The distinction between being-for-itself and being-in-itself, although mutually exclusive, is not collectively exhaustive. There exists a third manner of being called ‘being-for-others’ (l’être-pour-autrui). Being-for-others is exhibited by exactly the same beings whose being is being-for-itself: human beings. In being-for-others I am in a state that entails the existence of someone else. Under the heading of ‘Being-for-others’ Sartre attempts a refutation of solipsism, offers a phenomenology of the body, and a rather pessimistic ontology of human relations. I say something about each of these in turn.
Solipsism is the doctrine that only my mind exists. Putative refutations of solipsism usually either maintain, inductively, that other people have minds because they look and behave like me and I have a mind, or, it is argued that the formulation of solipsism as a theory presupposes its falsity. For example, Hegel argues in The Phenomenology of Spirit that one consciousness being a self-consciousness depends upon an encounter with another consciousness. Solipsism presupposes self-consciousness, so solipsism presupposes at least one other consciousness and so is false. Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (1953) argues that solipsism presupposes a logically private language for its formulation. A logically private language is impossible because any language presupposes a public language. A public language presupposes other language users, therefore solipsism may be formulated just on condition it is false.
Sartre takes neither of these routes. H is refutation is based upon human emotion, paradigmatically, shame. Sartre invites us to imagine that listening through a door and looking through a keyhole I suddenly hear footsteps behind me. I am under the gaze of the other. I feel shame. Shame however is shame before another. In this situation it is not a psychological option for me to sincerely doubt that other people exist or have minds.
Sartre’s phenomenology of the body is a description of the asymmetries which obtain between one’s own body, the body that I am, and the bodies of others: the bodies I may observe or encounter in a third person way. My own body is not for me a thing. It is a thing from the perspective of another, and another’s body is a thing from my perspective, but my own body is not presented to me as an object in the world; as something I could encounter or straightforwardly observe.
Sartre is not denying that each of us experiences his own body. I have a limited visual perspective onto the front of my body from the shoulders downwards. However, I can not see my own head and back. I also have a kinaesthetic awareness of the relative positions of the parts of my body, but not of their locations in the world.
As subject the body cannot be object and as object the body cannot be subject. For example, the eyes that are seeing can not see themselves. Although I can see using my eyes I can not see my seeing. There could be a human being, or an operation on a human being, such that one of the two eyes could watch the other while the other watched objects in the world. Nevertheless, in such a case, I am adopting the standpoint of the other in relation to one of my eyes. The eye that sees still does not see the eye that sees.
Similarly, my hand may touch objects in the world, and I may touch one of my hands with the other. However, my hand can not touch itself, or, at least, the part that is touching is not touching itself. Sartre says ‘we are dealing with two essentially different orders of reality. To touch and to be touched’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 304). Always, being the subject of an experience precludes being simultaneously the object of that same experience.
We see here a new level on which being-for-itself and being in itself are incommensurable. My body as I experience it is pour-soi. My body as experienced by another is en-soi. There are not two numerically distinct bodies, but there are two radically distinct modes of being exhibited by one and the same body: subjective and objective, free and mechanical, lived and observed.
This is a dualism of perspectives, not a dualism of entities. The phenomenology of the human body derived from being one is radically distinct from that derived from observing one, encountering one as a thing in the external world.
What is the relation between conscious and this body that I am? Sartre’s view is that being-for-itself is primordial with regard to both consciousness and the body. Unless there were the subjective type of being called ‘Being-for-itself’ there could not obtain the distinction between consciousness and the body.
By ‘being-for-others’ Sartre means my mode of being, my overall state of experience, when I take myself to be as others perceive me, or when I make myself be as others perceive me, or both. My taking myself to be an object or ‘thing’ in the world is a paradigm case of being-for-others. It is adopting towards myself the kind of perspective that others have on me. Being-for-others is therefore a kind of bad faith. It is not a false belief about myself because there is a way in which I appear to others and this is thinkable by me. However, it is not how I am and it is not how I experience myself to be. To this extent it is inauthentic and unreal. It does not correspond to my own lived experience.
Consciously or not, the phenomenology of human relations that Sartre offers essentially operates with the parameters of Hegel’s Master and Slave Dialectic in the 1807The Phenomenology of Spirit There self-conscious beings are depicted as mutually constituting through a struggle for recognition: a power struggle where one party may bestow or withhold psychological identity from another, a complex dialectic where the freedom of one is sought in the control of the other.
Sartre says that his descriptions of human relations have to be understood within the perspective of conflict. The possibility, if not the actuality, of conflict is a necessary condition for there being any human relations whatsoever. Conflict is ultimately conflict over freedom. In trying to define my own essence through the exercise of free choice I try to repress the freedom of the other. Simultaneously, the other is doing the same. It follows that the perverse form of bad faith called ‘being a swine’ (‘salaud’) is at the root of human relations.
It is Sartre’s view that there is no human encounter where one party does not psychologically dominate the other: one is master and one is slave. If two strangers pass in the street ‘the look’ ‘le regard’) of one will make the other uncomfortably subservient.
This is not simply a psychological generalisation. Sartre has philosophical premises for why it should be so. He subscribes to the Hegelian doctrine that my being what I am is partly due to the recognition or acceptance by others of what I am. This is a kind of bad-faith according to Sartre because I really or authentically am what my freedom makes me. Nevertheless, my being a waiter, a woman, a soldier, a leader, or my adopting any role, depends upon the acquiescence of others. The other holds the secret of what I am. It follows that the other may choose to bestow or withhold his recognition of what I am. My psychological security, my social identity as a person, is subject to the freedom of the other. The other ‘has a hold’ over me.
For this reason I try to deny the freedom of the other and the other tries to deny mine. In denying each other’s freedom we are exercising our own. This is the antagonistic power-struggle that pervades all human relations according to Sartre. It has no optimistic resolution.
Why, we might object, should not conflict be overcome in love? Why should not two human beings, who perhaps care more for each other than they do for themselves, feel secure in each other’s freedom and not threaten one another’s psychological security? Sartre’s reply is that love is a conflict.
