part0017

I am ‘alone’ in my study right now, looking out of the window for the inspiration to start this chapter. A cocky, bearded, red-faced guy in a tweed flat cap struts down the street and looks up at me looking out of the window. So I look down at him looking up at me and we form prejudiced opinions about each other and feel slightly annoyed that we are being looked at. We are always being looked at, and even when we are not we often feel we are, so pervasive is the existence of other people in our lives.

Existentialists recognise that the existence of other people is one of the inescapable truths of the human condition. In fact, they argue that the existence of others is so fundamental to our own existence that an important part of what we are exists for others, exists in relation to others, exists to be shaped by others and so on. They call this our being-for-others .

Even the recluse or hermit who takes to living in the middle of nowhere to get away from everyone still inhabits a world where others exist. She may occasionally have to come into contact with others to obtain the basic supplies she needs to live, and even if she has become totally self-sufficient it was not always so. Doubtless her so-called self-sufficiency will be based on having once collected tools and materials manufactured by others without which she could not survive. Robinson Crusoe survived alone on his island for years but only because he was able to salvage from the wreck of his ship many essentials that other people had produced, from knives, hatchets, guns and ammunition to rope, nails, barrels and biscuits.

Every so-called self-sufficient adult was once a totally dependent child, and, to state the obvious, our very entry into the world involves an intimate biological relationship with another person. Even when we are alone other people tend to be in our thoughts. We miss them and think about what we would say to them if they were present, or we regret what we said to them or they said to us last time we spoke and feel embarrassed or angry about it.

As we have seen, each person is a being-for-itself; a unique, embodied point of view on the world with her own intentions, goals and values. Each person is a free transcendence striving against the facticity of the world to fulfil herself through her choices and actions. But each person, each transcendence, is also an object for other people; a being at the mercy of the look, the intentions, the evaluations, the transcendence of other people .

In simply being conscious of me, other people force me to be what I am for them. I may revel in their opinion of me if it is positive, even if I know it to be false. If it is a negative opinion, as it often is, I am likely to want to alter it or to convince myself that its holder is of no account. I may even seek to escape their opinion altogether by creating myself anew so that it is no longer an opinion that applies to me. All these means aim essentially at the reassertion of my own free transcendence over the free transcendence of other people. Let’s look at all this more closely.

Not every feature of our conscious existence can be accounted for simply in terms of being-for-itself. Certain key features of our conscious existence are essentially Other related ; they belong to our being-for-others. One of the most familiar Other related feature of ourselves, one which we experience or feel in danger of experiencing every day of our lives, one which few people could honestly claim never to have experienced, is embarrassment .

Embarrassment is for consciousness, and a person is embarrassed in so far as she is conscious of being embarrassed. However, although embarrassment very much characterises the self of the person suffering it, a person does not realise embarrassment for herself and by herself. Embarrassment requires a direct apprehension of another person (the Other) as a conscious being who sees her and judges her. Embarrassment requires self-reflection. It is, after all, an uncomfortably acute form of self-consciousness. Primarily, however, it is embarrassment before somebody .

A person can, of course, experience embarrassment when alone, but such private embarrassment always refers back to others. A person can become embarrassed by her recollection of an encounter with another, even if she did not think to be embarrassed at the time. A person can become embarrassed wondering if perhaps she was seen doing an improper thing. A person can become embarrassed simply by imagining how awful it would be to be caught in flagrante delicto . To understand what is involved in being seen and judged, as an experience that is not merely comprehended but lived and suffered, is to understand the meaning and significance of being-for-others.

Human beings are objects. They have bodies, objects that are externally related to other objects and which are affected by the same physical determinants that affect all objects. However, although human beings are objects and the Other is a human being, it is not as an object that the Other is originally revealed to me as Other. So how is the Other revealed to me?

It is useful to begin with an example in which the Other does not encounter me. An example in which I simply see another person who does not see me. This example outlines certain structures that help elucidate the case we are most interested in, the case of being encountered by the Other. I see a woman on an otherwise empty beach. Immediately, my awareness of the woman’s presence on the beach affects my situation. The woman’s appearance constitutes the start of the disintegration of the world from my own point of view. Suddenly, the situation, which was mine to evaluate as I wished, contains a new source of values which are not mine and which escape me. I am decentralised by the appearance of the Other.

The reorientation of the world towards the woman, the fact that meanings unknown to me flow in her direction, constitutes her as a drain hole down which my own world flows. The term ‘drain hole’ in this context is borrowed from Sartre and is perhaps his least flattering way of describing the Other. ‘Rather it appears that the world has a kind of drain hole in the middle of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off through this hole’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 279).

