There is something that is very hard to get at: what it actually feels like to be an existential nomad. Ungrounded. Untethered. Disappointed. Disoriented. Not just knowing that the center isn’t holding, but experiencing the center as not holding. It feels something like vertigo, something like nausea—maybe like the famous nausea that the fictional character Roquentin experiences in Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal novel Nausea.
We might describe Roquentin’s experience in the following way: that particular nausea is what it feels like when the feeling of meaning collapses and nothing immediately replaces it. It isn’t that “existence is meaningless” but rather that the feeling of meaning has fled, vanished, withdrawn. This loss is a phenomenological event, not a philosophical claim. What characterizes the existential nomad is how often this event happens, even to the point of becoming the constant state he must endure.
It isn’t that one is thinking about existential dread, existential anxiety, nothingness, and so on. It is that one has become someone who can’t avoid experiencing it. Roquentin experiences the loss as definitive, as if he has uncovered the “truth” behind appearances, as if meaning was always an illusion. From my perspective, I would say that he has uncovered one layer of reality but mistaken it for the whole. What’s missing is the recognition that human beings are meaning-generating creatures, and that the feeling of meaning is part of our natural repertoire—even if it is unstable.
This ontological nausea is not the final word or the final experience—rather, it is the experience of being between feelings. Sartre himself half-recognizes this. Near the end of Nausea, Sartre’s famously “saves” Roquentin by having him experience something while listening to a jazz singer in a café—what I would call the return of the feeling of meaning. Unwittingly perhaps, Sartre announces that meaning can indeed be felt again, that certain activities reliably invite it. That is exactly the idea I’m championing in The Reenchantment of Meaning.
It seems that for Sartre, this reenchantment can happen only through art. To my mind, his answer is too narrow, too one-faceted. Sartre makes it seem as if only something like the experience of listening to a jazz singer in a café can reduce that ontological nausea. Ah, but the wise existential nomad comes to realize that the ways out or the ways back from a meaning loss are myriad.
Soon you’ll be able to preorder The Reenchantment of Meaning. I look forward to being able to make that announcement! If you’d like to be part of the launch team and maybe make some meaning that way <smile>, drop me a line to ericmaisel@hotmail.com and let’s get you aboard! That could be a lot of fun.