Love is a conflict because the love of the lover can always be withdrawn. There is no absolute security in love and it is in the nature of love not to require such absolute security. Love presupposes freedom. Love is freely bestowed and freely withheld. The lover wants the object of their love to love them, but to love them freely. The lover would not feel loved if who they loved was forced to love them. To be loved is to be freely loved. However, to love freely implies the possibility of not loving, and to be loved freely implies the possibility of not being loved. To be truly loved involves the perpetual possibility of that love being withdrawn. Love implies insecurity.
Love presupposes freedom but freedom does not presuppose love, and freedom for Sartre is in many ways a terrible thing. Indeed the layers of human interaction in which each of us is implicated accentuate our bad faith. Our being-for-others hides our freedom from ourselves, and this is as true of loving relationships as much as sadistic ones. Sartre thinks the dialectic of freedom and domination is more fundamental than the moral distinction between acts of love and acts of sadism. In the 1944 play No Exit (Huis Clos), which is set in hell, Joseph Garcin says ‘l’enfer, c’est les Autres’, ‘Hell is other people’.
[…] since the original bond with the Other first arises in connection with the relation between my body and the Other’s body, it seemed clear to us that the knowledge of the nature of the body was indispensable to any study of the particular relations of my being with that of the Other. These particular relations, in fact, on both sides presuppose facticity; that is, our existence as body in the midst of the world. Not that the body is the instrument and the cause of my relations with others. But the body constitutes their meaning and marks their limits. It is as body-in-situation that I apprehend the Other’s transcendence-transcended, and it is as body-in-situation that I experience myself in my alienation for the Other’s benefit. Now we can examine these concrete relations since we are cognizant of what the body is. They are not simple specifications of the fundamental relation. Although each one of them includes within it the original relation with the Other as its essential structure and its foundation, they are entirely new modes of being on the part of the for-itself. In fact they represent the various attitudes of the for-itself in a world where there are Others. Therefore each relation in its own way presents the bilateral relation: for-itself-for-others, in-itself. If then we succeed in making explicit the structures of our most primitive relations with the Other-in-the-world, we shall have completed our task. At the beginning of this work, we asked, “What are the relations of the for-itself with the in-itself?” We have learned now that our task is more complex. There is a relation of the for-itself with the in-itself in the presence of the Other. When we have described this concrete fact, we shall be in a position to form conclusions concerning the fundamental relations of the three modes of being, and we shall perhaps be able to attempt a metaphysical theory of being in general.
The for-itself as the nihilation of the in-itself temporalizes itself as a flight toward. Actually it surpasses its facticity (i.e., to be either given or past or body) toward the in-itself which it would be if it were able to be its own foundation. This may be translated into terms already psychological—and hence inaccurate although perhaps clearer—by saying that the for-itself attempts to escape its factual existence (i.e., its being there, as an in-itself for which it is in no way the foundation) and that this flight takes place toward an impossible future always pursued where the for-itself would be an in-itself-for-itself—i.e., an in-itself which would be to itself its own foundation. Thus the for-itself is both a flight and a pursuit; it flees the in-itself and at the same time pursues it. The for-itself is a pursued-pursuing. But in order to lessen the danger of a psychological interpretation of the preceding remarks, let us note that the for-itself is not first in order to attempt later to attain being; in short we must not conceive of it as an existent which would be provided with tendencies as this glass is provided with certain particular qualities. This pursuing flight is not given which is added on to the being of the for-itself. The for-itself is this very flight. The flight is not to be distinguished from the original nihilation. To say that the for-itself is a pursued-pursuing, or that it is in the mode of having to be its being, or that it is not what it is and is what it is not—each of these statements is saying the same thing. The for-itself is not the in-itself and can not be it. But it is a relation to the in-itself. It is even the sole relation possible to the in-itself. Cut off on every side by the in-itself, the for-itself can not escape it because the for-itself is nothing and it is separated from the in-itself by nothing. The for-itself is the foundation of all negativity and of all relation. The for-itself is relation.
Such being the case, the upsurge of the Other touches the for-itself in its very heart. By the Other and for the Other the pursuing flight is fixed in in-itself. Already the in-itself was progressively recapturing it; already it was at once a radical negation of fact, an absolute positing of value and yet wholly paralyzed with facticity. But at least it was escaping by temporalization; at least its character as a totality detotalized conferred on it a perpetual “elsewhere.” Now it is this very totality which the Other makes appear before him and which he transcends toward his own “elsewhere.” It is this totality which is totalized. For the Other I am irremediably what I am, and my very freedom is a given characteristic of my being. Thus the in-self recaptures me at the threshold of the future and fixes me wholly in my very flight, which becomes a flight foreseen and contemplated, a given flight. But this fixed flight is never the flight which I am for myself; it is fixed outside. The objectivity of my flight I experience as an alienation which I can neither transcend nor know. Yet by the sole fact that I experience it and that it confers on my flight that in-itself which it flees, I must turn back toward it and assume attitudes with respect to it.
Such is the origin of my concrete relations with the Other; they are wholly governed by my attitudes with respect to the object which I am for the Other. And as the Other’s existence reveals to me the being which I am without my being able either to appropriate that being or even to conceive it, this existence will motivate two opposed attitudes: First—The Other looks at me and as such he holds the secret of my being, he knows what I am. Thus the profound meaning of my being is outside of me, imprisoned in an absence. The Other has the advantage over me. Therefore in so far as I am fleeing the in-itself which I am without founding it, I can attempt to deny that being which is conferred on me from outside; that is, I can turn back upon the Other so as to make an object out of him in turn since the Other’s object-ness destroys my object-ness for him. But on the other hand, in so far as the Other as freedom is the foundation of my being-in-itself, I can seek to recover that freedom and to possess it without removing from it its character as freedom. In fact if I could identify myself with that freedom which is the foundation of my being-in-itself, I should be to myself my own foundation. To transcend the Other’s transcendence, or, on the contrary, to incorporate that transcendence within me without removing from it its character as transcendence—such are the two primitive attitudes which I assume confronting the Other. Here again we must understand the words exactly. It is not true that I first am and then later “seek” to make an object of the Other or to assimilate him; but to the extent that the upsurge of my being is an upsurge in the presence of the Other, to the extent that I am a pursuing flight and a pursued-pursuing, I am—at the very root of my being—the project of assimilating and making an object of the Other. I am the proof of the Other. That is the original fact. But this proof of the Other is in itself an attitude toward the Other; that is, I can not be in the presence of the Other without being that “in-the-presence” in the form of having to be it. Thus again we are describing the for-itself’s structures of being although the Other’s presence in the world is an absolute and self-evident fact, but a contingent fact—that is, a fact impossible to deduce from the ontological structures of the for-itself.
