Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

The Other's perspective reveals my own body as merely worldly

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@sartre_being_1943, loc. 913, @sartre_being_1943, loc. 1229, @bakewell_at_2016, loc. 733

3 min read

The Other’s perspective reveals my own body as merely worldly

Evidence

With the appearance of the Other’s look I experience the revelation of my being-as-object; that is, of my transcendence as transcended. A me-as-object is revealed to me as an unknowable being, as the flight into an Other which I am with full responsibility. But while I can not know nor even conceive of this “Me” in its reality, at least I am not without apprehending certain of its formal structures. In particular I feel myself touched by the Other in my factual existence; it is my being-there-for-others for which I am responsible. This being-there is precisely the body. Thus the encounter with the Other does not only touch me in my transcendence: in and through the transcendence which the Other surpasses, the facticity which my transcendence nihilates and transcends exists for the Other; and to the extent that I am conscious of existing for the Other I apprehend my own facticity, not only in its non-thetic nihilation, not only in the existent, but in its flight towards a being-in-the-midst-of-the-world. The shock of the encounter with the Other is for me a revelation in emptiness of the existence of my body outside as an in-itself for the Other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 913 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Nevertheless the Other’s existence brings a factual limit to my freedom. This is because of the fact that by means of the upsurge of the Other there appear certain determinations which I am without having chosen them. Here I am—Jew, or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one-armed, etc. All this I am for the Other with no hope of apprehending this meaning which I have outside and, still more important, with no hope of changing it. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1229 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Our perceptions also tend to be accompanied by that strange sense called ‘proprioception’ - the sense that tells us whether our legs are crossed or our head is cocked to one side. My own body is not an object like others; it is me. If I sit down with my knitting, says Merleau-Ponty, I might have to hunt for my knitting needles but I don’t hunt for my hands and fingers. And if I rest my arm on the table, ‘I will never think to say that it is next to the ashtray in the same way that the ashtray is next to the telephone.’ Our proprioception is exquisitely sensitive and complex: If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are accentuated and my whole body trails behind them like a comet’s tail. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 733 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: The Other’s look displaces my world’s center and objectifies me. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 92; Being seen by the Other freezes my lived situation into a fixed in-itself form; Under the Other’s gaze I become an instrumental complex ordered around the look (+14 more)

Broader Connections

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