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Summary: Being and Nothingness (page 7)


Neither idealism nor realism can resolve this paradox, and demonstrate the real existence of others as subjects. This causes some to fall into solipsism (others do not exist, I am alone in the world, in reality).


Some like Husserl have tried to show the reality of others by trying to establish that others are an indispensable condition for the constitution of a world. However, he only showed the parallelism of empirical egos, which no one doubts, not that of transcendental subjects.

Thus the other is never that empirical character that is encountered in my experience: it is the transcendental subject to which that character refers by nature1.


Sartre similarly shows how Hegel or Heidegger have advanced reflection on the Other, while criticising the inadequacy of their conceptions.


Sartre argues that one encounters the other, one does not construct him 12. How do we encounter him? How does he give himself to us as a subject?

Sartre starts with a simple example: I see a man on a lawn. Yet the relation of this man to this lawn escapes me:

The distance that unfolds between the lawn and the man is a negation of the distance I establish between these two objects. It appears as a disintegration of the relationships I apprehend between the objects in my world. It is like a background to things that escapes me in principle and is conferred on them from outside 3.


The Other thus appears to me in a very particular experience, as an element of disintegration of my universe 4. One encounters the other as subject (for oneself) when one notices the permanent flight of things towards a term that escapes me insofar as it unfolds around itself its own distances 5. It seems then that the world is pierced by an emptying hole, in the middle of its being 6.

How then does the Other reveal himself to me as subject? This disintegration reveals that I am an object for the Other. Now from the moment that he takes me for an object, it is that he proves to be, like me, a subject: It is in and through the revelation of my being-object for the Other that I must be able to grasp the presence of his being-subject 7.


The gaze is the privileged relationship through which the Other grasps me as object (and thus reveals himself to be subject).

In no case is the other given to me as object in the gaze: The objectification of the other would be the collapse of his gaze 8. On the contrary others are given as pure subjects 9. The error of solipsism and earlier doctrines about others is precisely to believe that others are first given to me as objects. It is then impossible to demonstrate his or her nature as subject, hence the refuge in solipsism.

My "being-for-others" is nothing other than my "self-object". Which is why it is through the other that my self-object comes to me 10.

The shame is the feeling of being an object for the Other, thus the original feeling of having my being outside, engaged in another being, illuminated by a pure subject 11.


Here, then, is the situation:

The Other looks at me and as such holds the secret of my being, knows what I am; thus, the deep meaning of my being is outside me, imprisoned in an absence; the Other has power over me 12.

From there, I can adopt two different types of attitude:


1/ Love

To sum up: Through the gaze, I am possessed by the Other, his gaze shapes my body in its nakedness, brings it into being, produces it as it is, sees it as I never will. The other person holds a secret, the secret of what I am. He makes me be and thereby possesses me. Others are for me both what has robbed me of my being and what makes there a being that is my being 13.


1 I, 3, p.273
2 ibid., p.289
3 I, 4, p.294
4 ibid.
5 ibid.
6 ibid., p.295
7 ibid., p.296
8 ibid., p.307
9 ibid., p.310
10 ibid.
11 ibid., p.328
12 ibid., III, p.403
13 III, 1, p.403