These two attempts which I am are opposed to one another. Each attempt is the death of the other; that is, the failure of the one motivates the adoption of the other. Thus there is no dialectic for my relations toward the Other but rather a circle—although each attempt is enriched by the failure of the other. Thus we shall study each one in turn. But it should be noted that at the very core of the one the other remains always present, precisely because neither of the two can be held without contradiction. Better yet, each of them is in the other and endangers the death of the other. Thus we can never get outside the circle. We must not forget these facts as we approach the study of these fundamental attitudes toward the Other. Since these attitudes are produced and destroyed in a circle, it is as arbitrary to begin with the one as with the other. Nevertheless since it is necessary to choose, we shall consider first the conduct in which the for-itself tries to assimilate the Other’s freedom.
Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me. We are by no means dealing with unilateral relations with an object-in-itself, but with reciprocal and moving relations. The following descriptions of concrete behavior must therefore be envisaged within the perspective of conflict. Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.
If we start with the first revelation of the Other as a look, we must recognize that we experience our inapprehensible being-for-others in the form of a possession. I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret—the secret of what I am. He makes me be and thereby he possess me, and this possession is nothing other than the consciousness of possessing me. I in the recognition of my object-state have proof that he has this consciousness. By virtue of consciousness the Other is for me simultaneously the one who has stolen my being from me and the one who causes “there to be” a being which is my being. Thus I have a comprehension of this ontological structure: I am responsible for my being-for-others, but I am not the foundation of it. It appears to me therefore in the form of a contingent given for which I am nevertheless responsible; the Other founds my being in so far as this being is in the form of the “there is.” But he is not responsible for my being although he founds it in complete freedom—in and by means of his free transcendence. Thus to the extent that I am revealed to myself as responsible for my being, I lay claim to this being which I am; that is, I wish to recover it, or, more exactly, I am the project of the recovery of my being. I want to stretch out my hand and grab hold of this being which is presented to me as my being but at a distance—like the dinner of Tantalus; I want to found it by my very freedom. For if in one sense my being-as-object is an unbearable contingency and the pure “possession” of myself by another, still in another sense this being stands as the indication of what I should be obliged to recover and found in order to be the foundation of myself. But this is conceivable only if I assimilate the Other’s freedom. Thus my project of recovering myself is fundamentally a project of absorbing the Other.
Nevertheless this project must leave the Other’s nature intact. Two consequences result: (1) I do not thereby cease to assert the Other—that is, to deny concerning myself that I am the Other. Since the Other is the foundation of my being, he could not be dissolved in me without my being-for-others disappearing. Therefore if I project the realization of unity with the Other, this means that I project my assimilation of the Other’s Otherness as my own possibility. In fact the problem for me is to make myself be by acquiring the possibility of taking the Other’s point of view on myself. It is not a matter of acquiring a pure, abstract faculty of knowledge. It is not the pure category of the Other which I project appropriating to myself. This category is not conceived nor even conceivable. But on the occasion of concrete experience with the Other, an experience suffered and realized, it is this concrete Other as an absolute reality whom in his otherness I wish to incorporate into myself. (2) The Other whom I wish to assimilate is by no means the Other-as-object. Or, if you prefer, my project of incorporating the Other in no way corresponds to a recapturing of my for-itself as myself and to a surpassing of the Other’s transcendence toward my own possibilities. For me it is not a question of obliterating my object-state by making an object of the Other, which would amount to releasing myself from my being-for-others. Quite the contrary, I want to assimilate the Other as the Other-looking-at-me, and this project of assimilation includes an augmented recognition of my being-looked-at. In short, in order to maintain before me the Other’s freedom which is looking at me, I identify myself totally with my being-looked-at. And since my being-as-object is the only possible relation between me and the Other, it is this being-as-object which alone can serve me as an instrument to effect my assimilation of the other freedom.
Thus as a reaction to the failure of the third ekstasis, the for-itself wishes to be identified with the Other’s freedom as founding its own being-in-itself. To be other to oneself—the ideal always aimed at concretely in the form of being this Other to oneself—is the primary value of my relations with the Other. This means that my being-for-others is haunted by the indication of an absolute-being which would he itself as other and other as itself and which by freely giving to itself its being-itself as other and its being-other as itself, would be the very being of the ontological proof—that is, God. This ideal can not be realized without my surmounting the original contingency of my relations to the Other; that is, by overcoming the fact that there is no relation of internal negativity between the negation by which the Other is made other than I and the negation by which I am made other than the Other. We have seen that this contingency is insurmountable; it is the fact of my relations with the Other, just as my body is the fact of my being-in-the-world. Unity with the Other is therefore in fact unrealizable. It is also unrealizable in theory, for the assimilation of the for-itself and the Other in a single transcendence would necessarily involve the disappearance of the characteristic of otherness in the Other. Thus the condition on which I project the identification of myself with the Other is that I persist in denying that I am the Other. Finally this project of unification is the source of conflict since while I experience myself as an object for the Other and while I project assimilating him in and by means of this experience, the Other apprehends me as an object in the midst of the world and does not project identifying me with himself. It would therefore be necessary—since being-for-others includes a double internal negation—to act upon the internal negation by which the Other transcends my transcendence and makes me exist for the Other; that is, to act upon the Other’s freedom.
This unrealizable ideal which haunts my project of myself in the presence of the Other is not to be identified with love in so far as love is an enterprise; i.e., an organic ensemble of projects toward my own possibilities. But it is the ideal of love, its motivation and its end, its unique value. Love as the primitive relation to the Other is the ensemble of the projects by which I aim at realizing this value.
