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Would Sartre have suffered fromnausea if he had understood theBuddhist no-self doctrine?Sheridan HoughPublished online: 28 May 2012.

To cite this article: Sheridan Hough (2012) Would Sartre have suffered from nausea if he hadunderstood the Buddhist no-self doctrine?, Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal,13:1, 99-112, DOI: 10.1080/14639947.2012.669280

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WOULD SARTRE HAVE SUFFERED

FROM NAUSEA IF HE HAD

UNDERSTOOD THE BUDDHIST

NO-SELF DOCTRINE?

Sheridan Hough

The central character in Sartre’s 1938 novel La Nausee, Antoine Roquentin, has lost his

sense of things, and now the world appears to him as utterly unstable. Roquentin suffers

from what he calls ‘nausea,’ a condition caused by an ontological intuition that the self,

as well as the world through which that ‘self’ moves, lacks a substantial nature. The

novel portrays Sartre’s own philosophical account of the self in La transcendence de

l’ego. Here Sartre argues that Husserl’s account of consciousness is not radical enough;

the ‘I’ or ego is a pseudo-source of activity (and Sartre thus draws very close to a

particularly Buddhist account of personal identity). My essay questions Roquentin’s

response to his ontological insight: why is this the occasion for ‘nausea’? Why doesn’t

Roquentin (as King Milinda famously does) celebrate and embrace his ‘non-self’? I argue

that Sartre’s depiction of Roquentin’s ailment, and the unsatisfactory solution he

provides, misunderstands both the aggregate nature of things as well as authentically

rendered consciousness-only (vijnaptimatra).

The basic shape of Sartre’s early ontology (and certainly its later development) has

some obvious affinities to the Buddhist no-self doctrine.1 These ontological

resemblances, however, are audible in a uniquely full-throated way in Sartre’s

fiction. Sartre’s novel La nausee (1938) is a philosophically rich (indeed, almost

didactic) depiction of Sartre’s commitment to the non-existence of substantial

selves, as well as a graphic account of a person coming to realize his non-nature.

The (anti)hero of the novel, Antoine Roquentin, has lost his sense of things, and

now the world appears to him as utterly unstable. Roquentin suffers from what

he calls ‘nausea’: his environment shows up to him as ‘viscous,’ and, as he puts it,

‘spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.’2 This state of ‘nausea’ is caused by an

ontological intuition that gradually dawns on Roquentin: in a climactic moment he

realizes that the self, as well as the world through which that ‘self’ moves, lacks a

substantial nature, essence or fixed features, and that his attempts to label and

categorize himself, and the world, merely covers up this reality.

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 13, No. 1, May 2012ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/12/010099-112

q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2012.669280

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But why is he nauseated?

From the Buddhist perspective, this question is surely an obvious one.3 Why

indeed? Why does Roquentin not embrace this ontological insight, and celebrate

his ‘non-self?’

In what follows, I will examine the condition of nausea using the most basic

tenets of the Buddhist no-self doctrine; however—as I intend to argue—only a

basic version of ‘no-self’ is needed in order to render a comprehensive diagnosis of

just what troubles the Sartrean account. As for the questions that inevitably arise in

a comparative project, I hasten to point out that the comparison here has to do

with the legitimacy of certain conclusions given a set of theoretical commitments;

I am not seeking to find a ghostly Buddhist presence in the Sartrean account, nor

am I suggesting that Sartre’s fictional account helps to illuminate Buddhist thinking

(in fact, quite the opposite). In this instance, some of the claims and conclusions of

Buddhism can come to the service of some rather confused Western thinking.

As Jay Garfield puts it: ‘[Comparative philosophical] conversations require . . . the

willingness of each participant to take seriously—as a moment in the dialectic,

though not as its endpoint—the possibility of interpreting his or her own tradition

and texts from the standpoint of the other . . . ’4 In what follows, I will be looking at

two very similar ontological pictures, and attending to the respective differences in

the conclusions that each draws about the human situation.

In order to understand Roquentin’s condition—and his utterly non-Buddhist

response to it—we need to begin by considering the theoretical framework that

Sartre is using to structure the novel Nausea. Sartre first elaborated his own

account of the (non)-self in The transcendence of the ego, an essay that appeared in

1937, just a year before his novel Nausea. In this essay, Sartre takes issue with

Husserl’s account of consciousness, one that does depend on an essentialist

notion of an ‘ego,’ the ‘reines Ich’ or ‘pure I’ that is the source of all mental activity.

