[From the translator]
We present a characteristic and immediately fascinating excerpt from the third part (“Being-for-another”) of Sartre’s lengthy treatise “Being and Nothingness” (1943). The treatise arose as a free psychodramatizing development of Husserl's and Heidegger's thought on the basis of French personalism. The placement of phenomenological and fundamental ontological analysis on the plane of individual consciousness and clarification of the relationship between individuals was predetermined by Sartre’s anthropocentrism. For him, there is nothing in the world more significant than a human being, who with painful effort creates being out of nothing, so as not to suffocate in the emptiness of this latter. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the sphere of intensified consciousness with its attempts to drive itself towards creative existence seems suffocatingly cramped next to the bottomless expanse of Nothing, in the “bright night” of which Being lurks. Heidegger preferred a demonstrative rejection of these very terms to the prospect of entering into heated post-war debates about man, his humanism, his creativity and his problems. Heidegger's indirect response to Sartre's version of existential analytics was Letter on Humanism (1946).
Translation according to edition: Sartre J.-P. La première attitude envers autrui: I’amour, le langage, le masochisme.- In: Sartre J.-P. L'être et le neant. P.: Gallimard, 1966, p. 431–447.
What is true for me is true for others. While I am trying to free myself from the other's grasp, the other is trying to free myself from my grasp; while I am trying to subdue the other, the other is trying to subdue me. This is not at all about some kind of one-sided relationship with some object-in-itself, but about mutual and moving relationships. The following descriptions must therefore be viewed in light of the conflict. Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.
If we start from the primary revelation of the other as a gaze, then we must admit that we perceive our elusive being-for-another in the form of possession. I am possessed by another: the gaze of another manipulates my body in its nakedness, forces it into the light, fashions it, brings it out of uncertainty, sees it in a way that I will never see it. The Other holds the secret: the secret of what I am. He gives me existence and thereby owns me, I am possessed by him, and this possession of me by him is nothing more and no less than his consciousness of possessing me. And I, recognizing my objectivity, feel that he has such a consciousness. In terms of consciousness, the other for me is both the thief of my being and the one thanks to whom the being that is my being “has.” This is how I come to understand this ontological structure: I am responsible for my being-for-others, but I myself am not its basis; my being-for-another thus appears in the form of an accidental givenness, for which, however, I am responsible, and the other lays the foundation for my being insofar as this being has the form of an “existent”; but the other is not responsible for it, although he creates it according to his own free will, in his free transcendence and with its forces. So to the extent that I reveal myself to myself as responsible for my being, I win back for myself the being that, in fact, I already am; that is, I want to conquer it or, in more precise terms, I am a project of conquering my being for myself. This thing, my being, appears to me as my being, but from a distance, like the food of Tantalus; I want to reach out to grab her and place her on the foundation of my own freedom. In fact, if my being-object, on the one hand, is an unbearable accident and pure “possession” of me by another person, then, on some other hand, this being of mine is, as it were, an indication of what I am obliged to conquer and justify as my own reason. But this is impossible to imagine otherwise than by appropriating to myself the freedom of another. It turns out that my project of reconquering myself is essentially a project of absorbing another. For all that, this project must leave the nature of the other intact. In other words: 1) Trying to absorb the other, I nevertheless do not cease to affirm the other, that is, I do not cease to deny my identity with the other: after all, if the other, the basis of my being, dissolves in me, then my being-for-another will evaporate . If, therefore, I project to bring about union with the other, then this means that I project to absorb the otherness of the other as such, as my own possibility. For me, the point is, in fact, to give my being the ability to absorb the point of view of another. The goal, however, is not to acquire just another abstract cognitive ability. After all, I project to assign to myself not just the category of another: such a category is unknown and even unthinkable. No, starting from the concrete, hard-won and felt experience of another, I want to absorb this concrete other into myself as an absolute reality, in its otherness. 