Encountering the Other reveals the for-itself having an outside and being embedded in being

Evidence

In his first example, Sartre asks us to imagine walking in a park. If I’m alone, the park arranges itself comfortably around my point of view: everything I see presents itself to me. But then I notice a man crossing the lawn towards me. This causes a sudden cosmic shift. I become conscious that the man is also arranging his own universe around himself. As Sartre puts it, the green of the grass turns itself towards the other man as well as towards me, and some of my universe drains off in his direction. Some of me drains off too, for I am an object in his world as he is in mine. I am no longer a pure perceiving nothingness; I have a visible outside, which I know he can see. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 676 (#expands, via linked claim)

What Michael Walzer famously called “Liberalism 1” constitutes one of the great discursive systems of the modern world, making in recent years virtually a clean sweep of political theory. Only a thin definition of culture and a highly attenuated notion of collective rights is compatible with the individualist emphasis at the center of this market-liberal conception. It does not recognize the degree to which the individual is what Taylor (1994) calls “dialogic”—not in the binary sense of dialogue between two already-constituted subjects, but in the sense of its relation to the other being fundamentally constitutive of the subject, which can position itself as an “identity” only in relation to what it lacks—its other, its “constitutive outside” (Lacan 1977; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Butler 1993). The meaningful individual life is always embedded in cultural contexts within which alone its “free choices” make sense. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 363 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Encountering another person makes one an object in their world — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 676; Individual identity forms dialogically through a constitutive outside, not autonomously. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 363; The Other’s presence resists phenomenological reduction and doubt (+17 more)

Broader Connections

• Encountering another person makes one an object in their world #expands (0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 676
• Being reflected upon gives consciousness a sense of having an outside #expands (0.85)
• Individual identity forms dialogically through a constitutive outside, not autonomously. #expands (0.78) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 363
• Identity gets constituted when the Other’s gaze names it #expands (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 207
• The Other’s presence resists phenomenological reduction and doubt #complicates (0.72)