Now, although Sartre disagrees with the conclusions that Husserl draws

about the self, both Sartre and Husserl are loyal Cartesians: they, like Descartes, take

our stream of mental experiences to be fundamental. Intelligibility and meaning

arise not from (as, for example, Heidegger claims) our concerned involvement with

things, but from this mental stream.

Even though Sartre is operating by way of his Cartesian intuitions, he begins

by making an important alteration to the claims of Descartes: Sartre denies that

consciousness should be identified with reflective awareness. (Here, of course,

Sartre finds himself in the company of a venerable Buddhist stream: Yogacara

thinkers such as Asa _nga and Vasubandhu make a similar distinction.)

For Sartre, the difference between these two theoretical suppositions is

dramatic. Descartes’ cogito—his conclusion that ‘I think, therefore I exist’ is a

reflective act; he doubts and then takes that very act of doubting as evidence for

his existence. Sartre points out that when Descartes is doubting he is surely not

thinking about his doubting: so what has happened is that his own consciousness

has now become an object for itself.

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Here is how Sartre puts it: ‘Now, my reflecting consciousness does not

take itself for an object when I effect the Cogito . . . Insofar as my reflecting

consciousness is consciousness of itself, it is non-positional consciousness.

It becomes positional only by directing itself upon the reflected consciousness

which itself was not a positional consciousness of itself before being reflected.

Thus the consciousness which says ‘I Think’ is precisely not the consciousness

which thinks.’5

Sartre is arguing that we must distinguish between consciousness as such

and our subsequent reflections ‘in’ it, if you like, or on, or about it. Sartre concludes

that there is a pre-reflective, contentless consciousness that is the basis for

reflection. As he puts it: ‘ . . . unreflected [consciousness] has ontological priority

over the reflected because the unreflected consciousness does not need the

reflected in order to exist.’6 This conceptual scheme does seem to have at least a

superficial affinity with the Yogacara view of the ‘storehouse consciousness,’

which postulates a more basic level of consciousness that contains the seeds of

both subject-directed and object-directed modes of apprehension. (I will have

more to say about Buddhist metaphysics momentarily.)

Here, then, is what Sartre is offering us: as he says at the beginning of

Transcendence of the ego, the ego is ‘neither formally nor materially in

consciousness: it is outside, in the world.’7 In other words, the ‘I’ and the ‘me’

are merely objects created by reflection, and posited in a transcendent field. A

person as a conscious entity thus has two levels or dimensions of experience:

humans are fundamentally non-positional consciousness; this field of awareness is

the site for mental representation, for positing or thematizing objects and states

in the world.8 As Sartre explains: ‘We arrive then at the following conclusion:

unreflected consciousness must be considered autonomous . . .Contrary to what

has been held, therefore, it is on the reflected level that the ego-life has its place.’9

Sartre’s proposal about the nature of consciousness thus radically parts

ways with Husserl’s account of consciousness, which depends on the reines Ich, or

the ‘pure ego,’ as the source for all conscious positing activity. Husserl’s concept of

the ‘pure ego’ is supposed to account for the observation (first made in the West

by Kant) that we are always able to say that a thought is in fact mine: even when

we are not attending to our own reflective or representational activity, we are

always able to identify a belief, a desire or a mood as our own. Sartre reminds us

that Kant never committed himself to the claim that this ‘I’ has some kind of actual

existence; rather, it is simply the condition for the possibility of experience: ‘ . . . I can

always regard my perception or thought as mine: nothing more.’10

Sartre concludes that the ‘I’—and indeed the ‘me’—only appears on

reflection: as he puts it: ‘ . . .while I was reading, there was consciousness of the

book, of the heroes of the novel, but the ‘I’ was not inhabiting this consciousness.

It was only consciousness of the object and non-positional consciousness of itself.

I can now . . . declare: there was no ‘I’ in the unreflected consciousness.’11

The Husserlian notion of a ‘pure I’—one that stands ‘behind’ consciousness,

and that sends rays of intentional regard (Ichstralen) that illuminate phenomena in

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the field of attention—is thus summarily rejected. For Husserl, the source of all

meaning-giving activity is the pure ego; for Sartre, the transcendental field is itself

the source: the ‘I’ is nothing more than the pseudo-source of conscious activity.