2) The Other whom I try to assimilate is in no way an object-Other. Or, if you like, my project of incorporation of the other is in no way identical with my reconquest of my being-for-itself, my true self, and overcoming the transcendence of the other by realizing my own possibilities. I do not at all intend to destroy my own objectivity by objectifying the other, which would be tantamount to ridding me of my being-for-another; quite the contrary, I want to assimilate the other as the other-looking-at-me, and such a project of assimilation includes an increased recognition of my being-under-the-other's gaze. In a word, I completely identify myself with my being-under-the-gaze in order to preserve the freedom of the other looking at me, which is external to me, and since my being-object is my only relation to another, in so far this being-object turns out to be the only instrument I have for my appropriation of someone else's freedom. Thus, in terms of reaction to the failure of the third ecstasy, my for-itself wants to identify itself with the freedom of the other, acting as a guarantor of its being-in-itself. To be different in oneself is an ideal that always concretely appears in the form of absorbing this other into oneself - this is the primary content of relations to another; in other words, over my being-for-other hangs the shadow of some absolute being, which would remain itself, being another, and another, being itself, and which, freely giving itself as another its being-by itself and as its own being-other , would be no less than the being of ontological proof, that is, God. This ideal will remain unrealizable if I do not overcome the original contingency of my relationship to the other, that is, the fact that there is no relation of internal negativity between the negation by virtue of which the other becomes different in relation to me, and the negation by virtue of which I become to others for others. We have seen that this contingency is irresistible: it is a fact of my relationship with another, just as my body is a fact of my being-in-the-world. Unity with another is virtually impossible. It is also legally unfeasible, because the assimilation of being-for-oneself and the other within the same transcendence would necessarily entail the disappearance of the other’s features of his otherness. Thus, the condition for me to project the identification of the other with me is my constant denial that I am this other. Finally, this project of unification is a source of conflict, since I perceive myself as an object for the other and project to assimilate him, remaining such an object, while he perceives me as an object among other objects of the world and in no way projects to absorb me into himself. It is necessary, therefore, since being for another presupposes a double internal negation, to act on that internal negation by virtue of which the other transcends my transcendence and forces me to exist for the other, that is, to act on the freedom of the other.
This unrealizable ideal, to the extent that it towers over my project of conquering myself in the presence of others, cannot be likened to love insofar as love is an enterprise, i.e. an organic collection of projects to deploy my own capabilities. However, he is the ideal of love, its driving principle and its goal, its own content. Love as a primary relationship to another is a set of projects through which I intend to realize this content.
These projects put me in direct connection with the freedom of another. It is in this sense that love is conflict. In fact, we noted that the freedom of the other is the basis of my being. But precisely because I exist at the expense of the freedom of another, I am, as it were, not provided with anything, I am under threat from this freedom; she freezes my being and forces me to be, she endows me with contents and takes them away from me, because of her my being turns out to be an eternal passive evasion from myself. Without any responsibility to me and unattainable, this protean freedom to which I am attached can, for its part, bind me to a thousand different ways of being. My project of reconquering my being cannot be realized except if I take possession of this freedom and reduce it to a freedom that is subordinate to my freedom. At the same time, this is the only way in which I can act on that free negation of interiority, by virtue of which the Other constitutes me into the Other, i.e., by virtue of which the paths for the future identification of the Other with me open up before me. To clarify this, we could turn to a problem that seems purely psychological: why does the lover want to be loved? Indeed, if Love were a pure desire for physical possession, it could in many cases be easily satisfied. For example, Proust's hero, who settles his mistress with him, can see her and possess her at any time of the day and managed to put her in a position of complete material dependence, should have been cured of his anxiety. However, on the contrary, as you know, he is consumed by concern. Consciousness is the space into which Albertine escapes from Marcel even when he is next to her, and that is why he knows no peace except in the moments when he sees her sleeping. It is clear, therefore, that love wants to captivate “consciousness.” But why does he want to? And how?
