Why nausea?

William Desmond ( Being and the Between ) points out that humans continue to experience a “surge of mind’s self-transcendence” in the face of skeptical arguments from empiricists and idealists. Metaphysics won’t stay down, and the attempt to keep it down is a self-defeating attempt to suppress the wonder at the world that is the source of philosophy in the first place.

To dissolve metaphysics into “matters of habit and custom” simply relocates the question: Why should there be these customs and habits? Or, one can take an existential tack: “suppose we think contingency along the lines of an absurdist existentialism: contingent being is a surd, beyond which thinking cannot pass. And yet the existential self either is nauseated by this contingency (Sartre), or revolts against it.”

But the nausea and the revolt still need to be accounted for: “Why nausea or revolt at all, if being just is? What has been sought and not found, what expectation disappointed Or perhaps the nausea might just be the sickness of spirit contacted by the blocking of transcendence as other, and by the dungeoning of self-transcendence in meaningless immanence. In any case, the revolt against the absurd is mere whistling in the dark, if the dark itself is the ultimate. For then we too, and our bold songs, are the senseless issue of the dark.”