These projects put me in direct connection with the Other’s freedom. It is in this sense that love is a conflict. We have observed that the Other’s freedom is the foundation of my being. But precisely because I exist by means of the Other’s freedom, I have no security; I am in danger in this freedom. It moulds my being and makes me be, it confers values upon me and removes them from me; and my being receives from it a perpetual passive escape from self. Irresponsible and beyond reach, this protean freedom in which I have engaged myself can in turn engage me in a thousand different ways of being. My project of recovering my being can he realized only if I get hold of this freedom and reduce it to being a freedom subject to my freedom. At the same time it is the only way in which I can act on the free negation of interiority by which the Other constitutes me as an Other; that is the only way in which I can prepare the way for a future identification of the Other with me. This will be clearer perhaps if we study the problem from a purely psychological aspect. Why does the lover want to be loved? If Love were in fact a pure desire for physical possession, it could in many cases be easily satisfied. Proust’s hero, for example, who installs his mistress in his home, who can see her and possess her at any hour of the day, who has been able to make her completely dependent on him economically, ought to be free from worry. Yet we know that he is, on the contrary, continually gnawed by anxiety. Through her consciousness Albertine escapes Marcel even when he is at her side, and that is why he knows relief only when he gazes on her while she sleeps. It is certain then that the lover wishes to capture a “consciousness.” But why does he wish it? And how?
The notion of “ownership,” by which love is so often explained, is not actually primary. Why should I want to appropriate the Other if it were not precisely that the Other makes me be? But this implies precisely a certain mode of appropriation; it is the Other’s freedom as such that we want to get hold of. Not because of a desire for power. The tyrant scorns love, he is content with fear. If he seeks to win the love of his subjects, it is for political reasons; and if he finds a more economical way to enslave them, he adopts it immediately. On the other hand, the man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not bent on becoming the object of passion which flows forth mechanically. He does not want to possess an automaton, and if we want to humiliate him, we need only try to persuade him that the beloved’s passion is the result of a psychological determinism. The lover will then feel that both his love and his being are cheapened. If Tristan and Isolde fall madly in love because of a love potion, they are less interesting. The total enslavement of the beloved kills the love of the lover. The end is surpassed; if the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone. Thus the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing; he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom.
On the other hand, the lover can not be satisfied with that superior form of freedom which is a free and voluntary engagement. Who would be content with a love given as pure loyalty to a sworn oath? Who would be satisfied with the words, “I love you because I have freely engaged myself to love you and because I do not wish to go back on my word.” Thus the lover demands a pledge, yet is irritated by a pledge. He wants to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free. He wishes that the Other’s freedom should determine itself to become love—and this not only at the beginning of the affair but at each instant—and at the same time he wants this freedom to be captured by itself to turn back upon itself, as in madness, as in a dream, so as to will its own captivity. This captivity must be a resignation that is both free and yet chained in our hands. In love it is not a determinism of the passions which we desire in the Other nor a freedom beyond reach; it is a freedom which plays the role of a determinism of the passions and which is caught in its own role. For himself the lover does not demand that he be the cause of this radical modification of freedom but that he be the unique and privileged occasion of it. In fact he could not want to be the cause of it without immediately submerging the beloved in the midst of the world as a tool which can be transcended. That is not the essence of love. On the contrary, in Love the Lover wants to be “the whole World” for the beloved. This means that he puts himself on the side of the world; he is the one who assumes and symbolizes the world; he is a this which includes all other thises. He is and consents to be an object. But on the other hand, he wants to be the object in which the Other’s freedom consents to lose itself, the object in which the Other consents to find his being and his raison d’ëtre as his second facticity—the object-limit of transcendence, that toward which the Other’s transcendence transcends all other objects but which it can in no way transcend. And everywhere he desires the circle of the Other’s freedom; that is, at each instant as the Other’s freedom accepts this limit to his transcendence, this acceptance is already present as the motivation of the acceptance considered. It is in the capacity of an end already chosen that the lover wishes to be chosen as an end. This allows us to grasp what basically the lover demands of the beloved; he does not want to act on the Other’s freedom but to exist a priori as the objective limit of this freedom; that is, to be given at one stroke along with it and in its very upsurge as the limit which the freedom must accept in order to be free. By this very fact, what he demands is a liming, a gluing down of the Other’s freedom by itself; this limit of structure is in fact a given, and the very appearance of the given as the limit of freedom means that the freedom makes itself exist within the given by being its own prohibition against surpassing it. This prohibition is envisaged by the lover simultaneously as something lived—that is, something suffered (in a word, as a facticity) and as something freely consented to. It must be freely consented to since it must be effected only with the upsurge of a freedom which chooses itself as freedom. But it must be only what is lived since it must be an impossibility always present, a facticity which surges back to the heart of the Other’s freedom. This is expressed psychologically by the demand that the free decision to love me, which the beloved formerly has taken, must slip in as a magically determining motivation within his present free engagement.
Now we can grasp the meaning of this demand, the facticity which is to be a factual limit for the Other in my demand to be loved and which is to result in being his own facticity—this is my facticity. It is in so far as I am the object which the Other makes come into being that I must be the inherent limit to his very transcendence. Thus the Other by his upsurge into being makes me be as unsurpassable and absolute, not as a nihilating For-itself but as a being-for-others-in-the-midst-of-the-world. Thus to want to be loved is to infect the Other with one’s own facticity; it is to wish to compel him to recreate you perpetually as the condition of a freedom which submits itself and which is engaged; it is to wish both that freedom found fact and that fact have pre-eminence over freedom. If this end could be attained, it would result in the first place in my being secure within the Other’s consciousness. First because the motive of my uneasiness and my shame is the fact that I apprehend and experience myself in my being-for-others as that which can always be surpassed towards something else, that which is the pure object of a value judgment, a pure means, a pure tool. My uneasiness stems from the fact that I assume necessarily and freely that being which another makes me be in an absolute freedom. “God knows what I am for him! God knows what he thinks of me!” This means “God knows what he makes me be.” I am haunted by this being which I fear to encounter someday at the turn of a path, this being which is so strange to me and which is yet my being and which I know that I shall never encounter in spite of all my efforts to do so. But if the Other loves me then I become the unsurpassable, which means that I must be the absolute end. In this sense I am saved from instrumentality. My existence in the midst of the world becomes the exact correlate of my transcendence-for-myself since my independence is absolutely safeguarded. The object which the Other must make me be is an object-transcendence, an absolute center of reference around which all the instrumental-things of the world are ordered as pure means. At the same time, as the absolute limit of freedom—i.e., of the absolute source of all values—I am protected against any eventual devalorization. I am the absolute value. To the extent that I assume my being-for-others, I assume myself as value. Thus to want to be loved is to want to be placed beyond the whole system of values posited by the Other and to be the condition of all valorization and the objective foundation of all values. This demand is the usual theme of lovers’ conversations, whether as in La Porte Etroite, the woman who wants to be loved identifies herself with an ascetic morality of self-surpassing and wishes to embody the ideal limit of this surpassing—or as more usually happens, the woman in love demands that the beloved in his acts should sacrifice traditional morality for her and is anxious to know whether the beloved would betray his friends for her, “would steal for her,” “would kill for her,” etc.