Sartre continues:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in

contemplating a portrait there is no I. There is consciousness of-the-streetcar-

having-to-be-overtaken, etc., and non-positional consciousness of

consciousness. In fact, I am then plunged into the world of objects; it is they

which constitute the unity of my consciousnesses; it is they which present

themselves with values, with attractive and repellent qualities—but me, I have

disappeared . . . 12

So: who is it that is having this experience?

Certainly, the Buddhist also faces a dilemma: how can the language of

‘experience’ be meaningfully deployed in the absence of subjects of experience?

Much depends upon how Sartre rises to this challenge.

Sartre denies an ‘ego-based’ theory of consciousness, but he does hold

that there is some kind of a ‘subject’ or ‘self’ that can be meaningfully referred to:

this (non)self is understood by way of the directedness of mental life, or what

phenomenologists call intentionality. Consciousness is directed at objects,

meaning both ‘things perceived’ as well as various mental states: in pre-reflective

consciousness, it intends such objects; in reflective consciousness, it also intends

itself as an object.

Sartre’s point is that both levels of conscious activity are non-positionally

self-aware. Think again of Descartes: when he doubts he intends or positions the

thing he doubts, and as he does this he is non-positionally aware of doing so;

when he examines his doubt, and makes it an object of his conscious scrutiny, he

positions or intends it, and is also non-positionally aware of doing so. This implicit

ego-contentless, pure open self-awareness, is the Sartrean (non)self, understood

here simply as the subject of experience.

I have already remarked that Sartre’s account does seem to have a structural

affinity with Buddhist metaphysics. Take, for example, the following classic

exchange from Vasubandhu’s critique of the self-view in the final chapter of his

Abhidharmakosa:

[Objection:] Some say that every activity exists in dependence upon an agent, since

an activity exists in dependence upon an agent. Just as saying that Devadatta

walks implies that walking, [which is] an activity [signified by an active verb,

gacchati ], exists in dependence upon Devadatta, a walker, so [saying that a person

apprehends an object implies that] a consciousness is an activity. Therefore, what

apprehends [an object] must exist [as a self].

[Reply:] But what is this ‘Devadatta’? If he is [assumed to be] a self, they will be

assuming the very thing they seek to establish. If he is what the world calls a

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man, he is not just one thing, but [a collection of phenomena] causally

conditioning [other] phenomena to which this name, [‘Devadatta’] has been

given. It is to these [phenomena] that we refer when we say that Devadatta

moves or apprehends [an object].13

Devadatta is a conventionally designated person, one who is not ‘one,’ but a series

of elements; consciousness is that which makes possible, from moment to

moment, Devadatta’s cognizing. (More of ‘conventionally designated persons’

later.)

For Sartre, a comparable distinction is in place: the non-positional and

positional dimensions of consciousness turn out to be irreducible. We are always

directed at an object and aware (non-positionally) of that directedness. As Sartre

remarks: ‘And consciousness is aware of itself in so far as it is consciousness

of a[n] . . . object. All is therefore clear and lucid in consciousness: the object

with its characteristic opacity is before consciousness, but consciousness is

purely and simply consciousness of that object. This is the law of its

existence . . . consciousness is not for itself its own object.’14

—And here we enter the properly existential dimension of Sartre’s account.

Sartre claims that Husserl’s account of consciousness illegitimately reifies it,

and—in so making consciousness into an object—flees from the most urgent

existential demand of being human. And what is this ‘demand’? It is the radical

freedom that characterizes consciousness itself. At any moment the non-

positional field of receptivity can reflectively take up, analyse, believe and act on

anything.

The disagreement with Husserl is thus (importantly) twofold. First, Sartre is

making an ontological objection: he argues that the reified ego is a cumbersome

addition to a perfectly workable structure; we can explain what goes on in

consciousness without having to add on this construct. (The Buddhist would

surely identify Sartre’s choice as appealing to the ‘Principle of Lightness.’) Sartre’s

second (and indeed ‘existential’) objection, however, is the more telling one. Such

accounts, Sartre argues, constitute a cover-up: they deny the terrible freedom that

is non-positional consciousness. Human consciousness lacks an essence or fixed

characteristics or features, and it is therefore radically free to choose what it is, and

what it does.

