Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  In elaborating his keyhole example Sartre specifies, almost in passing, that the particular unreflective emotion that we are to imagine moves the peeper to crouch by the door is jealousy.2 This jealousy is to be understood as “nothing except the simple objective fact that there is a sight to be seen behind the door” (348; Sartre’s emphasis). But it turns out that this is not a “simple objective fact” in any conventional understanding of these words. For, as Sartre argues, that there is something identifiable as a sight to be seen behind the door is true only because he is jealous. And yet it is a “simple objective fact” that there is something behind the door and that this something can be seen through the keyhole; in fact, it’s the fantasy of this “something,” this scene behind the door, that, intuitively enough, we are supposed to imagine has spawned the imaginary Sartre’s jealousy. Thus what Sartre wishes to argue is that his non-thetic consciousness in effect transforms what’s going on behind the door into “a sight to be seen,” while at the same time it’s this very sight that gives rise to the particular form his non-thetic consciousness takes—that is, his state of jealousy. This paradoxical constellation of circumstances—in which what’s going on behind the door both spawns and is spawned by the imaginary Sartre’s jealousy—is an example of what Sartre calls a “situation” (348). And by definition a situation (in this special, technical sense) is the situation it is only because of the coincidence of particular “simple objective facts” and some particular state of consciousness of a particular human being. This implies that the “simple objective fact” that something is going on behind the door is in and of itself meaningless and that the “situation” will differ for each person who runs up against any given “simple objective fact,” according to each person’s state of consciousness at the time.

  Despite his insistence in this discussion on the central role of simple objective facts, at the heart of Sartre’s concept of situation is the idea, emphasized both in the context of this scenario and throughout Being and Nothingness, that human beings always can control their particular states of consciousness and thus are to be held responsible for the situations they are in. In Sartre’s idiom (again adapted from that of Heidegger), “the ensemble exists only in relation to a free project of my possibilities” (348). What’s going on behind the door spawns Sartre’s jealousy, but only because he does not subject this jealousy to the scrutiny of his own consciousness. It is in principle possible for him not to be jealous under these circumstances. And yet because he acts unreflectively, this possibility is not alive for Sartre. In his lack of deliberation, of deliberateness, he fixes himself in his jealousy. His crouching by the doorway is the result of a frictionless momentum toward the door, produced by the spontaneous admixture of his unreflective (in this case, jealous) consciousness and the simple objective fact that (there are signs that) something is happening on the other side. The only thing that would counteract this momentum would be a change in his consciousness. In principle, Sartre insists, a human being is ontologically capable at any time and under any circumstances of willing such a change in consciousness; that is, such changes can occur without any corresponding change in the “simple objective facts.” But in reality, he suggests, human beings often pretend to themselves that they are the helpless victims of these facts, thereby exhibiting what Sartre famously calls “bad faith.” And the significance of the encounter with the “other,” the significance of Sartre’s appropriation of the meeting of two subjectively self-certain beings in the master-slave dialectic, is that this encounter is defined as that which can perform the service of rendering impossible, at least for a time, the self-serving rationales characteristic of bad faith.

  As unreflective consciousness, the Sartre who is crouching by the door is not, of course, thinking about the metaphysics or moral implications of what he is doing. He is just responding, in his jealousy, to his sense that something he must witness is going on behind the door. But let us imagine, Sartre then suggests, that “all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me!” And so I am “suddenly affected in my being and … essential modifications appear in my structure” (349). Specifically, Sartre says, “I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness” (349). In other words, the fact that someone else, someone Sartre wants to call the Other, is looking at him forces upon his unreflective consciousness the fact that he is a self, or, as he sometimes puts it, an Ego.3 To understand the significance of this change in consciousness, we need to remember that the unreflective consciousness is by definition totally absorbed in what the self is doing. It is not watching the self do what it’s doing; if it were, it would be what Sartre calls reflective consciousness. By definition, if unreflective consciousness becomes aware of the self, it can’t be as an object of reflection, per se. Instead, Sartre says, what’s forced upon his unreflective consciousness as a result of the Other’s gaze is that what is being gazed at is an Ego or self for that Other. And what unreflective consciousness also senses—immediately, unreflectively—is that this newly revealed self is expressly not for-itself; rather, it is expressly and exclusively “for-the-Other.”

  Yet at the same time, Sartre contends, unreflective consciousness automatically identifies with this self that exists exclusively for the Other. It sees that this self-for-Others belongs to it. Crucially for Sartre (and here is where he is at pains to distinguish himself from Hegel, for reasons that will become clear momentarily) this act of recognition is not, or at least not primarily, epistemological. Before the self knows itself to be for-the-other, it experiences itself as such: specifically, Sartre claims, the Other’s gaze effects an ontological change in the self that is registered in the self’s being instantly—helplessly—suffused with a feeling of shame or pride. In the case of the keyhole example, of course, the form the feeling takes is shame, and it is this shame “which makes me live, not know the situation of being looked at” (350).

