(“L’enfer c’est les autres”).^10 This has been taken as the epitaph on
the tomb of his social philosophy.
It is a common philosophical argument for the so-called “existence of
other minds” to reason from an analogy between our personal experience
to similar experiences in other “subjects.” Simply stated, as I feel pain
when someone steps on my foot, so do they have a similar experience
when I step on theirs. I am gaining access to their “inner” state by the
weakest form of argument – from analogy. But Sartre correctly notes
that the “probability” that such an argument yields, cannot warrant the
certitude that we enjoy regarding the existence of the Other. Others,
recognizing that our certitude of the “inner” thoughts and feelings
of others surpasses the limits of simple analogies, appeal to an kind of
affective “sympathy” or “feeling with” that is immediate and implicit in
our social interchange. Sartre will adopt this thesis with his acceptance
of “comprehension” as already noted. In fact, he considers our “pre-
ontological comprehension” of the Other’s existence and the certainty
it provides as indicative of “a sort ofcogito” concerning the Other: “It is
thiscogito,” he insists, “which we must bring to light by specifying its
structures and determining its scope and its laws” (BN 251 ).
Admittedly, comprehension becomes more important to his dialectical
reasoning later in his life, where it is called upon to skirt the negative
character of the looking/looked-at model of social relations. But inBN
the context is Cartesian and so is the challenge: how do I justify my
awareness of the other as subject, that is, as Other, when I seem to have
isolated myself in the confines of the Cogito? It is characteristic of
Sartrean phenomenology that he will approach this problem via our
experience of shame consciousness. Here mind and body are conjoined,
as it were, by the presence of an Other. By what one could call an “eidetic
reduction” (the imaginary variation of an example to yield the intuitive
grasp of an essence or intelligible contour), he “brings us to see,” as
Husserl would say, the essence of shame consciousness, namely, that
“shame is shame of oneself before the Other” (BN 222 ). This self–Other
relation is “contingently necessary”: that is, though it is necessary for my
status as an object, the Other is as contingent as I am. It is conceivable
(^10) Though it premiered two years later,Huis Closwas written in two weeks during the fall of
1943 (see Hayman,Writing Against, chronology, xix).
206 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness