The Look

Everything up to here describes a person alone: what they are, how they escape what they are, how they lie to themselves about it. This page adds the second person, and the claim is that adding them changes what the first person is, not merely what they know.

The plain version of the claim, before any vocabulary. When someone sees you, you acquire an outside. You become something that can be summed up, judged, and described from a position you cannot occupy. That outside is real, it is yours, and you cannot see it. Sartre thinks this is the basic structure of being with other people, and that shame is the experience in which it is felt most directly.

1. Two states of the same person

Sartre’s argument works by comparing one person in two moments. Take someone absorbed in doing something they should not be doing, listening at a door they should not be listening at. Then they hear footsteps behind them.

Before the footsteps, they are entirely taken up by the task. Sartre’s description: I am alone and on the level of a non-thetic self-consciousness. This means first of all that there is no self to inhabit my consciousness, nothing therefore to which I can refer my acts in order to qualify them. My acts are in no way known; I am my acts and hence they carry in themselves their whole justification.

Read that last clause carefully, because it is the crux. There is no self standing apart, watching and grading. There is only the doing. The situation shows up entirely as instruments and obstacles: behind that door a spectacle is presented as to be seen, a conversation as to be heard. The door and the keyhole are at once both instruments and obstacles, presented as to be handled with care.

Sartre’s summary of this state: my attitude has no outside. It is a pure process of relating the instrument to the end to be attained, a pure mode of losing myself in the world.

After the footsteps, everything is different, and Sartre says the modification is in his being, not in his information.

I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness. The self, which until this moment was only available to reflection, comes to haunt the unreflective consciousness directly. Sartre’s exact formulation: 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.

Note what he denies. He is not saying you now think about yourself. He is saying you now are something whose ground is located in another person.

2. Shame is recognition, not comparison

The natural reading of shame is that you compare how you appear to how you would like to appear and find a gap. Sartre rejects this, and the rejection is the load-bearing move of the section.

Shame is not reflective. I have just made an awkward or vulgar gesture. This gesture clings to me; I neither judge it nor blame it. I simply live it. But suddenly I raise my head. Somebody was there and has seen me. Suddenly I realize the vulgarity of my gesture, and I am ashamed. Sartre notes that the presence of another in my consciousness, even as a catalyst, is incompatible with the reflective attitude: in the field of my reflection I can never meet with anything but my own consciousness. The Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other.

It is not a comparison, and Sartre gives two reasons. First, it is not encountered as the result of a concrete psychic operation: shame is an immediate shudder which runs through me from head to foot without any discursive preparation. Second, the comparison is impossible, because I am unable to bring about any relation between what I am in the intimacy of the for-itself, without distance and without perspective, and this unjustifiable being-in-itself which I am for the Other. There is no standard here, no table of correlation.

So what is it? Shame is by nature recognition. It is the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object.

That word recognition is the same one from Hegel, and the connection is worth making explicitly in a paper: for both, what you are is settled in part by another consciousness. The difference is what happens next. In Hegel the demand is for mutual recognition, and the master/servant arrangement fails because recognition from someone you count as nothing is worthless. In Sartre the Other’s look does not need my consent and does not require any mutuality to take effect. It confers a nature on me whether or not I recognize the Other in return.

A third mode of being. Sartre draws the ontological conclusion: the Other has not only revealed to me what I was; he has established me in a new type of being which can support new qualifications. This being was not in me potentially before the appearance of the Other, for it could not have found any place in the for-itself.

His example is worth having because it is concrete: I could not be vulgar all alone. Vulgarity and awkwardness are meanings which transcend the body and refer to a witness capable of understanding them. Sartre’s line: nobody can be vulgar all by himself.

So there are now three modes of being in play.

1. Being-in-itself: the mode of objects. The inkwell is an inkwell, complete, coinciding with itself.
2. Being-for-itself: consciousness, which never coincides with itself and is defined by that gap.
3. Being-for-others: what I am in the Other’s look. An outside, a nature, mine but not available to me.

And a compressed statement of the third: shame is shame of oneself before the Other; these two structures are inseparable.

3. The Other steals the world

The stronger claim, and the one that separates Sartre from a plain account of self-consciousness. It is not only that I acquire an outside. The world reorganizes itself around someone else.

My possibilities become given. Before, the dark corner in the hallway referred to me as the possibility of hiding, a potential quality of its shadow, an invitation. That instrumentality belonged to the object as an objective, ideal property. With the Other’s look, a new organization of complexes comes to superimpose itself on the first. My possibility of hiding is transcended by the Other toward his possibility of pulling me out of concealment, of identifying me, of arresting me.

Sartre calls this a subtle death: my possibility of hiding still remains my possibility, it still lives, and the dark corner does not cease to indicate its potentiality to me. But it has become an instrumentality for someone else. Every act performed against the Other can on principle be an instrument which will serve him against me.

