Sartre’s nausea insight came from mescaline-tinged visions of contingency

Evidence

The narrator, walking alone around Naples on a very hot day, observes terrible things: a child on crutches picks a slice of watermelon crawling with flies out of a gutter, and eats it. Through an open doorway, he sees a man kneeling beside a little girl. While she says, ‘Daddy; my daddy,’ the man lifts up her dress and bites into her buttocks as one might into a loaf of bread. Sartre’s narrator is overwhelmed by nausea — but with it comes an insight: that nothing in the world happens with any necessity. Everything is ‘contingent’, and it could all have happened a different way. The revelation horrifies him. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 333

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s purpose of orienting in existentialism — the origin of the Nausea contingency idea is a foundational origin story for the whole movement. — connects to: Sartre’s Nausea centers on a root’s opaque being overwhelming consciousness — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 83; Sartre’s mescaline trip produced lasting hallucinations of lobsters and staring facades — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 332; Sartre deliberately manufactured nausea to study it philosophically — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 347
• SHARE: The Naples scene — man biting a child’s buttocks ‘as one might into a loaf of bread’ — is a grotesque image worth sharing with a friend interested in Sartre or literary grotesquerie.

Broader Connections

• Sartre deliberately manufactured nausea to study it philosophically #contradicts (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 347