It is because the Other is this drain hole that a person enjoying solitude in the wilds will feel annoyed when she sees another person, even if that other person does not see her. The very appearance of another person prevents her from playing God. She ceases to be the centre and sole judge of all she surveys because a source of re-evaluation has appeared on the scene to steal the world away from her and with it her glorious, godlike supremacy. Have you ever felt that a tranquil woodland path with one stranger walking towards you, or walking behind you, or even walking ahead of you and oblivious of you, was more crowded than Piccadilly Circus?

So far, the woman on ‘my’ beach is still only a special kind of object. Although she is a drain hole in my world and a threat to the centralisation I bring about, she remains an object in my world. However, that I recognise her as a threat to my centralisation suggests that there are occasions when this threat is realised; occasions when the Other effects a radical reorientation of my being.

The existentialists insist that the mere gaze of the Other fixes me as an object in the world of the Other. As an object for the Other I am a transcendence-transcended by the transcendence of the Other. I cease to exist primarily as a free subject for myself and exist instead primarily as an un-free object for others. As with many aspects of existentialist theory, this radical reorientation is best explained with a concrete example to which we can all relate.

CCTV and the internet can now make petty, immoral acts, that in the past people tended to get away with, into world-wide media sensations. So, beware how you conduct yourself on all occasions, there is a good chance the Big Brother Other is watching you. The example I’m thinking of is that of an English woman who in 2010 was caught on CCTV throwing a friendly young cat called Lola into a wheelie bin. The footage has been viewed millions of times on websites such as YouTube and will be viewed millions of times more in the future. Cruelty to cats is a terrible thing but the hatred and censure the woman has endured and will continue to endure is out of proportion to her crime, precisely because she is destined to commit her crime ad infinitum and to be condemned ad infinitum .

People who have done worse things to animals are still walking about with their heads held high, either because the cruelty they displayed was more socially acceptable, like fox hunting or dog fighting, or because it was not caught on CCTV. I knew of someone who threw a live hamster onto a fire, but as this was never filmed they probably go about today thinking of themselves as a good person.

The woman claims that to this day she has no idea why she put the cat in the wheelie bin, and my purpose here is not to psychoanalyse her motives. Perhaps she had a grudge against the owners or was having a bad morning. Perhaps she did it simply because she was free to do so and wanted to assert that freedom. What concerns us here is not her motives but the radical reorientation of her being that occurred the instant she knew she was exposed.

During her crime and for a blissfully ignorant period afterwards she remained a free transcendence. Certainly, during her crime, as a subject absorbed in what she was doing, she did not judge herself. She knew in a general sense that what she was doing was wrong, that others would consider it so, but at the time of acting she did not pass this judgement of wrongness upon herself because she was too wrapped up in the thrill of the moment to really see herself from an external point of view.

She did not know her actions, she was them. She freely transcended the meaning of her act even as she performed it and did not have to define herself as petty and spiteful. Later on, if she reflected on her act, she perhaps avoided branding herself as petty and spiteful by telling herself that her act was simply an aberration or a self-dare, a meaningless distraction with no bearing on her character or morals. Perhaps she told herself that a person’s present self cannot be held responsible for past conduct. Indulging in bad faith she might have reasoned that she had already ceased to be the person she was.

Suddenly, however, the footage is on the news or the police are at the door. What ghastly self-realisation and profound mortification she must have suffered in that first moment, the echoes of which will never die away for her. How she must have wished that her crime was less pathetic and ridiculous, something less embarrassing with more kudos, like theft or murder.

What she did, what she is, is now revealed to the Other and thereby very painfully to herself. All at once, her act, which for her had little or no meaning, has escaped her and acquired vast meaning for the Other. It now belongs to the Other for whom she has become an object of perpetual contempt. Her freedom is enslaved by the freedom of the Other. In catching her in the act the Other has caught her freedom, transcended her transcendence, and is at liberty to judge her and inflict meanings upon her: mean, mad, monstrous, misguided, a crusader against the feline menace.

In the mode of being-for-itself the self is precisely not an object. As a negation of being it is founded upon a being that it is not. It is not in the world as objects are but as a transcendence. Heidegger refers to this way of being as being-in-the-world . Being-in-the-world refers to a person’s being for herself as a being that constantly projects herself beyond the world, beyond the present, towards her possibilities. For herself, a person is not a thing alongside other things. She is not in being. Rather, she is that which freely transcends being towards the future. Being-in-the-world refers to the transcendent aspect of her being.

