith on an August afternoon in 2019. A friend was driving me to the airport, and as we spoke I began to feel a strange yet familiar sensation. It was nausea. Outside my window, the lush Oregon landscape rushed by. My head began to spin. Suddenly, I became acutely aware that I was surging through an asphalt artery at an inhuman speed, encased precariously in a metal death machine. Only a thin pane of glass and some aluminum separated me from certain death. Meanwhile, the greatest hits from a 60-year-old band blared through bass-boosted speakers. It occurred to me that every one of the band members was dead—buried deep in the ground or burned to ashes and tossed into the sea. Then, I had the most peculiar sensation of my life.
All at once, I felt as if my mind had decohered from my body. I seemed to exist outside of my own anatomy, observing. When I thought it couldn’t get any stranger, I suddenly felt as if I were my friend. I wasn’t merely outside of my own body–but inhabiting his. I could see through his eyes, feel his heart beating and lungs inflating, and hear his thoughts.
The strangest thing was seeing me as he saw me. My curly, blond hair sprang from my head this way and that—the part was on the wrong side. My grey-and-blue sweatshirt seemed older, and I suddenly noticed the fraying seams and fading dye. Blue eyes, freckles, the mole at the corner of my mouth—it was all there, but it wasn’t mine. It belonged to a stranger. And then the sensation passed, I returned to my body, and everything was as it had been–or almost everything.
Although it only lasted very briefly, what I experienced at that moment caused a kind of spiritual death inside of me. I saw myself as the other, and I realized that I’m not the protagonist or even particularly special. While I already knew these facts intellectually, I had never been able to grasp them in a tangible way. Suddenly, it was as if the truth of my existence—the peculiar triviality of being—had revealed itself to me in unambiguous terms. I felt more strongly than ever that I didn’t exist, that my identity as an individual was a mere illusion, and that my life was utterly devoid of external meaning. While I didn’t know how or why at the time, I knew that something within me had to change.
I want to clarify that I don’t believe I actually heard my friend’s thoughts, switched bodies, or anything like that. Even so, I can’t explain the psychological mechanisms that make such an experience possible. Needless to say, I’m no stranger to the themes and experiences explored in Existentialist literature. And while I’ve grown more comfortable with the Absurd, it lingers all the same. Part of me still feels rooted in the Absurd. That’s why I was nervous to read Nausea. I was afraid that reading it would send me back down that familiar spiral into the empty abyss. Fortunately, although reading it wasn’t exactly a soothing experience, it was on the whole a positive one.
“It Is Life that Asks the Questions of Us”
For a long time, I thought that my nausea had revealed to me the meaninglessness of my life. But now I see that the truth is quite the opposite. Yes, nausea showed me the precariousness of my existence and of my sense of meaning. Clear as day, I could see that all the meaning out there in the world comes crashing down at even the slightest inspection. At the same time, what I thought to be eternal and unchanging about the world turned out to be a mere illusion.
Now I see that nausea is only one of many possible responses to the Absurd. And far from being a satisfying response, nausea is instead thoroughly destructive and pointless in and of itself. It is useful only in the sense that it makes the necessity of choosing a better path abundantly clear.
In that vein, what nausea revealed to me was a critical failure in my ability to understand my own life in the context of the world around me. I thought that if I just asked the right questions, then life would answer me. But my nausea showed me that I am the one who is asked. The more questions I ask without attempting to give my own answers, the more meaningless my life becomes. In other words, my nausea is the result of my tendency to engage in bad faith.
Viktor Frankl, the legendary author and Holocaust survivor, came to a similar conclusion. In his view, the question of meaning is not abstract but concrete. In addition, it is not merely one question but a series of questions. At every moment, he says, each individual is faced with a decision, and by choosing in the here and now, we render our lives meaningful—one moment at a time. In Yes to Life, he gives a great example: imagine a news reporter asking a chess world champion, “Which chess move is the best?” Clearly, this is an absurd question, and yet we have probably spent years of our lives asking ourselves the very same question.
Of course, some people have no trouble finding meaning. And some people have no problem anchoring their sense of meaning to the external world. For some, religion acts as an unquestioned guide for life. For others, ideology serves the same purpose. But if you’re reading this now, you’re probably not one of those people. For those who struggle to find meaning, I think Frankl was right. We must look inside ourselves at each moment and—rather than asking what the meaning of our life is—we must answer. In this way, we take responsibility for our lives and avoid engaging in bad faith.
Our reward for accepting and embracing the uncertainty and subjectivity of life is the ultimate prize—meaning itself.
An End in and of Itself
Believing that life is meaningless is the result of viewing life as a means to an end. We expect the process of life to be exonerated by some endpoint, which could be financial success, a happy family, union with God, enlightenment, or even mere death. When we realize that the end we’re striving for is unreachable, undesirable, insufficient, or disappointing, however, we find that the process to reach it—life—is meaningless.
Many people, myself included, have reached the conclusion that no end goal, whether material, spiritual, or otherwise, can make our lives truly meaningful. Is meaning an impossibility, then? Is a meaningful life a futile goal? As we have seen, the answer is no.
The reason is that if we view life as an end in and of itself, then the problem of meaninglessness is no longer intractable. This is why I say that the problem of meaning is paradigmatic in nature. As cliche as it sounds, the point of life is to live. And living is the responsibility of creating meaning at each moment. Viewed in this way, a meaningless life is impossible—except when we reject our own responsibility.
Final Thoughts
To reiterate all that I have written here, each and every one of us has the responsibility to find meaning in our own lives. When we reject this responsibility, the result is nausea—decoherence from meaningful reality. In order to escape from the cold clutches of nausea, we must realize that we are not the ones who ask about the meaning of life but the ones who must answer. And to answer means to face each moment of our lives with the courage and strength to create our own meaning. In the end, the significance of our lives is determined not merely by the things we happen to do but by what we choose to do each day.