Jean-Paul Sartre: Chestnuts and Nothingness

He … swept aside all my suggestions that we might go for a walk. He was allergic to chlorophyll, he said, and all this lush green pasturage exhausted him. The only way he could put up with it was to forget it.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life

Jean-Paul Sartre was a loser. Or so he thought. Aged twenty-nine, he was no longer a young man of promise; no longer his grandfather’s golden boy. Sartre had scored the highest marks in his Sorbonne examinations, and excelled at the prestigious Paris university. Yet in 1934, he found himself teaching philosophy in Le Havre, a conservative port city in Normandy. He did not hate the town—it had its picturesque parts. But for Sartre, it was a symbol of his failure.

Sartre did his best to liven up the classroom, speaking excitedly without notes while puffing on his pipe. He played ping-pong with the boys, and stripped to the waist to box with them. The little cock-eyed philosopher was, wrote one student, ‘vigorous, stimulating, amusing and serious’. But Sartre was also deeply worried: almost thirty, he felt he had achieved nothing of note. No novel, no magnum opus, not even a short story in a magazine. Over a wine at a seaside cafe with his friend and lover Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre reflected on the tedium of his life—what he called, in his war diaries, a ‘doughy, abortive existence’. His career had plateaued. His friends were the same. Nothing new was on his horizon, and the same was true of de Beauvoir. ‘We were both still on the right side of thirty’, she wrote in The Prime of Life, ‘and yet nothing new would ever happen to us!’ For Sartre, Le Havre was a death sentence for greatness: execution by monotony.

What Filth! What Filth!

Sartre didn’t yet realise that Le Havre would provide him with his two most famous characters, from the book that launched his career in 1937: Nausea. The first was Antoine Roquentin, Nausea’s misanthropic protagonist, struggling with ennui, lost love and existential anxiety. The second was a chestnut tree, in the municipal park of Bouville—a dreary port town, chiefly modelled upon Le Havre. In October 1931, Sartre sat on a bench in a public park in Le Havre and for twenty minutes contemplated this tree. He played with descriptions in his mind. When he was satisfied, he left, preparing to ‘turn this tree into something different from what it is’, he wrote to de Beauvoir, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf. If Sartre had de Beauvoir’s romantic temperament, the tree might have become cause for reverie. In the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, for example, de Beauvoir was ‘elated’, she later wrote, by river and woodland. But not Sartre. ‘Look at the Beaver’, he teased, ‘in one of her trances again!’ Regardless of how ‘beautiful’ it was, in Nausea Sartre described the chestnut tree with acute revulsion.

As Sartre told the story, Roquentin’s visit to the park was a philosophical epiphany. Not pleasant, but illuminating. For weeks Roquentin had been troubled by what he called ‘nausea’, a visceral disgust and vertigo, triggered by ordinary things: cups, food, hands. He was alienated from others, and resentful of their easy normality. But in Bouville’s park, he finally understood the (literal and figurative) roots of his problem: existence is sickening. Not this or that existence, but being itself, the fundamental existence of all things. And, for Roquentin (read: Sartre), this was symbolised most powerfully by the chestnut tree. The passage from Nausea is worth reading at length:

My eyes never met anything but repletion. There were swarms of existences at the ends of the branches, existences which constantly renewed themselves and were never born … I slumped on the bench, dazed, stunned by that profusion of beings without origin: bloomings, blossomings everywhere, my ears were buzzing with existence, my very flesh was throbbing and opening, abandoning itself to the universal burgeoning, it was repulsive.

For Sartre, the tree is nauseating because it has no reason for being. It just is. And this ‘is’ has a kind of stupidity to it. Not only does it just exist, without plan or purpose; it also keeps existing: growing, flowering, fruiting, reproducing, and then it starts again. It is not that it wants to live; the chestnut tree cannot help living. ‘Every existent is born without reason’, says Roquentin, ‘prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance’. Everywhere he looks in the park, there is this absurd being: life, which multiplies without justification. And all the meanings that are draped over beings—beauty, virtue, intimate nostalgia—are just superficial masks. Under the masks: horrifying existence, without divisions or differentiations, and which is nothing but obscene superfluity—a kind of oozing, lumpy, ontological playdough. The park, for Roquentin, is a house of horrors. ‘What filth! What filth!’ he cries.

