Being for Others Sartre states that many relationships are created by peoples attraction not to another person, but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them. This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with the look of the other. The consequence is conflict. In order to maintain the persons own being, the person must control the other, but must also control the freedom of the other as freedom. These relationships are a profound manifestation of bad faith as the for-itself is replaced with the others freedom. The purpose of either participant is not to exist, but to maintain the other participants looking at them. This system is often mistakenly called love, but it is, in fact, nothing more than emotional alienation and denial of freedom through conflict with the other. Sartre believes that it is often created as a means of making the unbearable anguish of a persons relationship to their facticity (all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited, such as birthplace and time) bearable. At its extreme, the alienation can become so intense that due to the guilt of being so radically enslaved by the look and therefore radically missing their own freedoms, the participants can experience masochistic and sadistic attitudes. This happens when the participants cause pain to each other, in attempting to prove their control over the others look, which they cannot escape because they believe themselves to be so enslaved to the look that experiencing their own subjectivity would be equally unbearable.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 13:13:48 +0000
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