The concept of “property”, so often used to explain love, in fact cannot be primary. Why should I want to appropriate another into my property? I need this exactly to the extent that my being turns out to be a function of the Other. However, this presupposes a very specific method of appropriation: we want to take possession of the freedom of the other as such. And not through the will to power: the tyrant mocks love; he's had enough of fear. If he seeks the love of his subjects, it is only for the sake of politics, and if he finds some more economical way of enslaving them, he immediately seizes on it. He who wants to be loved, on the contrary, does not want the beloved being to be enslaved. He is not attracted by the prospect of becoming an object of oppressive, mechanical passion. He does not want to have a machine gun, and if you intend to insult him, you only have to portray to him the passion of the beloved as the result of psychological determinism: the lover will feel his love and his being inferior. If Tristan and Isolde are driven mad by some love potion, they become less interesting; and it happens that the complete enslavement of a beloved being kills the love of the lover. He missed the mark: if the beloved has turned into an automaton, the lover remains alone. Thus, the lover does not want to possess the beloved as one possesses any property; he dreams of a very special kind of appropriation. He wants to have freedom precisely as freedom.
But, on the other hand, he cannot be satisfied with such, in general, a sublime form of freedom, as a free and voluntary obligation. Who will be satisfied with love that acts as pure fidelity to a once-given oath? Who would agree to be told: “I love you, because I, by my free will, committed myself to loving you and do not want to change my word; I love you for the sake of my loyalty to myself”? Therefore, the lover demands vows - and vows irritate him. He wants to be loved by freedom - and demands that this freedom, as freedom, should no longer be free. He wants the freedom of the Other to give itself the image of love - and not just at the beginning of a love affair, but at every moment of it - and at the same time he wants this freedom to be captivated by him, the lover, precisely in its quality of freedom , so that she returns to herself, as in madness, as in a dream, and desires her captivity. And this plan must be a free and at the same time enchanted surrender of oneself into our hands. In love, we do not want from the other either the determinism of passionate obsession or unattainable freedom: we want freedom that plays the role of passionate obsession and is itself captured by its role. And in relation to himself, the lover claims to be not the cause of such a radical modification of freedom, but the unique and privileged reason for it. In fact, as soon as he wishes to be the cause, he immediately makes the beloved simply a thing among the things of the world, a kind of instrument that can be transcended. This is not the essence of love. In Love, the lover wants, on the contrary, to be “everything in the world” for the beloved; this means that he places himself next to the world; he concentrates in himself and symbolizes the whole world, he is this, which embraces all the other “these,” he is an object and agrees to be an object. But, on the other hand, he wants to be an object in which the freedom of another is ready to drown; an object in which the other agrees to find, as it were, his second reality, his being and the meaning of his being; the ultimate object of transcendence, an object, in the pursuit of which the transcendence of the Other transcends all other objects, but which itself is in no way amenable to transcendence for it. And first of all, the lover wants the freedom of the Other to close itself in a certain circle; that is, so that at every moment of conscious acceptance of the beloved as the insurmountable limit of one’s transcendence, the freedom of the Other is driven by the already accomplished fact of internal acceptance. He wants to be chosen as a target that, in fact, has already been chosen in advance. This allows us to finally understand what, in fact, the lover demands from the beloved: he does not want to act on the freedom of the Other, but wants to be a priori the objective limit of this freedom, that is, the same original given as itself, and from the very first steps to act as the limit that she must accept precisely in order to become free. Thus, he wants, as it were, to “glue”, to bind the freedom of another by itself: this limit built into freedom is essentially a given, and the very appearance of this given as the limit of freedom means that freedom comes to exist within this given, being its own prohibition to transcend the latter. And such a prohibition is necessary for the lover at the same time as a fact of life, that is, as something passively experienced - in a word, as an immutable circumstance - and at the same time as a freely made decision. The prohibition must be a freely made decision, because it inextricably merges with the formation of freedom, which chooses itself as freedom. But it must also be a simple fact of life, because it must be an always present imperative, a fact that permeates the freedom of the Other right down to its core; and this is expressed psychologically in the demand that the free decision to love me, made in advance by the lover, lurks as a fascinating driving force within his conscious free affection.
