On Existence and Sartre’s Nausea
“What exists?” has been a common question asked throughout history
The Hegelian Dialectic is perhaps one of the most influential approaches of argument, particularly among twentieth-century thinkers. This “speculative mode of cognition,” as Hegel himself phrased it, lays at the core of many theoretical concepts with respect to society, relations to “modes of production,” economics, gender, race, labor, etc. By placing the “Subject” in opposition to the “Object,” the “Self” in conflict with the “Other,” creates an opportunity in which self-actualization could occur. Self-Knowledge, according to Hegel, is not an insular division of solitary introspection; but instead, a social process, whereby the processes through which I recognize the Other in myself, is in relation to the friction caused by encountering the Other. Consequently, coming to full-consciousness of oneself as Subject, and “realizing” our freedom is, for Hegel, one and the same as regards the processes by which it is realized. And interestingly, he argued that the “life and death struggle” of these conflicting wills creates the conditions of freedom. For a thinker as layered as Jean-Paul Sartre, surely there is more to his intellectual influence than Hegel’s Dialectic, but it does present itself through his thinking via Marxism, nonetheless.