From this point of view, my being must escape the look of the beloved, or rather it must be the object of a look with another structure. I must no longer be seen on the ground of the world as a “this” among other “thises,” but the world must be revealed in terms of me. In fact to the extent that the upsurge of freedom makes a world exist, I must be, as the limiting-condition of this upsurge, the very condition of the upsurge of a world. I must be the one whose function is to make trees and water exist’ to make cities and fields and other men exist, in order to give them later to the Other who arranges them into a world, just as the mother in matrilineal communities receives titles and the family name not to keep them herself but to transfer them immediately to her children. In one sense if I am to be loved, I am the object through whose procuration the world will exist for the Other; in another sense I am the world. Instead of being a “this” detaching itself on the ground of the world, I am the ground-as-object on which the world detaches itself. Thus I am reassured; the Other’s look no longer paralyzes me with finitude. It no longer fixes my being in what I am. I can no longer be looked at as ugly, as small, as cowardly, since these characteristics necessarily represent a factual limitation of my being and an apprehension of my finitude as finitude. To be sure, my possibles remain transcended possibilities, dead-possibilities; but I possess all possibles. I am all the dead-possibilities in the world; hence I cease to be the being who is understood from the standpoint of other beings or of its acts. In the loving intuition which I demand, I am to be given as an absolute totality in terms of which all its peculiar acts and all beings are to be understood. One could say, slightly modifying a famous pronouncement of the Stoics, that “the beloved can fail in three ways.”1 The ideal of the sage and the ideal of the man who wants to beloved actually coincide in this that both want to be an object-as-totality accessible to a global intuition which will apprehend the beloved’s or the sage’s actions in the world as partial structures which are interpreted in terms of the totality. Just as wisdom is proposed as a state to be attained by an absolute metamorphosis, so the Other’s freedom must be absolutely metamorphosed in order to allow me to attain the state of being loved.
Up to this point our description would fall into line with Hegel’s famous description of the Master and Slave relation. What the Hegelian Master is for the Slave, the lover wants to be for the beloved. But the analogy stops here, for with Hegel the master demands the Slave’s freedom only laterally and, so to speak, implicitly, while the lover wants the beloved’s freedom first and foremost. In this sense if I am to be loved by the Other, this means that I am to be freely chosen as beloved. As we know, in the current terminology of love, the beloved is often called the chosen one. But this choice must not be relative and contingent. The lover is irritated and feels himself cheapened when he thinks that the beloved has chosen him from among others. “Then if I had not come into a certain city, if I had not visited the home of so and so, you would never have known me, you wouldn’t have loved me?” This thought grieves the lover; his love becomes one love among others and is limited by the beloved’s facticity and by his own facticity as well as by the contingency of encounters. It becomes love in the world, an object which presupposes the world and which in turn can exist for others. What he is demanding he expresses by the awkward and vitiated phrases of “fatalism.” He says, “We were made for each other,” or again he uses the expression “soul mate.” But we must translate all this. The lover knows very well that “being made for each other” refers to an original choice. This choice can be God’s, since he is the being who is absolute choice, but God here represents only the farthest possible limit of the demand for an absolute. Actually what the lover demands is that the beloved should make of him an absolute choice. This means that the beloved’s being-in-the-world must be a being-as-loving. The upsurge of the beloved must be the beloved’s free choice of the lover. And since the Other is the foundation of my being-as-object, I demand of him that the free upsurge of his being should have his choice of me as his unique and absolute end; that is, that he should choose to be for the sake of founding my object-state and my facticity.
Thus my facticity is saved. It is no longer this unthinkable and insurmountable given which I am fleeing; it is that for which the Other freely makes himself exist; it is as an end which he has given to himself. I have infected him with my facticity, but as it is in the form of freedom that he has been infected with it’ he refers it back to me as a facticity taken up and consented to. He is the foundation of it in order that it may be his end. By means of this love I then have a different apprehension of my alienation and of my own facticity. My facticity—as for-others—is no longer a fact but a right. My existence is because it is given a name. I am because I give myself away. These beloved veins on my hands exist—beneficently. How good I am to have eyes, hair, eyebrows and to lavish them away tirelessly in an overflow of generosity to this tireless desire which the Other freely makes himself be. Whereas before being loved we were uneasy about that unjustified, unjustifiable protuberance which was our existence, whereas we felt ourselves “de trop,” we now feel that out existence is taken up and willed even in its tiniest details by an absolute freedom which at the same time our existence conditions and which we ourselves will with our freedom. This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy: we feel that our existence is justified.
By the same token if the beloved can love us, he is wholly ready to be assimilated by our freedom; for this being-loved which we desire is already the ontological proof applied to our being-for-others. Our objective essense implies the existence of the Other, and conversely it is the Other’s freedom which founds our essence. If we could manage to interiorize the whole system, we should be our own foundation.