We now grasp the meaning of this demand: facticity, destined to become a meaningful limit for the Other (in my demand to be loved by him) and which should ultimately turn out to be his own facticity, is my facticity. Precisely to the extent that I am an object that begins to exist in the eyes of the Other, I must be the limit inherent in his very transcendence - so that the Other, ascending to being, gives me the existence of an insurmountable absolute, not as a destroyer for - oneself-being, but as being-for-another-in-the-middle of the world. Thus, the desire to be loved is tantamount to “infecting” the other with one’s own facticity; tantamount to the desire to force him to constantly recreate me as a condition of his freedom, freely subordinating and obliging himself; and at the same time tantamount to the desire for this freedom to give life to a fact, and for the fact to rise above freedom. If such a result could be achieved, then I would be provided, first of all, by the consciousness of the Other. In fact, the reason for my anxiety and my shame is that I perceive and feel myself in my being-for-others as something that another can always step over in the pursuit of something else - as a simple object of evaluative judgment, a simple means, a simple instrument. The source of my anxiety is that I have to, although unwillingly, take upon myself the existence imposed on me by others in his absolute freedom: “Only God knows what I am for him! God knows what he thinks of me." This means: “God knows what he makes of my being”; and I am haunted by this being, with which I am threatened one day with meeting at some crossroads, which is so alien to me and which, however, is my being, although, as I well understand, to meet it, despite all my efforts, I'll never succeed. But if the Other loves me, I become unsurpassable, and this means that I turn out to be an absolute goal; thereby I am saved from being used; my existence in the midst of the world becomes an exact correspondence to my own transcendence, because my independence is absolutely guaranteed. The object that the other forces me to be is now an object-transcendence, an absolute point of reference around which all things-instruments of the world are grouped as simple means. At the same time, being the absolute limit of freedom, that is, the absolute source of all values, I am protected from any depreciation: I am an absolute value. And to the extent that I accept my being-for-others, I accept myself as such a value. Thus, to want to be loved means to want to place oneself outside any system of evaluations posited by others as a condition for any evaluation and as an objective basis for all values. This requirement forms a common theme of conversations between lovers both when, as in The Narrow Gate, the one who wants to be loved identifies himself with the ascetic morality of self-overcoming and dreams of becoming the embodiment of the ideal limit of such self-overcoming, and then when, as happens more often , the lover demands that the beloved actually sacrifice traditional morality for him, asking whether the beloved will betray his friends for him, “will he steal for him,” “will he kill for him,” etc. From such a point of view, my being inevitably eludes the gaze of the lover; or, rather, it becomes the object of a gaze of a different structure: it is not I who should now be considered against the background of the world as “this is this” among other “this”, but, on the contrary, the world should be revealed thanks to me. Indeed, to the extent that the formation of freedom brings the world into existence, I, as the limiting condition of this formation, also turn out to be the condition for the emergence of the world. I turn out to be a being whose function is to bring into existence forests and waters, cities, fields, other people, in order to hand them over to another who will build a world out of them, just as in matronymic societies a mother receives titles and a name not for this purpose. in order to keep them for themselves, but in order to immediately pass them on to their children. In a sense, if I want to be loved, then I am an object by whose commission the world begins to exist for another; and in some other sense I am the world. Instead of being “this thing”, considered against the background of the world, I become that object-background in the light of which the world is revealed. My position is thereby ensured: the gaze of another no longer pierces me through and through, turning me into a finite thing; it no longer captures my being simply as it is; he can no longer regard me as unattractive, as short, as base, because these features necessarily represent a limitation of the fact of my being and the perception of my finite thingness as precisely finite thingness. Of course, my possibilities remain transcended possibilities, “extinguished possibilities”; but I have all the possibilities; I am all the extinguished possibilities of the world; thereby I cease to be a being that can be understood from other beings or from my own actions; I demand that the one who loves with his inner gaze sees in me such a given, which absorbs absolutely everything and serves as the starting point for understanding any beings and any actions. We can say, slightly distorting the famous stoic formula, that “a loved one is able to do a triple somersault.” The ideal of the sage and the ideal of the one who wants to be loved really coincide in that both want to be an object-totality, accessible to such a global intuition that perceives actions in the world of the beloved and in the world of the sage as partial structures to be interpreted on the basis of totality . And just as wisdom appears as a state achieved through absolute metamorphosis, in the same way the freedom of another must be absolutely transformed in order for me to achieve the status of the beloved.