At the end of The transcendence of the ego, Sartre triumphantly concludes

that his account of consciousness has opened a new path to a proper

phenomenology: as he puts it, ‘This absolute consciousness, when it is purified of

the I, no longer has anything of the subject. It is no longer a collection of

representations. It is quite simply a first condition and an absolute source of

existence . . .No more is needed in the way of a philosophical foundation for an

ethics and a politics which are absolutely positive.’15 Quite a ringing

endorsement—and again, one that seems to resonate admirably with the basics

of the Buddhist no-self account—but here we need to take a closer look at the

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‘radical freedom’ of consciousness, and what Sartre might have inadvertently built

into this ontological category.

Sartre provides a fascinating example of ‘thwarted non-positional freedom,’

one that reveals some of his own assumptions about the nature of the non-self.

Here it is:

Consciousness is frightened by its own spontaneity because it senses this

spontaneity as beyond freedom. This is clearly seen in an example from Janet.

A young bride was in terror, when her husband left her alone, of sitting at

the window and summoning the passers-by like a prostitute. Nothing in her

education, in her past, nor in her character, could serve as an explanation of such

a fear . . . She found herself monstrously free, and this vertiginous freedom

appeared to her at the opportunity for this action which she was afraid of doing.

But this vertigo is comprehensible only if consciousness suddenly appeared to

itself as infinitely overflowing in its possibilities the ‘I’ which ordinarily serves as

its unity . . .perhaps the essential role of the ego is to mask from consciousness

its very spontaneity . . . 16

This clinical study from the work of French psychologist Pierre Janet

describes a neurotic episode suffered by a newly married young woman. Sartre

rings the changes on this account by stripping it of any deeply embedded psychic

elements; after all, if humans are essentially non-positional (i.e., contentless)

awareness, then the source of her trouble cannot ultimately be some trauma from

the past. Instead, Sartre suggests that, in the turmoil of radical transition—from

‘Mademoiselle’ to ‘Madame’ (with a new surname, of course), moving from

(presumably) a parental dwelling to her own home, with the shock of leaping from

one life to another—and all of it the work of a civic (and no doubt religious)

ceremony—this young woman’s ontological birthright, her radical freedom,

becomes a crushing presence. Consider: this young woman, simply by saying

words before the appropriate civic or religious authority, now has a new name, a

new residence, new rights: and all of this happened because she chose to so do. Of

course—and here the temptation to beckon men from the street begins to make

good Sartrean sense—she can always choose to undo those decisions, ponderous

and final though they might seem. The young bride is essentially a pure open

awareness, and nothing can occlude her ability to choose how she takes up the

world around her.

The bride’s neurotic episode also underscores an important feature of

Sartre’s ontology: notice that this newlywed is structurally anxious before she is

actually having neurotic symptoms. Here is Sartre’s concluding thought on the

‘case of Janet:’ ‘Everything happens, therefore, as if consciousness constituted

the ego as a false representation of itself, as if consciousness hypnotized itself

before this ego . . . as if to make the ego its guardian and law.’17 In other words,

consciousness itself, according to Sartre, is designed to cover over the ontological

freedom that each person actually is.

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This notion—that a person can be in an ontological condition that may or

may not erupt into an affective or emotional condition—has a venerable pedigree

in existentialist thinking: it is first found in the writings of Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard—who, by the way, is committed to the very strongest notion of

individual selfhood—insists that a person who has not infinitely committed her or

himself to their own unique life-project is in despair, meaning that the elements

that constitute a human being are disordered.18 Kierkegaard claims that, once a

person has made a commitment to their (God-given) vocation, this despair will be

resolved. Nonetheless, a person might feel perfectly content—even happy—and

still be in despair.

So too with Sartrean anxiety. This new wife has become utterly anxious, but

that symptom bespeaks an existential condition, one that would be in place even

if the bride is simply enjoying her newly married status. The neurosis is the result

of disrupting a native tendency of consciousness, namely, the tendency to cover up

the absolute, contentless freedom that each person is.

So: at last we may now return to the novel Nausea—which turns out to be

nothing more than an extended meditation on what happens when the protective

structural cover of the ego is disturbed. Our protagonist Roquentin—who lives

well outside the margins of bourgeois society—begins to keep a diary so that, as

he puts it, he might ‘see clearly . . .how I see this table, this street, the people, my

packet of tobacco, since those are the things that have changed.’19 The change—

in both his sense of self and the objects he encounters—has been brought on by

this condition that he calls ‘nausea.’