  In identifying the feeling of shame as an ontologically (and not, or at least not initially, epistemologically) critical moment in the encounter with the Other, Sartre provides an interesting solution to an interpretive puzzle in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. This is the issue of just how each of the two encountering beings recognizes the other as both desirous and capable of recognition. There is something unsatisfying about the way Hegel sidesteps this question, as though human beings can or could just automatically read each other’s psychological demands and capabilities off each other’s appearances. At the very least, Hegel evidently doesn’t find pressing the question of how human beings are capable of this automatic reading. With the idea that the Other’s “Look” automatically induces in a me a sense of pride or shame that reveals to me my self or Ego insofar as it is “for” the Other, Sartre fills in this gap. For him the shame or pride I feel automatically in response to the Look reveals to me not only that I have a self that is for the Other but also that this Other perceives me as being nothing other than this self. And it is the need to alleviate my shame by proving that I am more than just Being-for-Others (to use Sartre’s term) that motivates my subsequent relations with the Other—motivates the Hegelian life-and-death struggle.

  I want to flag the fact that Sartre’s filling in of a Hegelian lacuna at this juncture by appealing to the experience of shame is considerably more compelling than his (mostly passing) acknowledgment that the Other’s Look can also produce in me a feeling of pride. This is because his explanation of what gets the fight-to-the-death off the ground turns on the repugnance the looked-at being is supposed to feel for the self revealed to him or her by the Other’s Look, insofar as this self is Being-for-the-Other. If my automatic response to this Look is one of pride, then it’s hard to see why I will be at pains to prove that I am more than the self I imagine the Other sees. Indeed, while Sartre discusses the phenomenon of shame in minute detail, he spends barely any time at all exploring the mechanics of pride. In the one short discussion of pride he offers (386–387), he seems to suggest that, indeed
, experiencing it in response to the Other’s Look leads not to a life-and-death struggle with the Other but to a complacent acceptance of oneself as nothing other than Being-for-Others. But because the self that is for-Others is inherently incapable of action—is, as we shall see, nothing other than the fixed object of the Other’s perception—to accept oneself as nothing other than Being-for-Others is to deny the fundamental fact of one’s own subjectivity, of one’s own Being-for-Self. This, for Sartre, is the quintessence of bad faith. It thus turns out that the only “authentic” response to the Other’s Look is shame.4 And this feeling of shame is what propels me to participate in a life-and-death struggle for recognition with the Other.

  But why, on Sartre’s interpretation of things, must my proving to the Other that I am more than Being-for-Others—indeed, that I am not, essentially speaking, such a being—take the form of destroying the Other, as Sartre, following Hegel, insists it does? The answer to this question turns on Sartre’s understanding of what it is to be an Other. For starters, of course, the Other is that being, any being, who can induce in me a feeling of shame, and specifically of shame in being the being the Other sees. But what kind of a being is this being the Other sees? It is, my shame reveals to me, my being, or at least part of my being. But it is my being insofar as I am perceived by an Other. That is, it is my being insofar as I am an object of the Other’s perception. “The Other,” Sartre says, “is first the being for whom I am an object; that is, the being through whom I gain my objectness” (361). And because the Other’s perception of me is something I cannot control, Sartre claims, in a turn of phrase that signals his desire to link his analysis of the Other with that of Hegel, “we can consider ourselves as ‘slaves’ insofar as we appear to the Other” (358). As Sartre sometimes puts it, the Look reveals to the looked-at person that he or she has a nature. And this, according to Sartre, using terminology that reveals his interest in construing the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as an interpretation or appropriation of the myth of Adam and Eve, is why “my original fall is the existence of the Other” (352). Sartre writes,

  Pure shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Other. Shame is the feeling of an original fall, not because of the fact that I may have committed this or that particular fault but simply that I have “fallen” into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am. (384)5

  The Other’s powers to transform the looked-at person, Sartre argues, are not limited to the ability to adduce shame. Rather, the Look brings about “a total metamorphosis of the world” (360): the looked-at person feels himself, in his shame, to be just one among many objects in a world that is all, specifically, for the Other. This means that for the looked-at person the Look is cataclysmic:

  Suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me. Everything is in place; everything still exists for me; but everything is traversed by an invisible flight and fixed in the direction of a new object. The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world. (343)

