Hi all!
Today, we're talking about Sartre's theory of the look, which comes up in his chapter
of the same title in Being and Nothingness sometimes also translated as "the gaze."
How do we know that there are other subjects in the world?
And how do we know ourselves as selves?
Sartre thinks that, in order to answer these two questions, we need
to think about the way that others structure our experiences through
the scene that he calls the look.
So imagine you're in a park and you're alone and you're walking along.
You're seeing grass, you're seeing benches, et cetera.
And then suddenly you see another person.
walking.
Now for Sartre, the other person is fundamentally different from
the other things that you have encountered so far in the park.
They're different from the grass, the benches, the trees, because they appear to
you as a center of their own experience.
Sartre says in seeing the other person, I feel the world stolen away from me.
It's almost as if there is a sink hole of being.
Because as much as I like to think of myself as the organizing center of
the world, as it turns out, there's somebody else who is the center of their
own world, and this, he thinks is a fundamentally threatening experience.
So our first encounters with others for start are
fundamentally the site of conflict.
It's not a warm, fuzzy feeling of being together.
He's drawing this in large part from Hegel, whose view of the master
servant dialectic you can hear in another video where I discuss it.
Now, when I feel the world being stolen away from me by sensing that there
is another subject within it, across from the park, I still, however can
have a sense of my own transcendence.
I still feel like even if there's another center of the universe,
I am still the subject of my own.
Things change fundamentally when the other turns and looks at me.
Suddenly, I feel myself no longer as a subject, but as the object.
I am the object of their gaze.
And my sense of self completely collapses in a moment.
This is the most important step of the look.
So temporarily, we might say that it's the second step.
The first is looking at the other person.
The second is the other person looking at me, but this second step temporally for
Sartre is ontologically the first step.
It's really what he means essentially, by the look.
Here, my subjectivity vanishes because it's in the face of another subject.
So in experiencing another person looking at me, I apprehend them as a
subject, but subjects look at objects.
Thus, I feel myself as an object.
And this feeling of being an object, Sartre calls shame.
He says it can also be felt as pride, but pride is a sort of
secondary response to shame.
Shame for him is simply the feeling of being an object.
Sartre says that the look doesn't have to be a literal look of eyes on you.
It can also be experienced through the appearance of a house on an, on a hill.
Right?
You see that somebody might be looking out the window at you, or the footfall.
He has a famous example of somebody looking through a key hole.
And then hearing a person behind them step onto the landing.
And they know through hearing that person's step, that that person is
looking at them, looking through a keyhole and that throws them back onto them.
You might also think about the experience of having a roommate.
So if you have a roommate, even if they're in the other room,
you feel their presence, you can feel their eyes on you, right.
Especially if you're making noise or just the simple fact
of them being in the same space.
And it's even more true if you're literally in the same room, right.
Even if you're not interacting, you feel their gaze on you.
Even if they've got headphones in and they're watching TV or something,
there's always a sense that you are the object for someone else, or that you're
potentially the object for someone else.
You might feel self-conscious right.
I think the sense of self-consciousness is more or less what Sartre has in
mind when he talks about the feeling of shame of being the object for another.
And when I feel myself as an object, I experienced my transcendence,
my freedom as transcended.
I no longer have that sense of
possibility with respect to myself.
I feel myself fixed.
And what's really the most threatening about this experience is that.
I don't have access to the way that the other sees me.
So I feel myself to be an object, but I actually can't
know myself to be an object.
I might try and imagine, oh, what does this person think of me?
How are they seeing me?
But I will never have access to that.
I will never be able to actually experience things from their subjectivity.
I'll never be able to be in their shoes.
They have an access to me that is unmediated and that I can never grasp.
And according to Sartre, this inability to see myself as others see
me is one way of describing shame.
Pride is the affirmation of myself as objects and saying like, okay,
well you see me as an object.
I'm going to affirm that I am going to say, look at me!
What a great object I am!
But that ultimately boils down to shame for Sartre because it originates
in the sense of being an object.
It's just a different manifestation.
So it might sound like the look is sort of a bad thing, right?
It makes us feel shame.
It makes us feel ourselves as objects.
It has a fundamentally threatening character, but according to
Sartre, that's not the whole story.
In fact, for Sartre, the look, by giving us to ourselves as objects, not only gives
us a sense that there are other subjects in the world, but it actually gives us
really crucial information about who we.
Because it shows us that a key aspect of our being is to be an object for others.
This is what Sartre calls being for others.
He thinks there are three main ways that beings manifest in the world
through being- for- itself, being- in- itself, and being- for- others.
And being- for- others is inaugurated by the look.
Sartre concludes from this, that we can only ever experience ourselves as
subjects or as objects at a given time.
And so we're constantly oscillating between feeling ourselves as subjects
and feeling ourselves as objects.
Sartre thinks, for instance, that if we're gazing into another person's eyes,
we are either seeing them as an object.
We're seeing their eyes.
We're looking at them, we're beholding them, or we are feeling seen by the.
And we are experiencing their subjectivity in a way that we're at the receiving
end of it, rather than looking at them.
This is something that subsequent phenomenologists have taken issue with,
including Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.
They disagree with Sartre that we can't experience ourselves as both
subjects and objects at the same time.
There's also a whole story to give here about how Sartre's concept of
the look is fundamentally affective.
It has to do with feeling.
And so we don't know ourselves as objects in a cognitive sense.
Rather, we experience ourselves as objects in a felt sense.
And this is something I've actually written an article
about in Philosophy Today
if you're inclined to pursue this a bit further.
For Sartre, the gaze of the other involves the death of my possibilities.
I no longer feel that I have this unlimited orientation to the world
that I'm able to transcend it, but rather my possibilities feel
as if they fall into probability.
And this follows directly from his contention that when we experience
the look, we experience ourselves as reduced to a facticity.
And this idea has actually been one of the key points of the look that
folks have used since in developing concepts around gender and race, such
as the male gaze or the white gaze.
Frantz Fanon, in chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks, suggest that
Sartre's view of the look actually needs to be taken a step further to
account for what he calls the racial- epidermal schema, or the ways that Black
bodies in white space are perceived as fundamentally, always already, the objects
of the look, rather than the lookers.
He says that the Black man living in a white supremacist society is constantly
thrust into this feeling of being an object to such a degree, that there may
not even be an oscillation between the first and second moments of the look.
Thanks for watching.
If you're interested in hearing more from me, please check out
my podcast, Overthink, which you can find in a link below.