Author: Dr. Savita Rani

Abstract: The present paper aims to elucidate the notion of freedom in Sartrean ethics. Jean-Paul Sartre is as much a philosopher as a novelist, a rare synthesis of philosophy and literature that, otherwise, are said to be two different disciplines. In this regard. He is closer to Jacques Derrida, who sought to bring about a play and thereby refused to privilege one discipline over the other, and Matthew Arnold, in his essay, The Function of Criticism at the Present Times, said that literary genius does not principally show itself in new ideas, that is, rather the business of a philosopher. It is because Sartre's existential psychoanalysis reveals to him that values are not written in things, but created by man. Nausea is a story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is frightened at his own existence: viscous, slimy, to be precise. The novel is an impressionistic diary wherein he records date-wise details of his confrontation with the nausea of the time, which, having corrupted him, is now at the receiving end, as Roquentin spreads it further. Thus, by fusing the philosopher and the artist in him, Sartre paved the way for the moral agent to be born, the being by whom values exist (Sartre's italics). That is why he aligns existentialism with humanism. It is in this context that we can appreciate his freedom of nausea as an expression of self-loathing. Sartre seems to ask why man should not resist being sucked up by the slimy, i.e., the world.

Keywords: Existentialism, Humanism, psychoanalysis, repugnance, self-loathing, seriousness.

Article Info: Received: 20 Mar 2026; Received in revised form: 19 Apr 2026; Accepted: 22 Apr 2026; Available online: 26 Apr 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.112.80