Such then is the real goal of the lover in so far as his love is an enterprise—i.e., a project of himself. This project is going to provoke a conflict. The beloved in fact apprehends the lover as one Other-as-object among others; that is, he perceives the lover on the ground of the world, transcends him, and utilizes him. The beloved is a look. He can not therefore employ his transcendence to fix an ultimate limit to his surpassings, nor can he employ his freedom to captivate itself. The beloved can not will to love. Therefore the lover must seduce the beloved, and his love can in no way be distinguished from the enterprise of seduction. In seduction I do not try to reveal my subjectivity to the Other. Moreover I could do so only by looking at the other; but by this look I should cause the Other’s subjectivity to disappear, and it is exactly this which I want to assimilate. To seduce is to risk assuming my object-state completely for the Other; it is to put myself beneath his look and to make him look at me; it is to risk the danger of being-seen in order to effect a new departure and to appropriate the Other in and by means of my object-ness. I refuse to leave the level on which I make proof of my object-ness; it is on this level that I wish to engage in battle by making myself a fascinating object. In Part Two we defined fascination as a state. It is, we said, the non-thetic consciousness of being nothing in the presence of being. Seduction aims at producing in the Other the consciousness of his state of nothingness as he confronts the seductive object. By seduction I aim at constituting myself as a fullness of being and at making myself recognized as such. To accomplish this I constitute myself as a meaningful object. My acts must point in two directions: On the one hand, toward that which is wrongly called subjectivity and which is rather a depth of objective and hidden being; the act is not performed for itself only, but it points to an infinite, undifferentiated series of other real and possible acts which I give as constituting my objective, unperceived being. Thus I try to guide the transcendence which transcends me and to refer it to the infinity of my dead-possibilities precisely in order to be the unsurpassable and to the exact extent to which the only unsurpassable is the infinite. On the other hand, each of my acts tries to point to the great density of possible-world and must present me as bound to the vastest regions of the world. At the same time I present the world to the beloved, and I try to constitute myself as the necessary intermediary between her and the world; I manifest by my acts infinitely varied examples of my power over the world (money, position, “connections,” etc.). In the first case I try to constitute myself as an infinity of depth, in the second case to identify myself with the world. Through these different procedures I propose myself as unsurpassable. This proposal could not be sufficient in itself; it is only a besieging of the Other. It can not take on value as fact without the consent of the Other’s freedom, which I must capture by making it recognize itself as nothingness in the face of my plenitude of absolute being.
Someone may observe that these various attempts at expression presuppose language. We shall not disagree with this. But we shall say rather that they are language or, if you prefer, a fundamental mode of language. For while psychological and historical problems exist with regard to the existence, the learning and the use of a particular language, there is no special problem concerning what is called the discovery or invention of language. Language is not a phenomenon added on to being-for-others. It is originally being-for-others; that is, it is the fact that a subjectivity experiences itself as an object for the Other. In a universe of pure objects language could under no circumstances have been “invented” since it presupposes an original relation to another subject. In the intersubjectivity of the for-others, it is not necessary to invent language because it is already given in the recognition of the Other. I am language. By the sole fact that whatever I may do, my acts freely conceived and executed, my projects launched toward my possibilities have outside of them a meaning which escapes me and which I experience. It is in this sense—and in this sense only—that Heidegger is right in declaring that lam what I say.2 Language is not an instinct of the constituted human creature, nor is it an invention of our subjectivity. But neither does it need to be referred to the pure “being-outside-of-self” of the Dasein. It forms part of the human condition; it is originally the proof which a for-itself can make of its being for-others, and finally it is the surpassing of this proof and the utilization of it toward possibilities which are my possibilities; that is, toward my possibilities of being this or that for the Other. Language is therefore not distinct from the recognition of the Other’s existence. The Other’s upsurge confronting me as a look makes language arise as the condition of my being. This primitive language is not necessarily seduction; we shall see other forms of it. Moreover we have noted that there is another primitive attitude confronting the Other and that the two succeed each other in a circle, each implying the other. But conversely seduction does not presuppose any earlier form of language; it is the complete realization of language. This means that language can be revealed entirely and at one stroke by seduction as a primitive mode of being of expression. Of course by language we mean all the phenomena of expression and not the articulated word, which is a derived and secondary mode whose appearance can be made the object of an historical study. Especially in seduction language does not aim at giving to be known but at causing to experience.
But in this first attempt to find a fascinating language I proceed blindly since I am guided only by the abstract and empty form of my object-state for the Other. I can not even conceive what effect my gestures and attitudes will have since they will always be taken up and founded by a freedom which will surpass them and since they can have a meaning only if this freedom confers one on them. Thus the “meaning” of my expressions always escapes me. I never know exactly if I signify what I wish to signify nor even if I am signifying anything. It would be necessary that at the precise instant I should read in the Other what on principle is inconceivable. For lack of knowing what I actually express for the Other, I constitute my language as an incomplete phenomenon of flight outside myself. As soon as I express myself, I can only guess at the meaning of what I express—i.e., the meaning of what I am—since in this perspective to express and to be are one. The Other is always there, present and experienced as the one who gives to language its meaning. Each expression, each gesture, each word is on my side a concrete proof of the alienating reality of the Other. It is only the psychopath who can say, someone has stolen my thought“—as in cases of psychoses of influence, for example.3 The very fact of expression is a stealing of thought since thought needs the cooperation of an alienating freedom in order to be constituted as an object. That is why this first aspect of language—in so far as it is I who employ it for the Other—is sacred. The sacred object is an object which is in the world and which points to a transcendence beyond the world. Language reveals to me the freedom (the transcendence) of the one who listens to me in silence.
But at the same moment I remain for the Other a meaningful object—that which I have always been. There is no path which departing from my object-state can lead the Other to my transcendence. Attitudes, expressions, and words can only indicate to him other attitudes, other expressions, and other words. Thus language remains for him a simple property of a magical object—and this magical object itself. It is an action at a distance whose effect the Other exactly knows. Thus the word is sacred when I employ it and magic when the Other hears it. Thus I do not know my language any more than I know my body for the Other. I can not hear myself speak nor see myself smile. The problem of language is exactly parallel to the problem of bodies, and the description which is valid in one case is valid in the other.
