Although I'm now rather engrossed in my trust project, I did say I'd write a bit about Sartre's 'being for others'.
This adds another dimension to the bad faith dilemma.
To recap, being for-itself (pour-soi) is the mode of existence of consciousness, consisting in its own activity and purposive nature - roughly, then, what came under the heading of transcendence; being in-itself (en-soi) is the self-sufficient, lumpy, contingent being of ordinary things, or facticity.
Being for others takes us into the realm of social relations. Heidegger used the phrase 'being with others'; Sartre's phrase sounds rather paranoid, bringing associations of manipulation, objectification and so on.
Philosophers have suggested that we can only be aware of our own consciousness, not of the consciousness of others. We have to accept that they too are conscious, by, essentially, a leap of faith. It's something we can't prove. Philosophers have tried. Mill said that by noticing how one's own body behaves and then watching other people's bodies, one proceeds by analogy. This is fairly unsatisfactory. Even if we did know others were definitely conscious, who knows if what we see as green is the same as what anyone else means when they say green?
Hegel says we only become conscious of ourselves only in confrontation with others. We relate to them in accordance with our need for their recognition. He says consciousness, self-consciousness and the consciousness of others is all made apparent as one package. And Sartre follows this: we become conscious of ourselves by being for others. It comes not from observation on our part but from the experience of being looked at.
As mentioned in the previous post on Sartre, shame is a key experience: here we know that we exist and that others exist. When we are looked at we are 'caught', 'objectified'.
Say I was seen in one of the 'being bad' moments of my life - stealing a book from a shop. If caught in the act, I would have felt great shame - it would 'wake' me out of the 'facticity' of the moment. As I picked up the book, I'd have been aware of 'book', 'bag-to-slip-book-into', 'door-to-get-out-of'. Once seen by the other, that all changes and I 'see myself' as thief because the other is 'seeing me' as thief. I would be thrown into self-consciousness, self-reflection and into seeing myself as the other sees me.
Now, if I decide to 'accept' that label, thief, I would be in bad faith. For that act, which is all the store guard knows of me (it could be what she sees as my 'essence'), is not all I know of myself. I am not that essence - I am also student, animal-lover, vegetarian, coffee-drinker, liberal and so on. I am also all the things I want to be - my transcendence.
One interesting issue that arises from all this is that one can start to internalise these judgments. Moral education is the increasing tendency to 'catch oneself' in the act - this is how the conscience develops. Indeed, in Christopher Boehm's Moral Origins, from which I got all that stuff about egalitarian hunter gatherers, this plays a critical role: members of the group come to police themselves through internalised conscience rather than acting thoughtlessly and being shamed by the group.
For Sartre, though, being for others is being pinned and objectified by the judgments of others. And, in a sense, we are always on trial - being judged by others and by the internalised conscience-directed judgments of ourselves.
Note how Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in attacking herd-behaviour, in valuing the individual, seek to dismiss these concerns. But Sartre says we cannot be indifferent. Others' judgments of us are as much a part of our identity as individuals as are our facticity and transcendence.
Of course, wholly accepting what others think of us as the truth, defining ourselves in that way, is a failure to take responsibility for our own existence - an act of bad faith. But so too would denying that the views of others play any part. We cannot divorce ourselves from the social. Sartre says this is not dependent on mere psychological factors (some people are more sensitive than others), it is an integral part of being human - we are social creatures in this rather disturbing sense that we cannot avoid being objectified and judged by others. We are guilty either of failing to live up to others' expectations of us or guilty of failing to exceed the limited expectations they set for us and aiming for the expectations we set for ourselves.
So now there is this three-way tension - all three pulling us, compromising each other.
He sees our relationship with others is always conflict. We are always trying to set aside the judgments they make of us or seeking to manipulate those judgments in accordance with the view we hold of ourselves. It's a battle between who can control whose judgment of the other.
So, this, stripped from Robert Solomon's Great Courses series No Excuses, is all somewhat depressing, no?
I don't think it's an invalid position. It certainly makes sense and has a kind of intuitive appeal - particularly if one is inclined to be either over-anxious or competitive, both of which I am. However, I do think that it fails to take account of other aspects of the human condition which, in my view, are just as natural, as 'essential'. Like sympathy/empathy/compassion. There has been enough work done in the intervening 75 years to suggest that such a trait is part of our inheritance (primate studies and developmental psychology). Sartre's view thus seems to me to be one-sided and, in the societal conditions in which we find ourselves (see the posts on inequality, scarcity, victimhood and populism, for example) buying into this one-dimensional analysis would be detrimental. I think it helps to explain difficulties, but it offers no solutions and that is a failing.
Notably, I would suggest that in recognising one's self-consciousness when one sees the other's consciousness, whereas Sartre sees this as evidence that one is always objectified by others, why not assume that in return the other is also recognising one's own self-consciousness, and thus is seeing one as another subject? I think he does get on to this, but this to me is the important factor: in interactions, especially face-to-face (eye-to-eye), each sees the other as subject and object, the self as subject and object. It becomes relational and intimate. Or it could do - if we weren't so focused on our own integrity.
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