Until now, this description could coincide with Hegel's famous description of the relationship between master and slave. The lover wants to be for the beloved what the Hegelian master is for the slave. But here the analogy ends, because Hegel’s master demands the slave’s freedom only in a marginal and, so to speak, implicit way, while the lover first of all demands a free decision from the beloved. For another to love me, I must be freely chosen by him as his beloved. We know that in the common terminology of love, the concept of “chosen one” is attached to the beloved. This choice, however, should not be relative, made in relation to the circumstances: the lover becomes upset and feels inferior when he thinks that his beloved has chosen him from among others. “Yeah, so if I hadn’t come to this city, if I hadn’t visited so-and-so, you wouldn’t have met me, you wouldn’t have loved me?” This thought torments the lover: his love turns out to be one of many others, limited by the facticity of the lover and his own facticity, by the random circumstances of the meeting: it becomes love in the world, an object that presupposes the existence of the world and, perhaps, in turn existing for some other objects . He demands something completely different, however, expressing his demand in awkward formulas that smack of “materialism”; he says: “We are made for each other,” or perhaps he uses the expression “soul mate.” This requires interpretation: he knows very well that the words “made for each other” refer to the original choice. This choice may come from God as a being with absolute choice; however, God here simply designates the ultimateity of the absolute requirement. After all, the lover essentially demands one thing - that the loved one make him the object of his absolute choice. This means that all being-in-the-world that belongs to the beloved must be loving-being. And since the other is the basis of my being-object, I demand from him that the free becoming of his being has the sole and absolute purpose of his choice of me, that is, that he freely choose for himself an existence designed to justify my objectivity and my facticity. Thus my facticity is “saved.” She is no longer the unthinkable and irresistible given that I was: she is that for which another freely decides to exist; she is the goal he sets for himself. I have infected him with my facticity, but since he has become infected with it by free decision, he returns it to me as accepted and sanctioned: he is its foundation in the sense that it is his goal. In the light of this love, I already perceive my alienation and my own facticity differently. She is now - in her being-for-others - no longer a fact, but a right. My existence is ensured by the fact that it is necessary. This existence, as far as I take it upon myself, becomes a pure blessing. I exist because I give myself gifts. These veins on my hands, the object of love, exist thanks to my kindness. How good I am because I have eyes, hair, eyebrows and I tirelessly give them away in an abundance of generosity in response to the tireless desire into which another, by his free choice, turns. Whereas before, when we were not yet loved, we were disturbed by this unjustified, unjustifiable prominence that was our existence, while before we felt “superfluous,” now we feel that our existence is accepted and unconditionally approved in its smallest details by absolute freedom, brought to life by my very existence - a freedom that is desired by our own freedom. This is the source of the joy of love when it exists: the feeling that our existence is justified.
And at the same time, if a loved one can love us, he is completely ready to be appropriated by our freedom: for that being-loved, which we desire, is already an ontological proof attached to our being-for-others. Our objective essence presupposes the existence of another, and vice versa, it is the freedom of the other that serves as the basis for our essence. If we could internalize this entire system, we would find ourselves justifying ourselves.
This, then, is the real goal of the lover insofar as his love is an enterprise, that is, a projection of himself. Such projection inevitably leads to conflict. In fact, the beloved perceives the lover as an object among many other objects, that is, he sees him against the background of the world, transcends and uses him. Favorite is a look. He is not at all disposed to waste his transcendence in order to set an extreme limit for his superiority, and his freedom - so that it takes itself prisoner. The beloved is not inclined to want to fall in love. The lover must therefore seduce the beloved; and his love is indistinguishable from this enterprise of seduction. By seducing, I am in no way trying to reveal my subjectivity to the other; however, I would still be able to do this only by looking at the other, but with this look I would destroy his subjectivity, whereas it is precisely this that I want to assimilate. To seduce means to take upon oneself completely and as an inevitable risk the burden of one's objectivity for another; means putting yourself under the gaze of another and letting him look at you; means to be exposed to the danger of being seen, without which I cannot gain a foothold for appropriating another to myself based on and through my objectivity. I refuse to leave the sphere in which I experience my objecthood; It is from within this sphere that I now intend to enter the struggle, making myself a fascinating object. In the second part of the book we defined enchantment as a state: it is, we said, the non-thetic consciousness that I am nothing in the presence of being. Seduction aims to evoke in another the consciousness of his own insignificance in the face of a seductive object. By seducing, I intend to act as the fullness of being and force them to recognize myself as such. To do this, I make myself a meaningful object. My actions are intended to point in two directions. On the one hand, in the direction of what is mistakenly called subjectivity and what is rather the