Fascination, however, even if it were to produce a state of being-fascinated in the Other could not by itself succeed in producing love. We can be fascinated by an orator, by an actor, by a tightrope-walker, but this does not mean that we love him. To be sure we can not take our eyes off him, but he is still raised on the ground of the world, and fascination does not posit the fascinating object as the ultimate term of the transcendence. Quite the contrary, fascination is transcendence. When then will the beloved become in turn the lover?
The answer is easy: when the beloved projects being loved. By himself the Other-as-object never has enough strength to produce love. If love has for its ideal the appropriation of the Other qua Other (i.e., as a subjectivity which is looking at an object) this ideal can be projected only in terms of my encounter with the Other-as-subject, not with the Other-as-object. If the Other tries to seduce me by means of his object-state, then seduction can bestow upon the Other only the character of a precious object “to be possessed.” Seduction will perhaps determine me to risk much to conquer the Other-as-object, but this desire to appropriate an object in the midst of the world should not be confused with love. Love therefore can be born in the beloved only from the proof which he makes of his alienation and his flight toward the Other. Still the beloved, if such is the case, will be transformed into a lover only if he projects being loved; that is, if what he wishes to overcome is not a body but the Other’s subjectivity as such. In fact the only way that he could conceive to realize this appropriation is to make himself be loved. Thus it seems that to love is in essence the project of making oneself be loved. Hence this new contradiction and this new conflict: each of the lovers is entirely the captive of the Other inasmuch as each wishes to make himself loved by the Other to the exclusion of anyone else; but at the same time each one demands from the other a love which is not reducible to the “project of being-loved.” What he demands in fact is that the Other without originally seeking to make himself be loved should have at once a contemplative and affective intuition of his beloved as the objective limit of his freedom, as the ineluctable and chosen foundation of his transcendence, as the totality of being and the supreme value. Love thus exacted from the other could not ask for anything; it is a pure engagement without reciprocity. Yet this love can not exist except in the form of a demand on the part of the lover.
The lover is held captive in a wholly different way. He is the captive of his very demand since love is the demand to be loved; he is a freedom which wills itself a body and which demands an outside, hence a freedom which imitates the flight toward the Other, a freedom which qua freedom lays claim to its alienation. The lover’s freedom, in his very effort to make himself be loved as an object by the Other, is alienated by slipping into the body-for-others; that is, it is brought into existence with a dimension of flight toward the Other. It is the perpetual refusal to posit itself as pure selfness, for this affirmation of self as itself would involve the collapse of the Other as a look and the upsurge of the Other-as-object—hence a state of affairs in which the very possibility of being loved disappears since the Other is reduced to the dimension of objectivity. This refusal therefore constitutes freedom as dependent on the Other; and the Other as subjectivity becomes indeed an unsurpassable limit of the freedom of the for-itself, the goal and supreme end of the for-itself since the Other holds the key to its being. Here in fact we encounter the true ideal of love’s enterprise: alienated freedom. But it is the one who wants to be loved who by the mere fact of wanting someone to love him alienates his freedom.
My freedom is alienated in the presence of the Other’s pure subjectivity which founds my objectivity. It can never be alienated before the Other-as-object. In this form in fact the beloved’s alienation, of which the lover dreams, would be contradictory since the beloved can found the being of the lover only by transcending it on principle toward other objects of the world; therefore this transcendence can constitute the object which it surpasses both as a transcended object and as an object limit of all transcendence. Thus each one of the lovers wants to be the object for which the Other’s freedom is alienated in an original intuition; but this intuition which would be love in the true sense is only a contradictory ideal of the for-itself. Each one is alienated only to the exact extent to which he demands the alienation of the other. Each one wants the other to love him but does not take into account the fact that to love is to want to be loved and that thus by wanting the other to love him, he only wants the other to want to be loved in turn. Thus love relations are a system of indefinite reference—analogous to the pure “reflection-reflected” of consciousness—under the ideal standard of the value “love”; that is, in a fusion of consciousnesses in which each of them would preserve his otherness in order to found the other. This state of affairs is due to the fact that consciousnesses are separated by an insurmountable nothingness, a nothingness which is both the internal negation of the one by the other and a factual nothingness between the two internal negations. Love is a contradictory effort to surmount the factual negation while preserving the internal negation. I demand that the Other love me and I do everything possible to realize my project; but if the Other loves me, he radically deceives me by his very love. I demanded of him that he should found my being as a privileged object by maintaining himself as pure subjectivity confronting me; and as soon as he loves me he experiences me as subject and is swallowed up in his objectivity confronting my subjectivity.
The problem of my being-for-others remains therefore without solution. The lovers remain each one for himself in a total subjectivity; nothing comes to relieve them of their duty to make themselves exist each one for himself; nothing comes to relieve their contingency nor to save them from facticity. At least each one has succeeded in escaping danger from the Other’s freedom—but altogether differently than he expected. He escapes not because the Other makes him be as the object-limit of his transcendence but because the Other experiences him as subjectivity and wishes to experience him only as such. Again the gain is perpetually compromised. At the start, each of the consciousnesses can at any moment free itself from its chains and suddenly contemplate the other as an object. Then the spell is broken; the Other becomes one mean among means. He is indeed an object for-others as the lover desires but an object-as-tool, a perpetually transcended object. The illusion, the game of mirrors which makes the concrete reality of love, suddenly ceases. Later in the experience of love each consciousness seeks to shelter its being-for-others in the Other’s freedom. This supposes that the Other is beyond the world as pure subjectivity, as the absolute by which the world comes into being. But it suffices that the lovers should be looked at together by a third person in order for each one to experience not only his own objectivation but that of the other as well. Immediately the Other is no longer for me the absolute transcendence which founds me in my being; he is a transcendence-transcended, not by me but by another. My original relation to him—i.e., my relation of being the beloved for my lover, is fixed as a dead-possibility. It is no longer the experienced relation between a limiting object of all transcendence and the freedom which founds it; it is a love-as-object which is wholly alienated toward the third. Such is the true reason why lovers seek solitude. It is because the appearance of a third person, whoever he may be, is the destruction of their love. But factual solitude (e.g. we are alone in my room) is by no means a theoretical solitude. Even if nobody sees us, we exist for all consciousnesses and we are conscious of existing for all. The result is that love as a fundamental mode of being-for-others holds in its being-for-others the seed of its own destruction.