Nausea and Nothingness

Obviously the novel was not a straightforward copy of life in Le Havre, and Roquentin was not simply a fictionalised Sartre. But at heart they were the same man. In his war diaries, Sartre wrote that Roquentin was him, with his ‘living principle’ removed—the author, only without his pride, passion and ambition. Roquentin’s melancholy, bitterness and revulsion—these were all Sartre’s. The author had been depressed in Le Havre and had experimented with drugs: uppers to write, downers to sleep, and hallucinogens for the adventure of it. Mescalin turned umbrellas into vultures, shoes into skeletons and, out of the corner of his eye, more squirming, oozing life: ‘crabs and polyps and grimacing Things’, recalled de Beauvoir in The Prime of Life. This darkened his mood and exhausted him.

Sartre’s own nausea continued for years: in his antipathy toward ‘natural’ food and landscapes, and in his writing. Six years later, when he began his existentialist opus, Sartre made nausea one of the cornerstones of his ideas. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre called nausea the ‘taste’ of the body. This needs explaining, because the book is notoriously unclear (partly fashionable German jargon, partly the amphetamines Sartre was popping). By ‘body’, he did not literally mean skin and bone. Rather, he meant the conscious experience of embodiment. We construct this body; it is a part of consciousness. This goes for the rest of the world too: we never touch, smell or see raw existence, what Sartre called ‘being’. Sartre did not mean that there was no reality, only that our reality is pure consciousness. ‘I want to grasp … being,’ he wrote, ‘and I no longer find anything but myself’. Being has no quantities, no qualities—all these are given by consciousness. Being just is—this is all that can be said about it. It is contingent: unnecessary, arbitrary, meaningless. We exist by saying ‘no’ to this contingency. This was one of Sartre’s contributions to twentieth-century thought: consciousness is a ‘no’ to pure being. It is also a ‘no’ to itself: it refuses its own pure being; it is divided. We split off parts of our consciousness into ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’—each of these splits is a little ‘nothing’ within the psyche (hence the book’s title).

In this way, Sartre’s vision of consciousness is a kind of restless creation and destruction, which constantly invents itself and its world, then says ‘no’ to both, to invent them anew. For Sartre, this is freedom: we transcend our physicality and continually create ourselves, in and as consciousness. Yet Sartre still believed that we are physical beings, amongst other physical beings. This is where the body comes in. It is consciousness of this physicality, of belonging to being: the inescapable feeling of this time and place, with this height, weight and ethnicity. What Sartre described as nausea was the reminder of this meaningless contingency; the flavour of lost freedom. Everything that makes us nauseous—blood, guts, rotten meat—recalls the bodies we are trapped in. This is why Roquentin saw the chestnut tree as disgusting. Because, while gazing at it, he had stumbled upon a philosophical axiom: anything less than pure freedom is dull, dead being, without reason or justification. And we are always thrown amongst it.

In Nausea, Sartre saw contingency in cups and chairs. But it was the chestnut tree that captured his imagination. This was no coincidence. For the philosopher, ‘nature’ was particularly worthy of indifference and disdain. He never enjoyed hiking with the Beaver and friends. While they roamed, he sat and wrote, oblivious to his picturesque surroundings. He chose canned foods over fresh. He was happiest in high, urban apartments. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar after World War II, de Beauvoir described the visiting French philosopher:

He hates the country. He loathes—it isn’t too strong a word—the swarming life of insects and the pullulation of plants. At most he tolerates the level sea, the unbroken desert sand, or the mineral coldness of Alpine peaks; but he feels at home only in cities.

