Nausea
Freedom, manifesting itself through anguish, is characterized by a constantly renewed obligation to remake the self which designates the free being.
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Anguish as the manifestation of freedom in the face of self means that man is always separated by a nothingness from his essence.
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Yet to flee anguish and to be anguish cannot be exactly the same thing. The fact that I am my anguish in order to flee it presupposes that I can decenter myself in relation to what I am, that I can be anguish in the form of “not-being it”, that I can dispose of a nihilating power at the heart of anguish itself.
Being and Nothingness (Jean-Paul Satre, 1943)
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I don’t see the problem with that presupposition. Why not decentre yourself in relation to what you are?-surely it can be done with the merest imaginative capacity? In fact, some people live their lives in that marginal space outside of themselves, looking with others’ eyes towards the hollow centre-or, if Satre must-towards that layer of nothingness that separates the self from its essence. Fleeing anguish? Ya, probably. But anguish itself can’t possess nihilating power. Nothing abstract can unless we invest it so. And why do that?
Sarte was always in a bad mood. :)
…For man to be able to question, he must be capable of being his own nothingness; that is, he can be at the origin of non-being in being only if his being — in himself and by himself — is transfixed with nothingness. Thus the transcendences of past and future appear in the temporal being of human reality.
Or something. 8-)