Sartre's second century

40 Chapter Three
behind a screen and began my birth over again at the right moment, the
very minute that the universe silently called for me. 25
At this point we encounter a phantasy of self-recreation, in which Sartre
expresses his metaphysical intuition of the creatio ex nihilo that Descartes
attributed to God, and that Sartre attributes to human consciousness. In
The Words, self-recreation ex nihilo, that is to say, absolute freedom, is
experienced by the child as a deep anguish:
I lived in a state of uneasiness: at the very moment when their ceremonies
convinced me that nothing exists without a reason and that everyone, from
the highest to the lowest, has his place marked out for him in the universe,
my own reason for being slipped away; I would suddenly discover that I
did not really count, and I felt ashamed of my unwonted presence in that
well ordered world [...]. A father would have weighted me with a certain
stable obstinacy. Making his moods my principles, his ignorance my
knowledge, his disappointments my pride, his quirks my law, he would
have inhabited me. That respectable tenant would have given me selfrespect,
and on that respect I would have based my right to live. My
begetter would have determined my future. 26
But Jean-Baptiste Sartre was dead a long time ago and the child was
compelled to grow up with a feeling of total gratuitousness, without any
paternal law to interiorise.
The fourth metaphysical experience is that of the contingency of every
real entity—real thing or human reality. In Being and Nothingness Sartre
claims that "Being-in-itself can neither be derived from the possible, nor
reduced to the necessary. [...] This is what we call the contingency of
being-in-itself." 27 In the famous scene of the public garden in Nausea,
Roquentin stops in contemplation before the black, gnarled root of the
tree, and experiences the unintelligible fact that this root lies in front of
him at this place and at this time, without any reason why it appears
precisely at this time, at this place, with its specific qualities and to him,
Roquentin. This concrete intuition of contingency underlies the entire
narrative of Jesus la Chouettet professeur de province (Jesus the Owl, A
Provincial Schoolmaster), a novel partly published in 1923. 28 In this book,
25 The Words, 113.
26 Ibid., 86-87.
27 Being and Nothingness, 22.
28 The title contains an ironic and untranslatable play on words because, in popular
speech, "chouette" can also refer to an ugly and cantankerous old woman, or to
anything that is "neat, smart, chic", etc.