that I could be existing in a solipsistic “world.” Hence the relation must
be one ofbeingand not simply of knowledge.
Important consequences follow from this insight – above all that the
appearance of the Other “has established me in a new type of being
[being-for Others] which can support new qualifications” (BN 222 ). But
first let us consider the classic “argument” that Sartre mounts to make his
point. It is based on his thesis that “We encounter the Other; we do not
constitute him,” neither do we “deduce” his existence (BN 250 ). And if
our encounter is with another subject (for-itself), it is going to imply a
certain clash of nihilations; like the approach of the negative poles of two
magnets, these two consciousnesses must be united and separated by an
internal negation.^11 This is the ontological source of Sartre’s insistence
that whatever totalization I undertake, whatever social whole I form with
Others, will always be a “detotalized” totality – whether individually or
collectively. Even the dialectic of History to which he will refer years later
will be a “dialectic with holes”; that is, “a totalization with pockets
of irreducible individual consciousness-freedom.”^12
“The Look (Le Regard)”
This famous case, I said, can be considered a kind of “eidetic reduction,”
a Schelerian argument by example, a paradigm case. It instantiates
Sartre’s psychological insights and descriptive powers naturally apt for
phenomenological philosophy. Picture someone kneeling at the door as
he looks through the keyhole at a couple who are unaware of his presence.
Shifting to the first person, Sartre continues:
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. They are in no wayknown;Iam myacts and
hence they are in themselves their whole justification. I am pure consciousnessof
things, and things, caught up in the circuit of my selfness, offer to me their
potentialities as the proof of my non-thetic consciousness (of) my own possibilities.
(^11) SeeBN 283 : “We need not understand by this that a Self comes to dwell in our consciousness
but that selfness is reinforced by arising as a negation of another selfness and that this
reinforcement is positively apprehended as the continuous choice of selfness by itself asthe
12 sameselfness and asthis very selfness.” It is our project, not substance, that confers our identity.
NE 459. SeeSFHRii: 47 – 49 , “A Dialectic with Holes in It: The Strike.”
“The Look (Le Regard)” 207