The self, however, has another mode of being that Heidegger refers to as being-in-the-midst-of-the-world . Being-in-the-midst-of-the-world refers to a person’s presence in the world as an object amongst other objects. Here, as in the case of the cat woman, her free transcendence is transcended by the Other and she becomes a thing alongside other things. She is still her possibilities, but these possibilities are now a given fact for the Other. They belong also to the Other and are subject to the Other’s judgement. This mode of being corresponds to a person’s being-for-others and is realised when she experiences herself as seen by the Other or when she regards herself from the point of view of the Other.

When a person experiences herself as seen by the Other she immediately ceases to be a transcendent subject, a pure point of view upon the world, and becomes instead an object in the midst of the world seen from the point of view of the Other. Importantly, to experience herself as an object for the Other is to experience the Other as a subject. It is this direct and unmediated experience of herself as an object for the Other’s subjectivity that reveals the Other to her as Other.

She experiences the Other through the immediate negation of her own transcendent subjectivity by the transcendent subjectivity of the Other. To experience the Other is for a person to exist her own being as a transcendence-transcended. ‘The other as a look is only that – my transcendence transcended’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 287).

A person’s being-for-others is very much a being that she is, but she is it over there, for the Other, in so far as the Other is free to interpret and evaluate her actions at will. A person’s being-for-others constitutes a whole range of (her) possibilities, but they are alienated possibilities. They are not possibilities that she maintains and controls through her own transcendence, but possibilities fixed by the transcendence of the Other.

Embarrassment is one way in which being-for-others is revealed existentially, but alongside embarrassment can be listed such related phenomena as shame, guilt and paranoia. Being-for-others, however, is not limited to these unpleasant states of being. Being-for-others also accounts for pleasant states such as feeling proud, flattered or indulged. Pleasure is gained here precisely because a person makes herself an object for the Other.

In making herself an object for the Other she enjoys relinquishing responsibility for her free transcendence; a responsibility that, as we have seen, may well be a source of anxiety. She may also take pleasure in reflecting on the pleasing object that she is for the Other. Interestingly, existentialists argue that the basis of the masochist’s pleasure is that he or she is a sexualised object for the Other. Being-for-other is, not surprisingly, an integral aspect of sexual relationships and sexual desire. Sexual desire is explored in Chapter 15.

It is important to note that the look of the Other does not permanently render a person an object for the Other. It is not the case that when the Other has transcended her transcendence she remains a transcendence permanently transcended. A person can also become Other for the Other by recovering her transcendence, thereby reducing the Other to an object. This is certainly the case in genuine interpersonal relationships where a person will find the opportunity to recover her transcendence. Indeed, if the Other is at all well disposed towards her this recovery will be positively encouraged.

It appears, however, that there are some relationships where a recovery of subjectivity appears to be impossible. In the relationship between a person and a CCTV camera, for example, a stable situation exists in which there is no possibility of returning the look the camera gives. The transcendence of a person’s transcendence by a camera cannot be reversed; a person cannot become Other for the Other and so regain her transcendence. It is not possible to outstare a camera. And when the power of the internet to broadcast CCTV images ad nauseam humiliates a person ad nauseam the transcendence is even more of an irreversible one-way street. It is an utter, ceaseless, irrecoverable objectification.

Technology aside, if we can put it aside, existentialists tend to characterise ordinary interpersonal relations as a ceaseless, irresolvable power struggle. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Sartre, for example, are certainly of the opinion that conflict is the essence of all human relationships. Conflict may involve a struggle to dominate the transcendence of the Other and render it a transcendence-transcended. This is the most familiar form of power struggle. Alternatively, for masochists, it will involve conflict over who gets to be dominated, but more of that in Chapter 15.

Sartre’s vision of hell, as depicted in his most famous play, In Camera (also called Behind Closed Doors or No Exit ), is simply three people trapped forever in a drawing room endlessly seeking to justify themselves and get the better of each other. The play progresses through mounting conflict towards Sartre’s damning conclusion, possibly the most famous lines he ever wrote, ‘There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people!’ (In Camera , p. 223).

The triangle of love and hate that the three characters in the play form is loosely based on the emotionally charged ménage à trois involving Sartre, de Beauvoir and Russian born Olga Kosakiewicz. Olga was a beautiful, intelligent, proud and capricious young woman who had been a student of Simone de Beauvoir’s in Rouen in the early 1930s. Sartre and de Beauvoir decided early on that their unique personal and intellectual relationship constituted a ‘necessary love’ that could tolerate and even benefit from the ‘contingent love’ of their various affairs. The passions that Olga stirred in both of them seriously challenged this arrangement. The necessary love between Sartre and de Beauvoir was threatened above all by Sartre’s intense infatuation with Olga and his jealous, thwarted desire to possess her.