As Roquentin remarks in his diary, his sense of who, or what, he actually is

has been undone: ‘And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale

reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin . . . and

suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.’20 His sense of the integrity of his

embodiment is also shaken: he writes,

There is bubbling water in my mouth . . . Forever I shall have a little pool of

whitish water in my mouth—lying low—grazing my tongue. And this pool is still

me. And the tongue. And the throat is me. I see my hand spread out on the table.

It lives—it is me. It opens, the fingers open and point. It is lying on its back.

It shows me its fat belly . . . The fingers are the paws . . . 21

Roquentin’s ‘nauseated’ self-assessment is suggestive of the legendary

exchange between Nagasena and King Milinda about Nagasena’s identity. Milinda

enumerates many body parts, including Nagasena’s hair, teeth, skin, flesh, bones,

sinews, and saliva; of course, Nagasena denies that these physical parts are

actually himself. In response to the king’s persistent request that Nagasena

provide some kind of account of what it is that his name and he, as bearer of that

name, stand for, Nagasena replies:.

. . . I am known as Nagasena, and it is by that name that my brethren in the

faith address me. But although parents . . . give such a name as Nagasena,

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or Surasena, or Vırasena or Sıhasena, yet this—Nagasena and so on—is only a

generally understood term, an appellation, a designation in common use, . . . for

there is no individual to be found.22

But we may rightly ask (as King Milinda does): who is it, then, that receives

offerings, abides by certain moral norms and engages in philosophical debate and

meditative practice? Who has acted in such a way that his or her actions can be

judged as worthy of praise and blame? Buddhaghosa offers a philosophically

illuminating commentary of the philosophical underpinnings of the no-self view:

Therefore, just as when the component parts such as axles, wheels, frame poles,

etc., are arranged in a certain way, there comes to be the mere term of common

usage ‘chariot,’ yet in the ultimate sense when each part is examined there is no

chariot; . . . so too, when there are the five aggregates [as objects] of clinging,

there comes to be the mere term of common usage ‘a being,’ ‘a person,’ yet in

the ultimate sense, when each component is examined, there is no being as a

basis for the assumption ‘I am’ or ‘I’.23

Roquentin seems to be struggling to express a similar idea by alienating

himself from his aggregate bits: the pool of saliva, the tongue—he identifies

these elements as ‘me,’ an acknowledgement that the name ‘Roquentin’ is

ultimately nothing more than a label for this bundle of physical and psychical

features.

Roquentin also finds the objects around him to be aggregates, and

not substantially real. Here is how he describes an encounter with a seat in a tram

car:

This thing I’m sitting on, leaning my hand on, is called a seat. They made it

purposely for people to sit on, they took leather, springs and cloth, they went to

work with the idea of making a seat and when they finished, that was what they

had made. They carried it here, into this car and the car is now rolling and jolting

with its rattling windows . . . I murmur: ‘It’s a seat’ . . .but the word stays on my

lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing.24

Nagasena’s ‘chariot analogy’ inevitably comes to mind. The ‘chariot’ is, of

course, not its pole, axle, body, wheels, yoke, or reins; however, the name ‘chariot’

is no mere empty sound, but is a ‘convenient designator’ that picks out a particular

aggregate of these components. At last, Nagasena has made his case to King

Milinda that both he, the person called ‘Nagasena,’ and the object referred to as

‘chariot,’ are both conventional designations given to sets of parts. Notice,

however, King Milinda’s reaction to this lesson (as reported in the Milindapanha):

‘Most wonderful, Nagasena, most extraordinary that you have solved this puzzle,

difficult though it was. If the Buddha himself were here he would approve of your

reply.’25

Now: Roquentin hardly thinks his phenomenological encounter with

the tram seat is ‘wonderful’: evidently, since Roquentin cannot get the word

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‘seat’ to adhere to the object in question, he still does not understand the

distinction Nagasena makes between a ‘mere sound’ that has no referent in

the world, and a ‘convenient designator’ that does meaningfully refer to

something.26

But why doesn’t he? Why is nausea the affect that attends Roquentin’s

recognition of the ‘aggregates’ (skandhas)?

