Chapter 6 - Existential Disgust and the Food of the Philosopher

Summary

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938), the climax comes when the narrator is required by his host at a restaurant to try some Camembert cheese. From the sensation of the cheese in his mouth comes the narrator’s nauseating apprehension of his own freedom. But why cheese? Why a restaurant? And why nausea? A close examination of the other writings of Sartre and his contemporaries, as well as of Nausea itself, shows that the intimation of metaphysical freedom arrives at an intersection between bad faith, represented in hospitality, and contempt for bad faith, represented in disgust. In addition, this intimation comes at the perception of a substance (‘slimy’ cheese, as Sartre is elsewhere inclined to call it) that challenges the boundaries of the solid and the liquid and hence the idea of boundaries itself. It is a very odd intersection, this: freedom and non-freedom, hospitality and ungratefulness, cheese and meat, the philosopher and the consumer. But it is here that Sartre’s existentialism reveals itself as a rejection of the world in search of another world that can replace it.  Sartre’s own dislike of Camembert is pertinent here; but more important is Sartre’s perception that freedom has sensory as well as intellectual components, and that the quest for freedom requires a rearrangement of both social and sensual bonds in the world.