  All the objects in the world remain precisely the same. But the looked-at person, in his shame, now experiences these objects, just as he experiences himself, as for the Other. He experiences himself as one among many objects fixed by the Other’s Look. And since the world is now for the Other, “the Other’s look as the necessary condition of my objectivity is the destruction of all objectivity [in any conventional sense of the word] for me” (360). The paradox, in other words, is that my becoming an object (my “objectivity”) is the product of something that also destroys my sense of the objectivity of the world. This fact is nightmarish for me, for it implies that the world I know, this world, with this keyhole, and this door, and even this Other, both is and is not my world, both is and is not the (real) world. Thus, the Other is apprehended by the looked-at person “through uneasiness; through him I am perpetually in danger in a world which is this world and which nevertheless I can only glimpse” (367). What fills the looked-at person with horror, Sartre suggests, is not only the sense that the Other has made him into an object and destroyed his sense of objectivity. It’s also that in making the looked-at person into an object the Other has an epistemological advantage over him. For as unreflective consciousness, the looked-at person is an object for the other but not for himself. Furthermore, the accuracy of the Other’s Look—its epistemological power—is confirmed by the looked-at person’s shameful reaction to it. In other words, the looked-at person feels horror in large part because he feels that the Other in a split second has gained knowledge of who he is, knowledge that he himself lacks. As Sartre puts it,

  The Other looks at me and as such he holds the secret of my being, he knows what I am. Thus the profound meaning of my being is outside of me, imprisoned in an absence. The Other has the advantage over me. (473)

  The Other merely looks at me, and he “has the advantage over me.” The Look itself is instantly imprisoning.

  There is, however, a way out of this prison, a way to escape this sense of being pinned by the Other’s consciousness. What is necessary is that I explicitly stake a claim to being a subject. Now, the Other himself became a subject by employing the Look and thereby turning the entire world into a world of objects for-himself. And since I’m fundamentally no different from the Other, my claiming the mantle of subjectivity (of being-a-subject) turns out to require simply that I Look back at him and thereby reduce him to an object in my world (see, e.g., 387). In so doing, I instantly reduce his subjectivity to “a simple property of the object considered” (384). And “in this way I recover myself, for I can not be an object for an object” (384). So my claiming my own subjectivity, which for Sartre demands my destroying my sense of myself as an object, also necessitates that the Other be reduced in my eyes to an object.

  The problem, of course, is that this reduction isn’t stable, since the Look can always in principle be returned, like a tennis ball during a volley. This means that for Sartre the confrontation between self-consciousnesses is not something that happens once and for all, either at the level of history or of a single human life, nor is it something that concerns only presocial beings. To the contrary, Sartre takes the radical view that the scenario he understands Hegel to be laying out in the master-slave dialectic depicts the mode of social relationships among human beings. We are all constantly under siege, constantly at each others’ throats:

  My constant concern is to contain the Other within his objectivity, and my relations with the Other-as-object are essentially made up of ruses designed to make him remain an object. But one look on the part of the Other is sufficient to make all these schemes collapse and to make me experience once more the transfiguration of the Other. (394)

  The failure of my ruses, the collapse of my schemes, the transfiguration of the Other at my expense—these are the marks and features of what Sartre calls hell. The only way to avoid this hell is ceaselessly to return the Look.

  Sartre’s idea that, to put things in Hegel’s terminology, every person is at every instant in every one of his or her relationships with others either a slave or a master seems to suggest that our ordinary conceptions of ourselves as beings capable of reciprocity, if not friendship—if not love—are grossly inaccurate. But how, then, does Sartre account for our ordinary understanding of the possibilities we have for mutually productive relationships? We find an answer to this question in the third chapter of the section of Being and Nothingness entitled “Being-for-Others,” the first chapter of which (“The Existence of Others”) has been the focus of my explication of Sartre’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic thus far. Let us recall that in that first chapter Sartre suggests that there are two possible responses to the Look, shame and pride, and that the response of pride is by definition a manifestation o
f bad faith. Furthermore, he suggests, there are two possible responses to the shame provoked by the Other’s Look: I can either allow myself to be fixed by the gaze, a caving-in which, in amounting to a denial of my own subjectivity, is also in bad faith; or I can “turn back upon the Other so as to make an object out of him in turn, since the Other’s object-ness destroys my object-ness for him” (473). Now, in chapter 3, Sartre identifies another possible response to the Look, a response that is not, or at least not obviously, a product of bad faith. This response is to attempt to “identify myself” with the Other’s freedom, a freedom I recognize as grounding the self revealed to me by the Other’s gaze (474). For it is in his freedom, his capacity as what Sartre, following Hegel, calls “for-itself”—that is, his capacity as a subject, which for Sartre means his capacity to act—it is in this freedom that the Other has turned me into an object that is for-him.

  To “identify” with the Other’s freedom involves, first, acknowledging this object to be myself, acknowledging that I am the “in-itself” the Other’s Look takes me to be. But I can accept myself as this “in-itself” only insofar as the Other, in his freedom, is himself enamored of it, that is, of me, as he sees me. I therefore try to get the Other to devote his freedom to me, to be the epitomizing object in his universe, to be the limit toward which his freedom reaches—to love me, at least in Sartre’s sense of the word. Indeed, Sartre claims that attempting to identify myself with the Other’s freedom is the “ideal of love, its motivation and it end” (477). If the “me” that the Other reveals through his look is a “me” constituted through and through by the Other’s love, a love that he gives freely, then for me to accept that “in-itself’ as myself is effectively for me to identify with the Other’s freedom. And it is thus, says Sartre, that I imagine that