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(15585476 - Volume 18 (2012) - Issue 1 (Mar 2012) ) Reconsidering The Look in Sartre's - Being and Nothingness PDF
(15585476 - Volume 18 (2012) - Issue 1 (Mar 2012) ) Reconsidering The Look in Sartre's - Being and Nothingness PDF
Introduction
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Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
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Luna Dolezal
2. The Body-for-Others
The second ontological dimension of the body’s existence is the
body-for-others (pour l’autrui). In this dimension, my body,
according to Sartre, ‘is utilized and known by the Other’15 and
I realise that I exist as an object for the other. In short, Sartre is
indicating the fact that through my own experience I have one
kind of knowledge of myself and my body which is different from
the knowledge given to me through the perspective of the other.
Through the second dimension, I acquire a conceptual awareness
of my body in an abstract way, as a knowing organism, with certain
objective features (biological, physiological, cultural, etc.) in the
world and in the midst of other bodies.
For Sartre, it is important to distinguish these first two ontological
dimensions of the body as he asserts that they are incommunicable
and cannot co-exist: ‘the nature of our body for us entirely escapes us
to the extent that we can take upon it the Other’s point of view’.16
Sartre claims that either the body is an object or thing, among other
things, or it is that which reveals things to me; however, it cannot be
both at once. This claim has important consequences for the nature
of intersubjective relations, as shall be discussed below.
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Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
The seen body is distinct from the ‘visible’ body Sartre alludes to
(which arises in states such as pain, illness or dysfunction) in that it
involves a view of the self as though from a distanced perspective and
is not concerned with salient internal bodily events. In contrast to
the visible body, the seen body ‘goes little farther than the view of a
surface’.21
While being a conscious representation of one’s public body, at
the same time, the seen body is what one presents to the world and
to others in the visual field. This is important because the experience
others have of my body is dominated by sight for Sartre: it is how
others see (and judge) my comportment, aspect and appearance that
is of interest in his analysis. Through the third dimension, and
through awareness of my seen body, I become reflexively self-aware
of how I appear to others. Hence, our self knowledge depends
largely on objectifying responses from other people who make us
objects of their judgements. In short, in the third dimension, as
Sartre describes it, I experience and am aware of how (I think) the
other sees me.
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The Look
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Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is
trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the
Other seeks to enslave me … Conflict is the original meaning of being-
for-others.26
He insists that, ‘[t]he essence of the relations between consciousnesses
is not the Mitsein [Being-with]; it is conflict’.27
This conflictual encounter with the other is dominated by the
visual field; it is described by Sartre through his account of ‘the
Look’ (le regard).28 The Look for Sartre is not merely about being
within the other’s perceptual field; it is not a neutral seeing, but
rather, it is a value-laden looking which has the power to objectify
and causes the subject to turn attention to him- or herself in a self-
reflective manner. When I am looked at by another, I am reduced to
an object. Sartre’s discussion of the Look in Being and Nothingness is
illustrated by his oft-cited vignette of the voyeur overcome by
jealousy kneeling by a keyhole to spy on his lover.29 This vignette has
been discussed frequently in philosophical writing and the Sartre
literature. The account Sartre gives has been seen as unproblematic
by some thinkers. They contend that it illustrates how being looked
at by another person (or at least believing someone is looking at you)
can modify one’s actions, and demonstrates the other’s power to
objectify. In contrast, other thinkers have critiqued this account for
offering a simplistic and pessimistic view of intersubjective relations
and personal encounters.
At times, it seems that Sartre intends the Look to have significance
in lived day-to-day encounters with others when considering
experiences of body-objectification and social instantiations of
evaluative emotions such as shame, pride and embarrassment.
However, it also seems clear that Sartre intends the Look to extend
beyond the possibilities afforded by an actual encounter with another
person who is really looking at me: there are cases when the other is
merely imagined or possible (there is a rustle in the bushes, but no
one is really there).30 In these cases, Sartre seems to be concerned
with self-evaluative states, and again experiences such as shame, guilt
or pride, when one can see oneself as though through the eyes of the
Other. At other times, Sartre’s concern is primarily ontological: as
discussed above, he believes that the encounter with the other is the
condition for the possibility for reflective self-consciousness. Hence,
the Look, in this case, is a symbolic (rather than merely literal)
encounter which awakens the capacity for reflective self-consciousness.
Hence, Sartre’s discussion of the Look is a multi-layered account
of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, visibility, objectification, absence
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Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
The encounter with another and the subsequent Look of the other
confers the relation of ‘Being-seen-by-another’. 40 Sartre argues
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Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
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Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
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Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
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Conclusion
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Notes
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge,
2006).
2. Throughout this article, I will employ the capitalised ‘Look’ to designate Sartre’s
le regard.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology
(London: Routledge, 2003), 333; Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le Néant: Essai
d’ontologie Phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 348. All following
citations give the pagination of the English translation followed by the pagination
of L’Être et le néant.
4. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 368/385.
5. Ibid., 329/344.
6. Ibid., 330/345.
7. Ibid., 362/379.
8. Ibid., 375/392.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 330/345.
11. Ibid., 350/366.
12. Ibid., 348/364.
13. Ibid., 347/363.
14. Ibid., 348/364. All italics in original unless otherwise indicated.
15. Ibid., 375/392.
16. Ibid., 382/399.
17. Ibid., 375/392.
18. The ‘seen’ body is a term also employed by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. See
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, ‘The Body as Cultural Object/The Body as Pan-
Cultural Universal’, in Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, ed. Mano
Daniel and Lester E. Embree (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1994), 86.
19. The seen body can be compared to Charles Horton Cooley’s conception of the
‘looking glass self’. This term refers to a social and psychological process where
people get a sense of self based on other people’s perception of them and their
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Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
bodies. See Charles H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (Glencoe,
IL: The Free Press, 1956), 184.
20. Paul Valéry, ‘Some Simple Reflections on the Body’, in Fragments for a History
of the Human Body – Part 2, ed. M. Feher, R. Naddaff and N. Tazi (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1989), 399.
21. Valéry, ‘Some Simple Reflections on the Body’, 400.
22. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 284/299.
23. Ibid., 246/260–261.
24. Ibid., 287/302.
25. Georg W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977). In Hegel’s account of the constitution of subjectivity, the Lord and
Bondsman are initially in an equal and reciprocal state, mutually recognising one
another’s consciousnesses through their co-constitutive relation. The Bondsman
serves the Lord, but as a result the Lord is confronted with a dependent
consciousness and no longer recognises his own independent state in the other
who faces him; the Lord cannot get the kind of recognition he sought in the
Bondsman. The Lord ultimately negates the independence of his own self-
consciousness because he has negated the independence of the Bondsman, who
provides him with insufficient recognition of himself.
26. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 386/404.
27. Ibid., 451/470.
28. Ibid., 276/292.
29. Ibid., 282–283/298.
30. Ibid.
31. Katherine J. Morris discusses how the mediation of the other (through the Look)
can be understood as epistemological or as ontological. In this formulation
she takes the self-evaluation to form part of the epistemological structure. See,
Katherine J. Morris, ‘The Graceful, the Ungraceful and the Disgraceful’, in
Reading Sartre, ed. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2010), 137.
32. Steven Earnshaw, Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London:
Continuum, 2006), 86.
33. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 300/316.
34. Ibid., 281/297.
35. Ibid., 245/259–260.
36. Ibid., 245/260.
37. Ibid., 282–283/298.
38. Ibid., 283/298.
39. Ibid., 284/299.
40. Ibid., 281/296.
41. Ibid., 283/298.
42. Ibid., 298/313.
43. Marjorie Grene, ‘Sartre and the Other’, Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association 45 (1971–1972): 32.
44. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 298/313.
45. Ibid., 299/315.
46. Ibid., 300–301/316.
47. Ibid., 281/297.
48. Ibid., 246/260.
49. Gary Cox, The Sartre Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2008), 157.
50. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 305/321.
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51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 301/317.
53. Ibid., 303/319.
54. Ibid., 301/316.
55. Ibid., 74/85.
56. Ibid., 304/320.
57. Ibid., 375/392.
58. Ibid., 281/297.
59. Peter Caws, Sartre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 99.
60. Hazel E. Barnes, ‘Sartre on the Emotions’, in Sartre: An Investigation of Some
Major Themes, ed. Simon Glynn (Aldershot: Avebury, 1987), 83.
61. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 300/316.
62. Ibid., 281/297.
63. Ibid., 314/319.
64. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the “I”’, in
Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), 1–7.
65. This is a line of criticism taken by Honneth. See, for example, Axel Honneth
and Charles W. Wright, The Struggle for Recognition: On Sartre’s Theory of
Intersubjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 164.
66. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 283/298.
67. Ibid., 246/260.
68. It would not even be enough if all others were destroyed or ceased to be. As
Hazel E. Barnes points out, ‘the memory of the Other’s look would live on
forever in my own conscious memory, inseparable from whatever idea I might
try to form of my object self’ (Hazel Barnes, Sartre [London: Quartet Books,
1973], 63).
69. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 245/259.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 312/328.
72. Ibid.
73. Caws, Sartre, 97.
74. Jan Hendrik van den Berg, ‘The Human Body and the Significance of Human
Movement: A Phenomenological Study’, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 13, no. 2 (1952): 181.
75. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 420.
76. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France,
Evanston:, Northwestern University Press, 2003), 28.
77. Marjorie Grene, Sartre (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 154.
78. Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 94.
79. Leder, Absent Body, 96.
80. Van den Berg, ‘The Human Body’, 182.
81. Michael Schudson, ‘Embarrassment and Erving Goffman’s Idea of Human
Nature’, Theory and Society 13 (1984): 641.
82. Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1969), 11.
83. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 298/313.
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