This was obviously journalism, not philosophy—if anything, de Beauvoir was taking the mickey. And the interview was part of the popular transformation of existentialism into a fashion: cafe tete-a-tetes, black turtlenecks and jazz. This was Sartre as charismatic guru, not lifelong scholar. But de Beauvoir’s description was accurate: Sartre genuinely disliked what we call ‘nature’, and the natural landscape. And as his chestnut-tree horrors suggest, parks and gardens did not escape his scorn. In Nausea, he wrote of the ‘castrated, domesticated plants’ growing on seaside railings. Their fat, white leaves felt like ‘gristle’—everything was fat and white in Bouville, because of the rain. He felt besieged, which was why he feared leaving towns: the ‘Vegetation’ (note the capital ‘V’) clambers over everything, its green paws grabbing and gripping. This was classic Sartre, like something from an old Doctor Who episode: assailed by lurking lamb’s ear.

 

So for the philosopher, plants were a symbol of being. And being was contingency: pure existence, without free consciousness. What made Sartre’s vision unique was the unhappy mood of this symbol: nausea. This was a gut response that did not occur with thinkers he admired. German philosopher Martin Heidegger, for example, was a profound influence on Sartre. He said he began Heidegger’s Being and Time in the 1930s, then studied it more keenly as a Stalag prisoner in World War II (Heidegger’s prose warrants a captive audience). More than any other modern philosopher, Heidegger most strikingly and systematically portrayed humanity as a brief flare-up of meaning in an otherwise meaningless cosmos. But while Heidegger recognised the anxiety of our responsibility, he never flinched from being; that is, from the bare fact of existence. In his later works particularly, Heidegger expressed an awed astonishment—being as something worthy of reverence, not disgust. In his 1955 ‘Memorial Lecture’, for example, he wrote that we step back from being—not as a retreat, but as if we were stopping, amazed, to admire the view. And not uncoincidentally, the German scholar was devoted to precisely the rustic landscape Sartre loathed: woodlands, streams, humble peasant cottages. Sartre specifically avoided hikes with de Beauvoir and friends, whereas Heidegger often took a break from writing to hike—he even had his own kitschy Black Forest hut. So Sartre’s strange loathing was not influenced by basic philosophical principles; by his recognition, following Heidegger, of humanity’s leap from being. The Frenchman’s queasiness was his own, distinctive trait.

Sartre was notoriously cavalier about others’ bodily ailments. During a boat trip in Greece, de Beauvoir vomited in the choppy water. Sartre ‘remained quite unmoved by my spasms of retching’, wrote de Beauvoir in The Prime of Life, ‘which he ascribed to deliberate malice on my part’. For all his drug abuse and illnesses, the paunchy philosopher did indeed have a tough constitution. But philosophically, Sartre was made of weaker stuff than Heidegger, and perhaps de Beauvoir. When it came to being in general, and creeping, oozing plants in particular, Sartre was sick to his stomach.

The Little Toad

Sartre’s nausea began in childhood. His earlier works stressed the radical freedom of consciousness. It was, he argued, its own rootless origin. But later on, the philosopher started a more Freudian analysis, tracing the scars left by childhood trauma. In his analyses of himself and others—Gustave Flaubert and Jean Genet—he sketched his psychological evolution. The result is not always convincing, but subsequent biographers confirm the key points.

In his autobiography, Words, Sartre recalls how feminine he was as a toddler. Dressed as a little girl, mollycoddled, decorated with long blond ringlets, he never learnt how to be valued for typical masculine traits. He was loved for his cuteness and his chatty playfulness. When his grandfather, the dominating Charles Schweitzer, cut off his curls, this changed: his unattractiveness was obvious, to the adults and to Sartre. Suddenly, the golden boy was gone, replaced by a squinting ‘toad’, with a puny body and a wandering right eye. The story of Sartre’s growing disenchantment with himself ended with a visit to the Jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris. No-one played with him. To the other children, he was neither beautiful nor strong nor brave—certainly not the hero of his favourite adventure stories. He was just a small, ugly, awkward boy. This was not mockery or hatred; it was worse: he was invisible. ‘I had met my true judges,’ he wrote, ‘and their indifference condemned me. I never got over being unmasked by them: neither a wonder nor a jelly-fish, but a shrimp that interested no-one’. All that Sartre could not control—his body, his face, his physicality—had let him down, and he hated them. He was perceived, he wrote in his War Diaries, as ‘an obscene goat’. Nature had failed him.

