Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Assume the Other's freedom to become limited by their gaze

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, deepthinking, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@sartre_being_1943, loc. 1234

2 min read

Assume the Other’s freedom to become limited by their gaze

Evidence

Now then we can see how my freedom in a way recovers its own limits, for I can grasp myself as limited by the Other only in so far as the Other exists for me, and I can make the Other exist for me only as a subjectivity recognized by my assuming my being-for-others. There is no circle here. By the free assumption of this being-alienated which I experience, I suddenly make the Other’s transcendence exist for me as such. It is only by my recognizing the freedom of anti-Semites (whatever use they may make of it) and by my assuming this being-a-Jew that I am a Jew for them; it is only thus that being-a-Jew will appear as the external objective limit of the situation. If, on the contrary, it pleases me to consider the anti-Semites as pure objects, then my being-a-Jew disappears immediately to give place to the simple consciousness (of) being a free, unqualifiable transcendence. To recognize others and, if I am a Jew, to assume my being-a-Jew are one and the same. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1234

Categorization

  • XREF: Directly sets up Beauvoir’s account of woman as made Other by being-for-others; coheres with her insistence that women can assume or refuse their being-as-Other. — connects to: A third observer can disarm the Other’s gaze by transcending it in turn; Proving one’s alienation requires freely recognizing the Other’s freedom; The Other’s gaze imposes unchosen determinations on my being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1229 (+2 more)
  • DEEPTHINKING: The claim that my limits only exist if I freely assume the Other’s freedom — that there is no circle — is a dense, generative move, not a simple point.

Broader Connections

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