La Nausée: A Sartrean View of why Business Frameworks Fail
"I was holding a pebble... I looked at it, and then it filled me with a sort of sweet disgust. How unpleasant it was! And it came from the pebble, I'm sure of it, it passed from the pebble into my hands... A sort of nausea in the hands."
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938)
The character ‘Roquentin’ from Sartre’s existential masterpiece ‘La Nausée’ has this realisation on a Normandy beach, as he picks up a stone to skim across the waves.
It’s the moment he picks up an inanimate object, and is suddenly overwhelmed with nausea; this pebble exists, yet its existence is unnecessary, unjustified and contingent.
The novel follows a dense format, framed ostensibly within a diary format, occasionally taking the form of an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative, veering into the ambiguous. Ultimately, detouring through several scenes and characters, Roquentin reasons that things simply exist, without an underlying necessity or reason.
Other than being a vehicle for describing Sartre’s own version of existential thinking, the novel works as an allegorical metaphor for the current state of disruption and volatility the world of technology, especially in the West, faces in the here and now.
The forces of the AI revolution, the dominance of Chinese manufacturing, vertically integrated supply chains, the scramble for rare-earth elements and ever-more powerful silicon have created an existential threat for many established Western industries, companies, and economies.
So faced with a question of existential dread, where better to look than to the existentialists themselves? On an abstract level they’d considered equally consequential problems in the early-to-mid 20th century, and arrived at not impractical conclusions.
La Nausée provides a number of useful metaphors to help process these.
We can look to the root of the chestnut tree that Roquentin sees in the park, the nausea creeping up on him again. The root is there, visible, you can touch it, see its black form. But why? Why is it there? What purpose does it serve? And it’s not the only one; there are thousands more like it in the same park, attached to the same type of tree. Roquentin comes to realise that the root just is. It’s not there for the benefit of humans or anyone else, there is no reason for its existence. It just exists, and he must accept it.
So when we see new technologies, new systems and ideas, maybe we should come to the same realisation. There’s no point debating why they exist, over-analysing them, making forecasts and slide decks and new buzzwords, just so we can force them into our own systems of thinking. Maybe we just accept they exist and deal with it.
Perhaps the mistake is assuming that we need to understand something by fitting it into the systems we already have. Maybe understanding sometimes starts with accepting that the system itself has changed, and that forcing something new into an old framework tells us more about the framework than it does about the thing we're trying to understand.
Equally we can look to the ‘salauds’, the officials Roquentin observes as people who treat contingent social values, identities or conventions as though they possessed an objective, fixed necessity. They believe their status, respectability and social position give them an inherent right to exist as they do.
What happens when the credentials that once demonstrated competence within a system become evidence of competence in operating the system, rather than evidence of being able to respond when the system changes?
The officials in the portraits wear their robes, sure of their own importance. With no other purpose created, they put all faith into a purpose created for them. They act in bad faith. When change manifests, they reach for the guidelines and frameworks of the system that they ‘should’ follow.
Meanwhile l’Autodidacte visits the library every day, reading the contents in order, from A to Z. Roquentin uses the term ‘l’Autodidacte’ to almost mock him as the ‘self-taught man’; for he hasn’t necessarily learned anything of use. He’s performed the act of reading, and has memorised much of the detail, but he isn’t mentioned as someone who created a body of work or a purpose. It’s consumption over creation or cognition.
He’s framed as a contradictory, hypocritical figure. The equivalent of memorising the spec sheets, collecting the certifications, attending the in-house training and pointing out all the edge cases, but without ever shipping a product.
The rituals and frameworks and performances of the salauds and l’Autodidacte aren’t so different to the things we put faith in. The bad faith of sprints, stand-ups, Alignment calls, steering committees and roadmap sessions. While the chestnut roots are appearing and existing, we console ourselves with the comfort blankets of process, of optimisation frameworks designed for steering ships in calm waters. Neither the salauds nor l’Autodidacte will innovate to break out though; they’ll act out the performance until it inevitably fails to deliver, and then blame the system they had faith in. It’s a corporate equivalent of the Nuremberg defence; best practices were adhered to, processes were followed and risks mitigated.
So how to escape this certain fate? We can reference Roquentin directly once more. When he realises that things sometimes just exist, without apparent reason, he arrives at the realisation that there’s no point trying to understand and rationalise in the style of the salauds or l’Autodidacte. He understands finally that he must create and apply purpose for existence to mean anything.
Roquentin acts this out by resolving to create his novel; by creating, he can hope to break out of the nausea. This is a core tenet of Sartre’s response to contingency, and one we can apply directly to the existence we’re faced with today. This is basically an example of praxis, creating to test an idea or thought, and in turn creating purpose.
Now this article isn’t an exercise in performance; this isn’t the literary equivalent of those LinkedIn posts where people attach a picture of neatly-arranged books from the personal development section of Waterstones to say ‘look, I read books’. That would be an act of bad faith. I’d be no better than the salauds or l’Autodidacte (and he really could read).
As an act of creativity there’s a purpose in doing this. Most obviously it’s about holding a mirror to ourselves; we can’t waste time rationalising why AI, vertically integrated supply chains or demand for neodymium exist and are turning flat seas into choppy oceans. The nausea will have submerged us before we know it.
Like Roquentin and the chestnut tree root, we can only accept they exist, and reject the rituals and performance of bad faith which try to explain and optimise them as if they were constituents of the old industries. Creativity is the only answer; look these problems in the face and create to break out. That’s what assigns purpose and an output, a body of work and ultimately an answer.
Secondly, there’s a subplot here. The frameworks, buzzwords, forecasts and slide decks of the 21st century are trying to solve a problem that on an abstract level, a collection of writers in 20th century France already tackled. In a moment of meta, those frameworks are the rituals of bad faith and the salauds.
When the likes of Sartre wrote, it was about existence itself. It was asking that if there was no point to what is objectively a contingent existence, then what are you supposed to do? He rejected the nihilist concept that you either accept it and give up, or accept it with relief that nothing matters at all. Sartrean existentialism came to the conclusion that purpose should be created, that it could be found in the act of doing.
It’s not so different to rapid prototyping, agile sprints or much-feted vibe coding (and I’m talking about real agile - building products in real time, not plastering post-it notes to a whiteboard or polishing a Jira board ahead of a review call). You find something interesting or necessary, and try to execute it to the highest standard possible. Purpose is achieved through the act of doing, a response to contingency.
So in the face of an ever more volatile landscape, there might be something in this book from 1938. Applying practical creativity to break out from the contingency of existence is valid; as Roquentin rejects the self-justifying systems of bad faith and decides to write his novel, breaking out from the contingency of the old systems of optimisation to respond to volatility and disruption through innovation is equally as valid.
David Turner is the founder of Kói, an independent technology consultancy advising investors, founders, and boards on how organisations respond to structural and technological disruption.
You can reach him at: enquiries@dkoi.design
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