The Other’s look makes the self haunt an unreflective consciousness

Evidence

So long as we considered the for-itself in its isolation, we were able to maintain that the unreflective consciousness can not be inhabited by a self; the self was given in the form of an object and only for the reflective consciousness. But here the self comes to haunt the unreflective consciousness. Now the unreflective consciousness is a consciousness of the world. Therefore for the unreflective consciousness the self exists on the level of objects in the world; this role which devolved only on the reflective consciousness—the making-present of the self—belongs now to the unreflective consciousness. Only the reflective consciousness has the self directly for an object. The unreflective consciousness does not apprehend the person directly or as its object; the person is presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other. This means that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 727

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes how the self appears to unreflective vs. reflective consciousness, and how the Other’s look transfers the self’s mode of appearance.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other’ inverts the ordinary phenomenology of selfhood — the self is not given in reflection but only as object-for-Other — a genuinely paradigm-shifting account of intersubjectivity.
• XREF: Central backdrop for Beauvoir’s account of woman’s situation as defined through being-an-object-for-the-Other. — connects to: Being objectified by another’s look constitutes an inescapable existential guilt — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 72; Shame is the recognition of being as the Other sees one — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 660; Being seen by the Other freezes my lived situation into a fixed in-itself form (+20 more)

Broader Connections

• The Other’s gaze imposes unchosen determinations on my being #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1229
• The Other’s look reveals my body as an object-for-others #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 913
• The Other’s perspective reveals my own body as merely worldly #expands (0.80)
• Shame first reveals one’s factical body because the Other’s look falls on embodiment #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 97
• The doppelganger figure encodes life’s unrealized potential selves #exemplifies (0.75) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1095
• The body seen from another’s viewpoint is a thing, not lived #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 923