In order to see what is really bothering Roquentin, we need to consider

the remedy for ontological nausea that he finally stumbles upon (and the

remarkably strange soteriology involved). First, we need to remember that,

throughout the novel, Roquentin has been searching for a deep necessity in

the contours of the world: instead, he is bored and stricken with a sense of

meaninglessness. The more he delves into experience for meaning, the more he

scrutinizes himself, his face, the persons and the things around him, the more

he reveals the composite, aggregated character of all things. The ‘deep meaning’

is emptiness: nothing in the world has a fixed, established or settled nature.

Our utterances and attributions, our descriptions and claims are thus, as

Roquentin puts it, slippery, loose, viscous, and (for him, at any rate) nauseatingly

unstable.

Roquentin apparently assumes that a truly meaningful utterance must refer

to something that has an essence or fixed nature; since this kind of referent does

not exist, then he must find a substitute.

Here, of course, we might again wonder: why? Why not, as King Milinda

does, simply rejoice in a better understanding of oneself and the world?

The answer lies in the Sartrean structure of consciousness, one that tends to

cover up its own emptiness. If we are ontologically designed to reify ourselves and

the objects in our environment, then insight into our essential emptiness becomes

a glimpse into the abyss (recall our poor neurotic bride). The assumption,

evidently, is that only something ontologically fixed and essential will be able to

comfort Roquentin. He thus sets about to find such a palliative, and it turns out

that the antidote has been with him all along.

Early in the novel, Roquentin feels the nausea coming on (‘the filth,’ as he

puts it) while he is sitting in a cafe. He calls to the waitress and asks her to put a

song he likes on the phonograph, ‘Some of these days’ (an actual Shelton Brooks

song from 1910). As the song begins, he remarks, ‘For the moment, the jazz is

playing; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest,

an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them . . . there is this band of

steel, the narrow duration of the music which traverses our time through and

through, rejecting it . . . ’27 As the chorus begins, Roquentin exults, ‘What has just

happened is that the Nausea has disappeared . . . [the music] filled the room with

its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls.’28 Later, as

he ponders leaving the small town he’s living in, he remembers how he feels when

he hears the song: ‘ . . .what summits would I not reach if my own life made the

subject of the melody.’29

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Roquentin, in his yearning for what he calls ‘something almost

mathematical,’ something that is necessary and unchanging, has discovered an

odd path to salvation, one that seems to be a kind of revised Platonism.30 Music

in particular—and art in general—turns out to have the right kind of what I will

call—to use a good oxymoron—‘contingent necessity:’ contingent, since, of

course, the song’s melody does not need to have the note-order, time scheme

and rhythm that it does; necessary, in order for it to be that song it must now,

eternally, have those notes in (something that recognizably resembles) that very

order.

Consider: for Plato, a meaningful claim is posited on the basis of an

independent and fixed reality that it reflects. For Sartre, humans attempt to posit

meaning—and indeed we must do so, given the two-tiered, non-positional/

positional nature of consciousness; however, this positing has no necessary

conceptual realm from which to draw.

Roquentin thus must make do with the ‘contingent necessity’ he first

discovers in the song ‘Some of these days.’ Here is the climactic scene in which he

discovers that this humble tune is what will save him: ‘ . . . Someone must have

scratched the record . . . the melody is absolutely untouched by this tiny coughing

of the needle on the record . . . the disc is scratched and wearing out, perhaps the

singer is dead; I’m going to leave, I’m going to take my train. But behind the

existence which falls from one present to the other . . .behind these sounds which

decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the

same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.’31 Roquentin imagines a scene

from New York’s Tin Pan Alley and the hot room in which the song is composed: it

is a desultory afternoon, and the composer wants to be done with the song so

that he can drink whisky with his friend. Roquentin laments: ‘He was lucky . . . I

envy him . . . ’; when the song begins for the last time, he concludes, ‘So the two of

them [the songwriter and the singer] are saved . . . .they have washed themselves

of the sins of existing.’32 The ‘salvation’ here is not that of, say, creating ‘high art’

for which they will be remembered (and certainly not that they will be

remembered at all); rather, they are ‘saved’ because they have created a fixed,

necessary musical narrative, one that stands outside the fluctuation of conscious

positing.

Roquentin declares that he too will create a kind of ‘necessary contingency.’

