Quotation
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“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”
Jean-Paul Sartre · Existentialism · Modern · 1938
What does it mean?
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. Roquentin, in the garden, finds existence superfluous, sticky, without justification. A rival reading treats the sentence as Sartre's settled metaphysics, a gloom he never revised. It is a novel's discovery, and the philosophical books will talk about nothingness and freedom rather than about this viscosity alone. Another reading hears a mood you should grow out of. He thought the mood was an insight into contingency, the fact that things did not have to be. The insight can be refused.
Did Jean-Paul Sartre really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Lloyd Alexander's English of Roquentin's reflection in the novel. Robert Baldick's Penguin wording differs slightly. The sentence is the character's nausea, not a numbered thesis in Being and Nothingness.
Where it comes from
Nausea, in Lloyd Alexander's translation
Approximate date: 1938.
How to use it
On a Sunday in a park in Norwich, a tree is just there, and the there-ness is slightly disgusting. That is the register of the sentence. It is not a reason to tell someone their life is an accident in a way that leaves them with nothing to do. Roquentin writes. The writing is the novel's answer, such as it is. Contingency is not yet a politics.
A mindset reading
Do not file the sentence under 'existentialism is depressing' and stop. The depression is a description of existence without essence, which the lecture will later try to make a humanism. Whether that try succeeds is a real question. The novel does not pretend to have succeeded.
Understand the philosophy
Nausea, 1938, comes before the treatise and the lecture. Alexander's translation is the classic American English. The chestnut tree is the scene. Without the scene the sentence is a pessimistic proverb, which is less strange than what he wrote.
- meaning
- death
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. Roquentin, in the garden, finds existence superfluous, sticky, without justification. A rival reading treats the sentence as Sartre's settled metaphysics, a gloom he never revised. It is a novel's discovery, and the philosophical books will talk about nothingness and freedom rather than about this viscosity alone. Another reading hears a mood you should grow out of. He thought the mood was an insight into contingency, the fact that things did not have to be. The insight can be refused.
Did Jean-Paul Sartre really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Lloyd Alexander's English of Roquentin's reflection in the novel. Robert Baldick's Penguin wording differs slightly. The sentence is the character's nausea, not a numbered thesis in Being and Nothingness.
Which work is it in?
Nausea, in Lloyd Alexander's translation Approximate date: 1938.