As Sartre tells the story, the grandfather who precipitated this crisis also offered the cure: culture. Charles Schweitzer was an educated man: a German teacher and author of textbooks who loved the French language. He encouraged the boy to read—classic French and German novels, the encyclopaedia, Jules Verne—and, more importantly, to write. And write he did: poems, essays, novels—for the rest of his long life, Sartre was a prolific author, churning out some twenty pages a day. While Sartre’s school grades waxed and waned with his mood and domestic circumstances, the boy was clearly intellectually gifted and combined this with a sharp wit and a passion for words. His grandfather and mother dutifully applauded, only their praise was no longer for his cutesy Shirley Temple show but for his literary performance. Later, as a teenager, Sartre realised he could also impress schoolmates and girls with his words. ‘Writing was a form of seduction’, writes biographer Ronald Hayman, ‘the aim was to peel away the mystery of things and offer them in all their splendour to a girl’. At the same time, Sartre also began to write for himself. It was still a performance, but it was one he was able to witness and judge. ‘By writing, I existed’, he wrote in Words, ‘I escaped from the grown-ups; but I existed only to write and if I said: me—that meant the me who wrote’. Trying to play in the Jardin du Luxembourg, he was a failure: an outsider, an ‘ugly little toad’. Trying to impress one Lisette on a floral avenue in La Rochelle, the boy was ‘a bum with one eye that says shit to the other’. But in a study, a library, a schoolroom, a cafe, Sartre dominated. Culture succeeded where nature failed, and he hated the latter for it.

The point is not one of simple association: that the Luxembourg Gardens were tainted by Sartre’s feelings of rejection, and therefore all gardens were. Instead, it was one episode in an ongoing struggle to be loved and valued. As he described it, this caused a profound split within Sartre between, on the one hand, all that he was proud of—his bright mind, his clownish performance, his literary gifts—and, on the other, all that embarrassed or pained him: his physique and the workings of his body. He had supreme confidence in his voice, ideas, humour—they won him many beautiful women, by whom he liked to be surrounded. But Sartre rarely enjoyed sex, precisely because of its physicality. His frankly oddball passages on slime, in Being and Nothingness, are simultaneously damning of sap, semen and sex—slime as ‘sickly-sweet feminine revenge’. He was clearly bothered by sex, and also believed that a lover could get no pleasure from his body. He was uncomfortable with the reflexes of arousal and described himself as ‘more a masturbator than a copulator’. Better than both, he loved to write about it all at length in letters posted to de Beauvoir. ‘Sartre fucked Bianca’, writes philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, about one early conquest, ‘but he climaxed with the Beaver’.

In this, Sartre was an absolutist—in life, as in philosophy. As he argued in Being and Nothingness, his freedom was absolute: all that won him approval was infinite. It is like a schoolboy’s dream of superhuman power, only the potency is cognitive, not muscular. And all that oppressed him was absolute other. He took those parts of himself that were loathsome and exiled them completely. They became pure being: stupid, unjustified, disgusting. ‘This ugliness, this absolute disaster that it induces in the economy and harmony of Being’, writes Lévy, ‘convinced him of the invincible darkness of things and of the consequent impossibility of reconciling the world to himself’. This is why Sartre wrote nausea into the Le Havre park and cemented it in the foundations of his philosophy: the chestnut tree was part of nature, which he had withdrawn from himself and put on the other side of an ontological abyss. Heidegger worshipped being and nature; his most famous French student vilified both.

