Nausea is the nonpositional apprehension of one’s own contingent facticity, not a metaphor

Evidence

It goes without saying that we have chosen physical pain for the sake of an example and that there are thousands of other ways, themselves contingent, to exist our contingency. In particular we must note that when no pain, no specific satisfaction or dissatisfaction is “existed” by consciousness, the for-itself does not thereby cease to project itself beyond a contingency which is pure and so to speak unqualified. Consciousness does not cease “to have” a body. Coenesthetic affectivity is then a pure, nonpositional apprehension of a contingency without color, a pure apprehension of the self as a factual existence. This perpetual apprehension on the part of my for-itself of an insipid taste which I cannot place, which accompanies me even in my efforts to get away from it, and which is my taste—this is what we have described elsewhere under the name of Nausea. A dull and inescapable nausea perpetually reveals my body to my consciousness. Sometimes we look for the pleasant or for physical pain to free ourselves from this nausea; but as soon as the pain and the pleasure are existed by consciousness, they in turn manifest its facticity and its contingency; and it is on the ground of this nausea that they are revealed. We must not take the term nausea as a metaphor derived from our physiological disgust. On the contrary, we must realize that it is on the foundation of this nausea that all concrete and empirical nauseas (nausea caused by spoiled meat, fresh blood, excrement, etc.) are produced and make us vomit. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 886

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Nausea as the pure nonpositional apprehension of contingency — an ontological structure that grounds rather than derives from empirical physiological disgust.
• XREF: Connect to Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, which inherits this notion of the body as contingency that consciousness must assume. — connects to: Nausea reveals facticity through the body’s inescapable belonging to being; Fundamental nausea reveals the facticity of existence beneath all empirical disgusts; The Other’s gaze reveals one’s own nausea as fleshly object. (+5 more)
• ADDENDUM: The nausea as ground of bodily facticity complements the embodied-pain discussion in ‘On Sacrifice’ — both treat the body as the site where contingency is existed.

Broader Connections

• Fundamental nausea reveals the facticity of existence beneath all empirical disgusts #corroborates (0.90)
• Self-consciousness is not an added quality layered onto a psychic event #expands (0.82)
• The Other’s gaze reveals one’s own nausea as fleshly object. #expands (0.80)
• Self-consciousness need not posit the self as an object #corroborates (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 10
• Lived bodily knowledge is absolute and pre-discursive, not built from explicit angles #qualifies (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 734
• Unassimilated particularity that resists conceptual order arouses visceral disgust #qualifies (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 137