depth of objective and hidden being; the act is performed not only for its own sake, no, it points to an endless and cohesive series of other real or possible actions, which together I present as the content of my objective and invisible being. In this way I try to manipulate the transcendence that transcends me, referring it to the infinity of my “extinguished possibilities” precisely in order to show myself as insurmountable in the sense in which only infinity is insurmountable. On the other hand, each of my actions is intended to indicate the maximum thickness of the “possible world” and should present me as connected with the most extensive spheres of this world, regardless of whether I give peace to my beloved and try to act as a necessary mediator between him and the world or simply I demonstrate through my actions my infinitely diverse power over the world (money, influence, connections, etc.) d.). In the first case, I try to act as infinite depth, in the second, I try to identify myself with the world. In such various ways I offer myself as an unsurpassable magnitude. This proposal of mine does not stand on its own feet, it necessarily requires a contribution from the other, it cannot acquire the significance of a fact without the consent of the freedom of the other, which must captivate itself, recognizing itself as nothing in the face of the fullness of my absolute being.
We will be reminded that these various attempts at self-expression presuppose language. We will not object, we will say better: they are the essence of language or, if you like, the fundamental mode of language. For if there are psychological and historical problems concerning the existence, acquisition or use of this or that partial language, then there is no special problem concerning what is called the invention of language. Language is not a phenomenon added to being-for-others; it is originally being-for-another, that is, the fact that some subjectivity is perceived as an object for another. Language could in no way be “invented” in a universe of pure objects, since it initially presupposes a relation to another subject; and in the intersubjectivity of being-for-another there is no need to invent it, because it is already given in the fact of recognition of the Other. Due to the mere fact that, no matter how I act, my freely conceived and executed actions, my projects in the direction of my possibilities have a meaning outside of me, which eludes me and which I perceive as a given external to me, I there is a language. It is in this sense - and in this sense only - that Heidegger is right in declaring that I am what I say. Essentially, this language is not an instinct of an already formed human individual, nor is it an invention of our subjectivity; but it should not be reduced to pure “being-outside-itself” inherent in “here-being.” Language is part of human nature, it is initially a test of what this or that can do for itself out of its being-for-another, and then - going beyond the limits of this test using it to realize my possibilities, which are my possibilities, then there is for the fulfillment of my capabilities to be this or that for others. It is therefore no different from my recognition of the existence of others. The appearance of another in front of me as a gaze directed at me brings to life language as a condition of my being. This primitive language is not necessarily seduction, we will consider its other forms; however, we have already noted that there is no initial position in the face of another and that all positions alternately replace each other, each implicating the other. But on the contrary, seduction does not presuppose any pre-existing form of language: it is entirely the embodiment of language; this means that language can reveal itself completely and immediately through seduction as the primary way of self-expression. It goes without saying that by language we understand any phenomenon of expression, and not just an articulate word, which is already a derivative and secondary way of expression, whose formation can constitute an object of historical research. In particular, when seducing, the purpose of language is not to let you know, but to make you feel.
However, in this first attempt to find the enchanting language, I proceed blindly, since I am guided only by the abstract and empty form of my objectivity-for-others. I cannot even imagine what effect my gestures and my poses will have, because each time they will be perceived and justified by the freedom that transcends them, and they can only have meaning if this freedom gives them such. The “meaning” of my expressions always eludes me; I never know for sure whether I designate what I want to designate, or even whether I designate anything at all; in this particular situation, I would need the ability to read the thoughts of another, which is basically impossible. And since I do not know what I am really expressing to another, I construct my speech as an incomplete phenomenon that eludes me. At the moment of expression, I can only guess at the meaning of what I express, that is, ultimately, at the meaning of what I am, because from the perspective we are considering, expressing and being are one and the same thing. The Other is always in front of me, he is present and experienced by me as an authority that gives meaning to my speech. Every expression, every gesture, every word is, on my part, a concrete experience of the alienating reality of the other. It is not only a psychopath who can say, as, for example, in the case of influence psychoses, “my thoughts are being stolen from me.” No, the very fact of expression is the theft of thought, since thought needs the help of alienating freedom in order to be constituted as an object. This is why the primary aspect of language, insofar as I use it to address another, is the sacred. Indeed, the sacred object is an object of the world, pointing to transcendence beyond the world. Language reveals for me the freedom of the one who silently listens to me, that is, his transcendence.