Taken as a retreat from discomfort, awkwardness and embarrassment, Sartre’s philosophy looks less like the polished theory of a free mind and more like an organism protecting itself. Put simply, this is not the work of pure consciousness. Sartre’s consciousness was riddled with instincts and impulses, which were as biological as they were cognitive. In fleeing from his body in particular, and nature as a whole, he demonstrated the unavoidable influence of both. In one of those ironies that make hypocrites of most philosophers, Sartre’s chestnut-tree nausea was an exemplary case of bad faith.

Growing Up

Simone de Beauvoir’s experience was exactly the opposite of Sartre’s. In her autobiographical books, she wrote freely of her delight in the Limousin landscape, capturing a child’s simple reveries (‘Under the thorny hedgerows and in the heart of the woods’, she wrote in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, ‘were hidden treasures’). Her love for nature deepened as she aged, and faced adult love, war, poverty and loss. After World War II, de Beauvoir wrote to Sartre from Gary, Indiana, where she was staying with her lover, American author Nelson Algren. With Algren, she had enjoyed what was impossible to savour with Sartre: hiking, and passionate afternoons in bed. Amidst the usual gossip and political lamentations, she reflected on her simple happiness ‘in the garden, with a little lake at my feet’.

De Beauvoir had the courage to embrace physicality: her own and that of the world at large. This is not to say that she wasn’t informed by Sartre’s existentialism. In her influential feminist masterwork The Second Sex, de Beauvoir saw the body not as the whole of a woman’s being, but as, in her words, ‘a limiting factor for our projects’. The body ‘is not enough to define her as a woman’, she wrote, ‘there is no true living reality except as manifested by the conscious individual through activities and in the bosom of society’. This was a classic Sartrean idea. What kept women from economic and professional equality was not childbirth, but very specific social and psychological conditions. Likewise, de Beauvoir catalogued the oozing, spasming, bleeding (‘the bloody verdict’) female body—shades of Sartre’s passages on slime. But unlike her friend, she saw our bodies as inexorably intertwined with our minds. There was no realm of pure freedom—the body impinged. She recognised that her consciousness was a mongrel, not Sartre’s pure breed. ‘If you gave way to tears or nerves or seasickness’, de Beauvoir wrote of Sartre, in The Prime of Life, ‘he said … you were simply being weak. I … claimed that stomach and tear ducts, indeed the head itself, were all subject to irresistible forces on occasion’. De Beauvoir acknowledged that, like Le Havre’s park, her psyche contained blind, dim, thoughtless processes and principles—Sartre’s ‘being’. And when de Beauvoir enjoyed, as a girl, ‘weeping willows, magnolias, monkey-puzzles’, she was revelling in this, the being Sartre loathed.

For all his fear and loathing, Sartre led a full life, and was loved obsessively by many. As a man, the philosopher could be funny, moving, intriguing—a conversational and intellectual dynamo. He was exploitative and deceptive with women, but also generous and loyal. Decades of denying his body eventually left Sartre dizzy, lame, blind and incontinent—but de Beauvoir, along with his other girlfriends, stoically dealt with the prescriptions and whisky bottles. For over a quarter of a century, her letters read as professions of adoration: from the ‘hundred kisses’ of 1930 to the ‘big hug and kisses’ of 1955, de Beauvoir was a faithful friend to her ‘dear little being’. As he seduced beauties in France and abroad, she endured his evasions and betrayals. If he was a ‘bit of a tomb’, as he put it to de Beauvoir’s later companion Claude Lanzmann, the stink of death did not turn his lovers’ stomachs.

As a writer, Sartre was a novelist of rare power and a bold journalist. Throughout his career, he remained committed to writing, even when he had forgotten his audience. If not the most original or influential scholar, Sartre was certainly the most famous philosopher of the century—the archetypal public intellectual. Fifty thousand fans crowded his funeral, and his name spearheaded the existentialist fashion of the 1950s. There are many names that are only remembered because of his. Sartre’s lopsided philosophy did not rob him of rightful success or fame. His flaws, in philosophy and life, were consistent in this respect. The point is this: Jean-Paul Sartre was the quintessential modern, urban thinker, for whom gardens were somewhere between dull and disgusting. And he did not miss what he lost.