Existence Precedes Essence By Sartre

When trying to read sartre you can get lost in his world of nothingness. As sartre 's main theme of the book is to try and explain the feeling of his belief that existence precedes essence. He explains this idea through a story with Roquentin, a historian who live in bouville. Roquentin starts to journal to try and help in log the strange things happening around him. Roquentin by no fault of his own separates object such as a stone and humans; one being a “being-in-itself” and the other “being-for-itself”. Which I will go on to analyze that this is the true difference between existence and essence. Sartre is known for the idea that inanimate objects and animated objects have a passive to active relationship.
Sartre’s philosophy by trying to …show more content…
My example being the blue cotton shirt and the purple suspenders. “When the patronne goes shopping her cousin replaces her at the bar. His name is Adolphe. I began looking at him as I sat down and I have kept on because I cannot turn my head. He is in shirtsleeves, with purple suspenders; he has rolled the sleeves of his shirt above the elbows. The suspenders can hardly be seen against the blue shirt, they are all obliterated, buried in the blue, but it is false humility; in fact, they will not let themselves be forgotten, they annoy me by their sheep-like stubbornness, as if, starting to become purple, they stopped somewhere along the way without giving up their pretensions...The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the cafe, I am the one who is within it.” When Roquentin is at the bar he sees the bartender adolphe wearing purple suspenders, and he can’t shake from his mind even though they are purple in places they look blue. This again returns the feeling of nausea, which is caused by his understanding of the connection between essence and existence with the object he is looking at. He starts at the suspenders and realizes that they exist, and the color they are is a construct of color. He knows that they should not be able to change and this relative color …show more content…
Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me... denying its existence to lose itself in a frenzied excess. I scraped my heel against this black claw: I wanted to peel off some of the bark. For no reason at all, out of defiance, to make the bare pink appear absurd on the tanned leather: to play with the absurdity of the world. But, when I drew my heel back, I saw that the bark was still black.Black? I felt the word deflating, emptied of meaning with extraordinary rapidity. Black? The root was not black, there was no black on this piece of wood—there was . . . something else: black, like the circle, did not exist. I looked at the root: was it more than black or almost black? But I soon stopped questioning myself because I had the feeling of knowing where I was.” For the root exists without any strings attached, but roquentin goes on to define the root as black. Even though the root being black is not a necessity for the root to exist. In fact the idea that the blackness of the root is more important than the root itself is funny. When we look at the tree again Roquentin thinks about “the essence of the tree” and finds the idea of the tree funny, so he laughs, and while he does the tree smiles back at him in return to his gesture. Obviously, the smile that the tree has for Roquentin is a metaphor for the nausea he has been having. When he says ”when you realize that, it turns your heart upside down