How do we know that there are other subjects in the world? And how do we know ourselves as selves? Sartre thinks that, in order to answer these two questions, we need to think about the way that others structure our experiences through the scene that he calls the look. So imagine you’re in a park and you’re alone and you’re walking along. You’re seeing grass, you’re seeing benches, et cetera. And then suddenly you see another person walking. Now for Sartre, the other person is fundamentally different from the other things that you have encountered so far in the park. They’re different from the grass, the benches, the trees, because they appear to you as a center of their own experience. Sartre says in seeing the other person, I feel the world stolen away from me. It’s almost as if there is a sink hole of being. Because as much as I like to think of myself as the organizing center of the world, as it turns out, there’s somebody else who is the center of their own world, and this, he thinks is a fundamentally threatening experience. So our first encounters with others for start are fundamentally the site of conflict. It’s not a warm, fuzzy feeling of being together.
Sartre’s theory believes that we need to think about the way that others structure our experiences through the scene that he calls the look. As much as we like to think of ourselves as the organizing center of the world, it turns out there’s somebody else who is the center of their own world, and Sartre thinks this is a fundamentally threatening experience. So our first encounters with others for start are fundamentally the site of conflict.