He is no songwriter, but he will write a book—a novel, in fact—that will confer a

kind of significance to his life: as he puts it: ‘Naturally, at first it would only be a

troublesome, tiring work, it wouldn’t stop me from existing or feeling that I exist.

But a time would come when the book would be written, when it would be

behind me, and . . . a little of its clarity might fall over my past. Then, perhaps,

because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance.’33 The fixed,

permanent, necessary nature of his work (that is, these characters, having certain

beliefs and desires, and performing certain acts, and not others, operating in a plot

that cannot change) will give Roquentin a kind of respite from the roiling nausea

of impermanence.

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Or—so he thinks. I am obliged to help myself to yet another Western

thinker, Nietzsche. The gay science, aphorism #124, is a cautionary tale about what

happens when thinkers challenge the theoretical (and indeed theistic)

underpinnings of their cultural practices:

In the horizon of the infinite.—We have left the land and have embarked. We have

burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the

land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it

does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and

reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is

infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor

bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel

homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer

any land.34

Nietzsche thus provides a warning about the demolition of metaphysical

structures. Western thought, as observed by Nietzsche, largely abandons the

Platonic template, an anti-metaphysical development that he clearly endorses.

The danger involved in this enterprise, however, is not the loss of these

metaphysical assurances, but the longing for such guarantees. We will suffer, says

Nietzsche, from ‘homesickness’: we will want absolute grounds for our claims

when such grounds no longer exist.

Clearly, Sartre’s protagonist Roquentin is homesick for these kinds of

metaphysical claims: for Roquentin, ‘salvation’ from the impermanence of

existence can only be found in a notional essence, in something conceptually fixed

and secure. His condition, however, underscores a deeper problem with Sartre’s

ontological programme, at least the one that Roquentin is committed to living out

successfully. Recall that the Sartrean non-self is fundamentally a pure open

awareness: in this picture, a person is essentially featureless, despite all the many

encrustations of habit and cultural praxis: at any moment, a person may be, or do,

anything she or he chooses to do (witness the young wife who suddenly beckons

men in from the street). All persons are thus radically free to shape and shift who

and what they are, from moment to moment.

The problem with this picture becomes clear when we compare it to the

Buddhist account. Consider the Buddhist understanding of the ‘aggregates’ of

consciousness: here too there are no fixed or given features of any kind, but

there is certainly no accompanying notion that therefore everything is open to

choice-driven change. The doctrine of dependent arising, which argues for an

absolute connection between cause, its conditions, and effect—denies

that ‘anything goes’ in this radical Sartrean sense. In fact, by the lights of

dependent arising, a pre-determined set of options is all that is ever available to

a person, one that is dependent on the karmic seeds of deeds past, and of

countless other choices already made, and ones that are always already in

motion. The ‘non-self’ of the Buddhist picture may lack fixed metaphysical

contours, but it certainly does not lack a precise, highly refined karmic content,

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one that must be dealt with and owned up to (or denied) from moment to

moment.

Roquentin’s longing for something fixed and secure misunderstands the

bright, empty nature of his own being: the nexus of choice and action that has

brought him to this space is itself a contentful, meaningful arena of activity, and

one that he needs to attend to. The roiling, shifting environment that nauseates

Roquentin is ‘karmically’ constructed, and his nausea needs to give way to

meditative, contemplative action. Clearly, only a brisk dose of actual ‘conscious-

ness-only’ (vijnaptimatra) will save him.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A version of this essay was presented at the XVIth Congress of the International

Association of Buddhist Studies at Dharma Drum Buddhist College in Taipei,

Taiwan, June 2011. Thanks to Christian Coseru and Georges Dreyfus for their

helpful comments and suggestions.

NOTES

1. Many Buddhist scholars have explored this comparative terrain, including Phra

Medhidhammaporn (1988), Stephen Laycock (1989) and Derek Heyman (1997).

2. Sartre (1964, 21).

3. —if only because the Buddhist recognizes the constructive aspects of

conceptual thought as a conditioning factor in perpetuating the kind of angst

that Roquentin experiences.