But at the same time, I remain a meaningful object for another - as I always have been. There is no way for me, while remaining in my objectivity, to let others know about my transcendence. Postures, expressions and words always point to another only to other postures, other expressions, other words. Thus, language remains for another simply a certain property inherent in a magical object, and this magical object itself: it is a certain action at a distance, the effect of which is precisely known to the other. Thus, a word is sacred when I use it, and magical when another hears it. Thus, my tongue is no more known to me than my body is as another person sees it. I can neither hear myself speak nor see my smile. The problem of language is exactly parallel to the problem of the body, and descriptions that are suitable in one case are also suitable in the other.
Meanwhile, charm, even if it happens to cause fascination in another, in itself does not necessarily cause love. A speaker, actor, tightrope walker can enchant - but this does not mean that we love him. Of course, we can't take our eyes off him; but it still only stands out against the background of the world, and enchantment does not yet make the enchanting object the final goal of transcendence; on the contrary, it is transcendence. When will the loved one in turn become the lover?
The answer is simple: when he builds a project to be loved. The other-object itself is never powerful enough to produce self-love. If love has as its ideal the appropriation of the other as an other, that is, as a subjectivity looking at me, then this ideal will become my project only on the basis of my meeting with the other-subject, not with the other-object. Charm itself can only impart to the other-object trying to seduce me the character of a precious object that would be good to possess; perhaps she will even force me to take great risks to win him; but this desire to appropriate one object among the objects of the world cannot be confused with love. Love can therefore be born in the beloved only from the experience of alienation he experiences and from his flight to another. But again, the beloved, if he is in this position, will turn into a lover only if he undertakes to be loved, that is, if what he wants to take possession of is not the body, but the subjectivity of the other as such. Indeed, the only means he can imagine for carrying out such appropriation is to force himself to love. We see, therefore, that my love is essentially my project to make myself loved. Hence - a new contradiction and a new conflict: each of the lovers is completely a captive of the other, since he is captured by the desire to force him to love himself, rejecting all others; but at the same time, each demands from the other love, which in no way reduces to the “project of being loved.” He demands, in essence, that the other, without striving primarily to be loved, with some kind of inner vision, in contemplative and at the same time affective intuition, sees in his beloved the objective limit of his freedom, the immutable and predetermined basis of his transcendence, the totality existence and supreme value. Love expected from another should not demand anything: it is pure devotion without reciprocity. But just such love cannot exist except in the form of the need of the lover; and if the lover is captivated, then by something completely different: he is captive of his own need - to the extent that love is the need to be loved; he is freedom, which wants to be embodied bodily and needs something outside itself; that is, he is freedom enacting flight to another; freedom, which, precisely as freedom, insists on its alienation: The freedom of the lover, in his very effort to force another to love himself as an object, alienates himself, goes into the body-for-others, that is, comes to existence in the aspect of flight to another; she constantly refuses to appear as a pure self, because such self-affirmation as herself would entail the disappearance of the other as a gaze and the emergence of an other as an object, that is, a state of affairs would arise in which the very possibility of being loved is undermined, for the other is reduced to its objective dimension. This refusal makes freedom dependent on the other, and the other, as subjectivity, becomes the insurmountable limit of freedom of being-for-itself, the supreme and final goal, since it holds the key to the being of the lover. We return here to the ideal of the love enterprise: to alienated freedom. Only it is not the beloved who alienates his freedom, but the one who wants to be loved, and exactly to the extent that he wants to be loved. My freedom alienates itself in the presence of the pure subjectivity of the other, on which my objectivity stands as its foundation; the latter could in no way come to self-alienation in the face of the other-object. A similar self-alienation of the beloved, the dream of the lover, would turn out to be a contradiction in itself, because the beloved can become the basis of the being of the lover, which objectified itself only by fundamentally transcending it in the direction of other objects of the world; it is clear that this transcendence cannot constitute the object beyond which it strives, both