Sartre's second century

42 Chapter Three
"reduced" or "excluded" ("bracketed", Husserl would say), but which
nevertheless influence the phenomenological analysis: the convictions that
all real existence is contingent and that consciousness is an absolute
spontaneity.
Let us begin with contingency. If we turn to Nausea, we see a clear
sequence of significant events in Roquentin's life, each one linked to the
other. We find the heart-breaking discovery that "there are no
adventures" 31 —nothing in real life begins and ends like a hero's adventure
in a novel. The famous visit to the museum in Bouville follows. Here,
Roquentin becomes aware that the quiet happiness of the bourgeois is
nothing but cowardice and nastiness. A few days later, meeting Dr Roge at
the restaurant Chez Camille, Roquentin mocks him as a "professionnel de
l'experience" ("an experience professional")—the truth is that it is a
complete illusion to think that any life improves by experience: to live is
to decline in an irresistible decay. Further on in the novel we witness the
death of the project of writing the scholarly book on Rollebon. Finally, we
have the lunch with the Autodidact, a repulsive caricature of genuine
culture, the embodiment of disgusting humanism:
The Self-Taught Man's face is close to mine. He smiles foolishly, all the
while close to my face, like a nightmare. [...] People. You must love
people. Men are admirable. I want to vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the
Nausea. 32
This crisis introduces the episode of the public garden, the discovery of the
contingency of the tree's root and, more generally, the discovery of the
contingency of all things existing in the world.
Finally, we encounter the definite death of the love for Anny ("we
have nothing more to say" 33 ) and the conclusion that in every real life
everybody loses the game. 34 In this entire sequence of events, the
metaphysical experience of contingency is expressed in a plot and fixed in
metaphors. As a consequence, the phenomenological article on intentionality
rejects the most idealistic implications of Husserl*s phenomenology.
Indeed, intentionality itself is considered by Sartre to be a "burst" ("un
dclatement") of consciousness in the midst of the world and not the
"constitution" of the world within the "transcendental Ego", as Husserl
repeatedly insists in Ideas and in the Cartesian Meditations. Let us read a
31 Sartre, Nausea, 150.
32 Ibid., 122.
33 Ibid., 153.
34 Ibid., 157.