Roquentin says that the seat that he is sitting on might just as well be the bloated belly of a dead donkey. Language has failed him. He says, “Things are divorced from their names.... I am in the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words, defenseless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me.”

n another occasion in Nausea, Roquentin records in his diary an experience he had earlier while sitting on a park bench staring at the root of a chestnut tree:

efore, says Roquentin, when he had used the verb “to be,” it had designated nothing. When he had said, “The sea is green,” or, “That speck up there is a seagull,” the verb named an empty category.

Concepts name what all members of a class have in common. Therefore, they are always abstractions. But what Roquentin has discovered is that “existence” is not a concept. It is never abstract, but is always concrete.

artre’s view is that we never, or hardly ever, confront reality (Being-in-itself) directly, but only through the medium of human institutions, which in fact camouflage rather than reveal reality. Human thought is in fact usually about thought. It is a system of infinite self-referentiality, unequipped to refer beyond itself to real existence. It is for this reason that Sartre has Roquentin say that the word “existence” designates nothing.

ow, what has happened in the case of Roquentin is that “the world” of language, institutions, and justifications has suddenly collapsed as if sucked down a drain hole, and Roquentin, in this spontaneous epoché, suddenly confronts Being-in-itself, denuded of all artificial camouflage.

This is not a purely positive experience. Roquentin writes:

“And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things...the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.”

Sitting in his hotel room meditating on his experience in the park, Roquentin arrives at several philosophical insights. The first is the SUPERFLUITY of all Being, including his own, which he suddenly experiences as “in excess,” an unneeded addendum. But it is not just his own being that is superfluous— it is the whole of existence.

This is not relative absurdity, but ABSOLUTE absurdity. (Most absurd things are absurd only relative to their context. A clown’s antics are absurd in relation to the seriousness of everyday life. An absurd sentence is absurd only relative to the rest of language. But Being, as Roquentin has encountered it, is ABSOLUTELY ABSURD.)

In his epoché, Roquentin has discovered the CONTINGENCY of all being. “Contingency” is the opposite of “necessity.” The idea of a square having four equal sides is logically necessary. Any other idea of a square is logically impossible. But it is logically possible to conceive of the whole universe as empty. Now, in fact the universe is not empty, but that fact is a contingent fact.

This “contingency” of being—its “superfluousness,” raises the metaphysical question posed so clearly by the seventeenth-century German rationalist philosopher GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ.

In order to answer his question, Leibniz had developed his “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” which says, “For anything that exists, there must be some reason why it exists, and why it exists as it does.”

or Leibniz, this principle was the criterion of rationality. Anybody who denies this principle simply declares himself to be irrational. So, take an example like the fact that my keys are on the table.

are they there? Because I placed them there.

Because I plan to enter my locked office after writing this chapter.

In order to pick-up my briefcase and go home.

In order to... Again, every moment of being is explained by referring to some other moment of being on which the former is dependent.

how far does this chain of explanation reach? For Leibniz, there are only two possibilities:

every chain of contingent being finally terminates in some NECESSARY being (a being which could not NOT exist—that is, a God), and that being anchors and is responsible for the meaning of all being ....

every chain of contingent being is infinite—in which case every state of being is explained by another state of being, which in turn is explained by yet another state of being, and so on ad infinitum. In this case, according to Leibniz, there is never any real explanation of anything, only infinite deferral of meaning...

and in that case, everything is utterly absurd.