From 1935 to 1937, as Sartre tried everything in his power to win Olga, her refusal either to accept or reject him drove him to near madness and despair. Sartre later claimed he never knew jealousy except where Olga was concerned and undoubtedly his affair with her was a life-defining episode that haunted his writing for many years.

Several of Sartre’s female characters have some of Olga’s personality traits. The ménage à trois at the centre of de Beauvoir’s 1943 novel, She Came to Stay , is also based on the ménage à trois involving herself, Sartre and Olga. The most detailed account of the actual affair, an affair so pivotal to the intellectual and emotional development of these two great existentialists, is found in de Beauvoir’s autobiography, The Prime of Life (pp. 254–263).

Some critics resist the existentialists’ claim that the essence of all relationships is conflict, not because they think it is too pessimistic, but simply because they think it is an unjustifiable generalisation. We only have to reflect on the endless conflict that dominates the news – cruelty, violence, exploitation, injustice – to see that the existentialists have a point, nevertheless, most of the time most people actually get along reasonably well.

Even the Sartre, de Beauvoir, Olga triangle, as described biographically rather than caricatured for dramatic purposes, was as much a source of joy to the participants as a source of misery, and there were many happy times when three was not a crowd. To suggest, as the existentialists do, that the look of the Other is always threatening, is to ignore the evidence of certain concrete situations in which the look is clearly not threatening. Turning her critical gaze on Sartre, Marjorie Grene invites us to consider, ‘The rare but still indubitable experience of mutual understanding, of the reciprocal look of peers; or the look of mother and infant, where the one protects and the other is protected. In its immediate appearance there seems no internecine warfare here’ (Sartre , p. 154).

Arguably, the existentialists’ insistence on the universality of conflict is motivated too much by personal considerations. The French existentialists in particular lived through hugely troubled times. World War I cast a shadow over their childhoods and their progress to intellectual maturity was coloured first by the Spanish Civil War and then by World War II. It is little wonder that their personal experiences led them to over-emphasise one aspect of human nature.

To be fair to the French existentialists, they did grow to appreciate Heidegger’s notion of mitsein : ‘being-with’, ‘being-with-others’, the phenomenon of ‘we’. They came to recognise that their conflict orientated account of being-for-others, in which each person struggles to reduce the Other to a transcendence-transcended, is incomplete as it makes no reference to situations in which a person is in community with the Other rather than in conflict with her.

The question is, how is it possible for there to be a ‘we’ subject in which a plurality of subjectivities apprehend one another as transcendences-transcending rather than as transcendences-transcended? The answer is that for the ‘we’ to occur there must be a common action, a collective enterprise or an object of common perception that is the explicit object of consciousness.

For example, a member of an audience absorbed in watching a play is explicitly conscious of the play rather than the audience around her. In being explicitly conscious of the play, however, she is also implicitly or indirectly conscious of being conscious of the play and of being a co-spectator of the play. Being-with can only occur in this implicit, indirect way. It cannot be the explicit object of consciousness. If a spectator makes her fellow spectators the explicit object of her consciousness, rather than the shared experience of the play, she will cease to be a co-spectator with them of the play and they will cease to be her fellow spectators. Her being-with them as part of a ‘we’ will be lost as they become the object of her consciousness and she transcends their transcendence.

Being-with-others as submergence in an us , as submergence in some collective experience or enterprise, is often maintained through conflict with a them as opponent or hate object – conflict at the group level. Happily, however, there appear to be some occasions when an us does not require a them in order to exist. For example, a group may work together on a task with a common goal that is not primarily the goal of beating the competition. Alternatively, a group united together by religion, music, dancing or drugs may achieve a state of reverie or synergy amounting to a collective loss of self.

Interestingly, in her autobiography, The Prime of Life , Simone de Beauvoir describes having a revelation, not of her being for herself or her being-for-others, but of her being just another person . De Beauvoir, as you might expect, being a true existentialist, prided herself on her independence and self-reliance. In the late 1930s, however, she was taken so seriously ill with pneumonia that she had to place herself entirely in the care of other people in order to survive. She describes the distress and surprise she felt as two male nurses stretchered her from her hotel room. Strangers on the street watched as the nurses loaded her into an ambulance. She was suddenly just anyone. Just one more health statistic. She thought:

This is really happening, and it’s happening to me … Anything, it was clear, could happen to me, just as it could to any other person. Now here was a revolution … Sickness, accidents and misfortunes were things that happened only to other people; but in the eyes of those curious bystanders I had abruptly become ‘other people’, and, like all such, I was to all ‘other people’ just ‘another person’ myself. (The Prime of Life , p. 292)