We have just defined the triple destructibility of love: in the first place it is, in essence, a deception and a reference to infinity since to love is to wish to be loved, hence to wish that the Other wish that I love him. A preontological comprehension of this deception is given in the very impulse of love—hence the lover’s perpetual dissatisfaction. It does not come, as is so often said, from the unworthiness of being loved but from an implicit comprehension of the fact that the amorous intuition is as a fundamental-intuition, an ideal out of reach. The more I am loved, the more I lose my being, the more I am thrown back on my own responsibilities, on my own power to be. In the second place the Other’s awakening is always possible; at any moment he can make me appear as an object—hence the lover’s perpetual insecurity In the third place love is an absolute which is perpetually made relative by others. One would have to be alone in the world with the beloved in order for love to preserve its character as an absolute axis of reference—hence the lover’s perpetual shame (or pride—which here amounts to the same thing).
Thus it is useless for me to have tried to lose myself in objectivity; my passion will have availed me nothing. The Other has referred me to my own unjustifiable subjectivity—either by himself or through others. This result can provoke a total despair and a new attempt to realize the identification of the Other and myself. Its ideal will then be the opposite of that which we have just described; instead of projecting the absorbing of the Other while preserving in him his otherness, I shall project causing myself to be absorbed by the Other and losing myself in his subjectivity in order to get rid of my own. This enterprise will be expressed concretely by the masochistic attitude. Since the Other is the foundation of my being-for-others, if I relied on the Other to make me exist, I should no longer he anything more than a being-in-itself founded in its being by a freedom. Here it is my own subjectivity which is considered as an obstacle to the primordial act by which the Other would found me in my being. It is my own subjectivity which above all must be denied by my own freedom. I attempt therefore to engage myself wholly in my being-as-object. I refuse to be anything more than an object. I rest upon the Other, and as I experience this being-as-object in shame, I will and I love my shame as the profound sign of my objectivity. As the Other apprehends me as object by means of actual desire, I wish to be desired, I make myself in shame an object of desire.
This attitude would resemble that of love if instead of seeking to exist for the Other as the object-limit of his transcendence, I did not rather insist on making myself be treated as one object among others, as an instrument to be used. Now it is my transcendence which is to be denied, not his. This time I do not have to project capturing his freedom; on the contrary I hope that this freedom may be and will itself to be radically free. Thus the more I shall feel myself surpassed toward other ends, the more I shall enjoy the abdication of my transcendence. Finally I project being nothing more than an object; that is, radically an in-itself. But inasmuch as a freedom which will have absorbed mine will be the foundation of this in-itself, my being will become again the foundation of itself. Masochism, like sadism, is the assumption of guilt. I am guilty due to the very fact that I am an object, I am guilty toward myself since I consent to my absolute alienation. I am guilty toward the Other, for I furnish him with the occasion of being guilty—that is, of radically missing my freedom as such. Masochism is an attempt not to fascinate the Other by means of my objectivity but to cause myself to be fascinated by my objectivity-for-others; that is, to cause myself to be constituted as an object by the Other in such a way that I non-thetically apprehend my subjectivity as a nothing in the presence of the in-itself which I represent to the Other’s eyes. Masochism is characterized as a species of vertigo, vertigo not before a precipice of rock and earth but before the abyss of the Other’s subjectivity.
But masochism is and must be itself a failure. In order to cause myself to be fascinated by my self-as-object, I should necessarily have to be able to realize the intuitive apprehension of this object such as it is for the Other, a thing which is on principle impossible. Thus I am far from being able to be fascinated by this alienated Me, which remains on principle inapprehensible. It is useless for the masochist to get down on his knees, to show himself in ridiculous positions, to cause himself to be used as a simple lifeless instrument. It is for the Other that he will be obscene or simply passive, for the Other that he will undergo these postures; for himself he is forever condemned to give them to himself. It is in and through his transcendence that he disposes of himself as a being to be transcended. The more he tries to taste his objectivity, the more he will be submerged by the consciousness of his subjectivity—hence his anguish. Even the masochist who pays a woman to whip him is treating her as an instrument and by this very fact posits himself in transcendence in relation to her.
Thus the masochist ultimately treats the Other as an object and transcends him toward his own objectivity. Recall, for example, the tribulations of Sacher Masoch, who in order to make himself scorned, insulted, reduced to a humiliating position, was obliged to make use of the great love which women bore toward him; that is, to act upon them just in so far as they experienced themselves as an object for him. Thus in every way the masochist’s objectivity escapes him, and it can even happen—in fact usually does happen—that in seeking to apprehend his own objectivity he finds the Other’s objectivity, which in spite of himself frees his own subjectivity. Masochism therefore is on principle a failure. This should not surprise us if we realize that masochism is a “vice” and that vice is, on principle, the love of failure. But this is not the place to describe the structures peculiar to vice. It is sufficient here to point out that masochism is a perpetual effort to annihilate the subject’s subjectivity by causing it to be assimilated by the Other; this effort is accompanied by the exhausting and delicious consciousness of failure so that finally it is the failure itself which the subject ultimately seeks as his principal goal.
1 Literally, “can tumble three times.” Tr.
2 This formulation of Heidegger’s position is that of A. de Waehlens. La philosophic de Martin Heidegger. Louvain, 1942, p. 99.Cf also Heidegger’s text, which he quotes: “Diese Bezeugung meint nicht hier einen nachträglichen und bei her laufenden Ausdruck des Menschseins, sonder sie macht das Dasein des Menschen mit usw. (Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung, p. 6.)
(“This affirmation does not mean here an additional and supplementary expression of human existence, but it does in the process make plain the existence of man.” Douglas Scott’s translation. Existence and Being, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949, p. 297.)
3 Furthermore the psychosis of influence, like the majority of psychoses, is a special experience translated by myths, of a great metaphysical fact—here the fact of alienation. Even a madman in his own way realizes the human condition.