nnot exist in any other state:
Jean-Paul Sartre is a demoniacal philosopher of freedom. As Hakim writes, freedom is Sartre's main key to the understanding of man: through freedom, meaning enters into the world. We recall that he asserts that, at the start, man simply is. Thus the vocation of the Sartrean man is nothing else but the perpetual process of self-creation. Sartrean freedom is one which excuses no one.
Man is not free not to be free. The heavy burden of this freedom perpetually haunts man. An oft-quoted phrase encapsulates this burden: Man condemned to be free carries the whole world (http://www.geocities.com/sartresite/sartre_theses4.html).
Sartre is the most philosophical of these three writers: He is in fact the only one of the three who arguably should be called a philosopher at all while the other two are writers with a philosophical bent. It is thus in no way surprising that Sartre's concept of freedom is more complex, entangled in and supported by his understanding about the nature of knowledge and reality. Indeed, for Sartre, in the novel Nausea that we are examining here, is as much about the importance of knowledge (and of intellectual creation, which is not quite the same thing) as it is about freedom. The protagonist of Nausea, the historian Antoine Roquentin, is a surrogate for Sartre himself as he attempted to find a way to justify human existence - as he attempted to find a way to live with the terrible burden of freedom.
Gide's conception of the nature of freedom is both more limited and more convenient - indeed, there is almost a taste of the expedient in his embracing an ethic of personal freedom. This is actually not so much in evidence in the text under consideration here - the 1914 Les Caves du Vatican - as it is in his most infamous work - Corydon, in which he discussed his own homosexuality. But there runs throughout this work that he called a sotie, a work of satire intended to showcase a g...