4. Garfield (2002, 153).

5. Sartre (1957, 44–45).

6. Sartre (1957, 58).

7. Sartre (1957, 31).

8. Of course, Sartre’s claim here is ontological: we are always already intending

some object, and this fundamental open awareness is not existentially available

to us. Heidegger makes a similar distinction in Being and time: ‘In no case is a

Dasein, untouched and unseduced by the way in which things have been

interpreted, set before the open country of a “world-in-itself” so that it just

beholds what it encounters’ (Heidegger, 1962, 213). The ontological point,

however, is crucial for Sartre: the freedom that each person has to re-cast and

reconceive her or himself rests on this fundamental pure, open awareness, the

field in which features are posited.

9. Sartre (1957, 58).

10. Sartre (1957, 32). The Buddhist tradition likewise identifies ‘directed attention’

(manaskara) as a pre-condition for conscious experience (which includes, or

presupposes, a prereflective reflexivity).

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11. Sartre (1957, 47).

12. Sartre (1957, 49).

13. Trans., slightly altered, per James Duerlinger (2003, 98ff.).

14. Sartre (1957, 40 –1).

15. Sartre (1957, 106).

16. Sartre (1957, 100).

17. Sartre (1957, 101).

18. Cf. the account of selfhood provided in The sickness unto death (Kierkegaard,

1980)

19. Sartre (1964, 1).

20. Sartre (1964, 170).

21. Sartre (1964, 98).

22. Milindapanha II 1.1 (25). Trans., slightly altered (Davids 1890, 40).

23. Visuddhimagga XVIII 28. Trans. (Na_namoli 1991, 617).

24. Sartre (1964, 125).

25. Milindapanha II 1.2 (29) Trans., slightly altered (Davids 1890, 45).

26. Cf. Mark Siderits’ thorough account of ‘convenient designators’ in Buddhism as

philosophy (Siderits, 2007, 56–68).

27. Sartre (1964, 21).

28. Sartre (1964, 22).

29. Sartre (1964, 38).

30. As Iris Murdoch succinctly remarks, ‘Roquentin is a Platonist by nature. His ideal

mode of being, to which he often recurs in thought, is that of a mathematical

figure—pure, clear, necessary and non-existent’ Sartre: Romantic rationalist

(Murdoch, 1953, 7).

31. Sartre (1964, 175–176).

32. Sartre (1964, 177).

33. Sartre (1964, 178).

34. Nietzsche (1974, 180–1).

REFERENCES

DUERLINGER, JAMES. 2003. Indian Buddhist theories of persons: Vasubandhu’s refutation of a

theory of a self. London: Routledge.

GARFIELD, JAY. 2002. Empty words: Buddhist philosophy and cross-cultural interpretation.

New York: Oxford University Press.

HARTMANN, KLAUS. 1966. Sartre’s ontology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

HEIDEGGER, MARTIN. 1962. Being and time. trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.

New York: Harper and Row.

HEYMAN, DEREK K. 1997. Dual and Non-Dual Ontology in Sartre and Mahayana Buddhism.

Man and World 30 (4): 431–43.

KIERKEGAARD, SØREN. 1980. The sickness unto death. trans. Howard Hong. Princeton:

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LAYCOCK, STEPHEN. 1989. Nothingness and emptiness: A Buddhist engagement

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MANSER, ANTHONY. 1966. Sartre: A philosophic study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MEDHIDHAMMAPORN, PHRA. 1988. Sartre’s existentialism and early Buddhism: A comparative

study of selflessness theories. Bangkok: Buddhadhamma Foundation.

MURDOCH, IRIS. 1953. Sartre: Romantic rationalist. New Haven: Yale University Press.

NA_nAMOLI, BHIKKHU. trans 1975. The path of purification: Visuddhimagga by Buddhaghosa.

Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society.

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH. 1974. The gay science. trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage

Books.

RHYS DAVIDS, T. W. 1890. The questions of King Milinda. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL. 1957. The transcendence of the ego. trans. Forrest Williams and Robert

Kirkpatrick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL. 1964. Nausea. trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions

Press.

SIDERITS, MARK. 2007. Buddhism as philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing

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WEBBER, JONATHAN, ed. 2011. Reading Sartre: On phenomenology and existentialism.

New York: Routledge.

Sheridan Hough is the author of Nietzsche’s Noontide Friend: the Self as

Metaphoric Double (Penn State Press, 1997) and the novel Mirror’s Fathom

(Mercer University Press, 2012). She has published a number of articles on

phenomenological and existential themes.

Address: Department of Philosophy, College of Charleston, 66 George Street,

Charleston, South Carolina 29424, USA.

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