I am fixed in place. To apprehend myself as seen is to apprehend myself as seen in the world and from the standpoint of the world. The look does not carve me out in the universe; it comes to search for me at the heart of my situation and grasps me only in irresolvable relations with instruments. If I am seen as seated, I must be seen as seated-on-a-chair; if I am grasped as bent over, it is as bent-over-the-keyhole.

Loss of mastery. Sartre’s summary in an ordinary expression: I am no longer master of the situation. More exactly, I remain master of it, but it has one real dimension by which it escapes me, by which unforeseen reversals cause it to be otherwise than it appears to me.

He distinguishes this carefully from ordinary accident. If in solitude I knock over a vase, the consequences are unfortunate but they were foreseeable in principle: nothing there escapes me on principle. The appearance of the Other causes an aspect to appear of which I am not master and which on principle escapes me, because it exists for the Other. Sartre borrows Gide’s phrase for it, the devil’s part, and calls it the unpredictable but still real reverse side.

Why it cannot be recovered. The Other is free. My being-for-him depends on his freedom, which is precisely the thing I cannot control or predict. Sartre’s image: this being which I am is given to me as a burden which I carry without ever being able to turn back to know it, without even being able to realize its weight. It is comparable to my shadow, but projected on a moving and unpredictable material such that no table of reference can be provided for calculating the distortions.

He ends the sequence with a sentence that is the compressed version of the whole account: my original fall is the existence of the Other.

4. What this establishes for the rest of Sartre

Three consequences that matter for a paper.

1. Other minds are not an inference. I do not observe a body and deduce a consciousness behind it. The Other is given to me in the experience of being an object, which is why shame is prior to any argument about other minds.
2. Freedom is not solitary. The being I have for the Other is inscribed in and by the Other’s freedom. Sartre says each of my free acts involves me in a new setting where the very material of my being is the unpredictable freedom of another.
3. Bad faith gets a second field. Alongside the transcendence-facticity device, there is now a duplicity between being-for-myself and being-for-others, allowing a perpetual game of escape from the for-itself to the for-others and back. Sartre notes that shame is itself a confession, that bad faith is an attempt to flee the being which I recognize, and that bad faith is also a confession, since it is an effort to flee what one has acknowledged.

Worked example: reading a case through the two states

The exercise is to take any situation of being caught and separate the two states cleanly, since that separation is the argument.

State one, absorbed. The person is their acts. There is no self standing apart to grade them, so the acts carry their own justification. The world appears as a system of means arranged toward an end: this is to be used, that is an obstacle, that other thing is to be handled carefully. Sartre calls the whole arrangement a situation, and notes it reflects both facticity and freedom at once, since the objective structure of the world refers my freedom to me in the form of tasks to be freely done.

The interruption. Footsteps. Note that no one has actually appeared yet. Sartre is precise about this: what I apprehend immediately when I hear the branches crackling behind me is not that there is someone there. It is that I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place and cannot in any case escape from the space in which I am without defense. In short, that I am seen. The look is first an intermediary which refers from me to myself.

Which means the Look is not literally about eyes. It is the structure of being exposed to another freedom, and a sound in a hallway produces it as completely as a face.

State two, seen. Three things have changed at once.

1. I have a nature. I am the person bent over the keyhole, and that description is true of me in a way I cannot revise from inside. I am my ego for the Other in the midst of a world which flows toward the Other.
2. The world has been reorganized around someone else. My possibilities are now his instruments; the dark corner is now his to illuminate.
3. I live rather than know it. Sartre is emphatic that the relation between my unreflective consciousness and my ego, which is being looked at, is a relation not of knowing but of being. Beyond any knowledge which I can have, I am this self which another knows. It is shame or pride which makes me live, not know, the situation of being looked at.

The test for a paper. If your account of the case can be restated as “he found out that someone had seen him,” you have described a change in information and missed the argument. Sartre’s claim is that a new being appeared, one that did not exist even potentially beforehand, and that it is his.

Vocabulary to deploy

Exact terms, with the phrasing that earns marks in a philosophy paper.

• Being-for-others (être-pour-autrui) — the third mode of being, alongside in-itself and for-itself. What I am in the Other’s look: a nature, mine, unavailable to me. “This being was not in me potentially before the appearance of the Other.”
• The Look (le regard) — not eyes. The structure of being exposed to another freedom. “What I apprehend immediately when I hear the branches crackling behind me is not that there is someone there; it is that I am vulnerable.”
• Shame as recognition — “Shame is by nature recognition. It is the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging.” Not comparison, not reflection.
• Non-thetic self-consciousness — the pre-reflective state before being seen, in which “there is no self to inhabit my consciousness” and “I am my acts.”
• The subtle death of my possibilities — my possibility becomes an instrumentality for the Other. The corner I might hide in is the corner he might light.
• “I am no longer master of the situation” — the situation acquires a dimension that escapes me on principle, not by accident.
• “My original fall is the existence of the Other” — the compressed statement of the whole section.
• “Nobody can be vulgar all by himself” — the one-line proof that being-for-others is a distinct mode rather than a fact I learn.