as the transcended object and as the ultimate object of all transcendence. Let's say, in a loving couple, everyone wants to be an object for the sake of which the freedom of the other alienates itself in the original intuition; but this intuition, which could be called love in the proper sense of the word, is an inevitably contradictory ideal of being-for-itself; so that each is alienated only to the extent that he requires the alienation of the other. Everyone wants the other to love him, without realizing that to love means to want to be loved and that, thereby, wanting the other to love me, I only want the other to want to force me to love him. Thus, love relationships represent a system of indefinite references, similar to the pure “reflected-reflection” of consciousness, under the ideal sign of love as a value, that is, a system of such a fusion of consciousnesses in which each of them must somehow preserve its otherness... in order to be the basis for another. The point is that consciousnesses are separated by an insurmountable “nothing” - insurmountable because it is both the internal negation of one consciousness by another, and the actual nothingness in the interval between two internal negations. Love is a contradictory effort to overcome actual negation while maintaining internal negation. I demand that the other love me, and I put into action everything I can to carry out my project; but if another loves me, he cuts off my expectations at the root with his very love: I expected that he would lay the foundation for my being, making me a privileged object and preserving himself as pure subjectivity in the face of me; since he loves me, he perceives me as a subject and immerses his objectivity in the face of my subjectivity. The problem of my being-for-others therefore remains unresolved; lovers remain to exist each for themselves in their total subjectivity; nothing comes to their rescue, nothing relieves them of the obligation to maintain their existence for themselves; nothing removes their contingency or saves them from facticity. True, each has at least achieved the point that he no longer feels threatened by the freedom of the other, but everything did not turn out as he thought: he is not threatened at all because the other has made him the ultimate object of his transcendence, but because that the other perceives it as subjectivity and does not want to perceive it differently. Moreover, even this small gain is constantly under attack: firstly, at any moment, each of the consciousnesses can get rid of its chains and suddenly look at the other as an object. Then the spell breaks, the other becomes a means among other means; he is now, of course, an object for another, which is what he wanted to be, but an object-tool, an object constantly transcended; the illusion, the play of mirror reflections that constitutes the concrete reality of love, immediately dissipates. Secondly, in love, each consciousness tries to take refuge in the freedom of the other, handing over to him its being-for-others. This presupposes that the other is beyond the world as pure subjectivity, as the absolute through which the world rises into being. However, as soon as someone else looks at both lovers, each of them begins to feel not only himself, but also the other as an object. The Other thereby ceases to be for me an absolute transcendence that lays the foundation for my being, and turns out to be a transcended transcendence - transcended not by me, but by someone else; and my original attitude towards him, that is, the attitude of me, the beloved being, towards the loving one, freezes as a “extinguished possibility”. This is no longer the experiential relation of the ultimate object of any transcendence to the freedom that grounds it; this is already love-object, a thing completely alienated in relation to a third person. Here is the real reason why lovers want to be alone. The appearance of someone third, no matter who he is, destroys their love. However, actual privacy (we are alone in my room) is in no way legal privacy. In fact, even if no one sees us, we exist for all consciousnesses and we ourselves are aware that we exist for all consciousnesses; it turns out that love, as a fundamental mode of being-for-others, carries in its being-for-others the germ of its destruction. We have just outlined the threefold destructibility of love: firstly, it is essentially deception and a system of endless references, because to love means to want to be loved, that is, to want the other to want me to love him. And the pre-ontological understanding of this deception is present in the love impulse itself; hence comes the eternal dissatisfaction of the lover. Its reason is not the one that is too often talked about, not the unworthiness of the beloved being, but the implicit understanding that the loving insight into me, the lover, grounding me in my objectivity, is an unattainable ideal. The more I am loved, the more surely I lose my being, the more inevitably I return to existence at my own peril and risk, to my own ability to justify my being. Secondly, the awakening of another is always possible; at any moment he can make me an object in his eyes: hence the eternal insecurity of the lover. Thirdly, love is an absolute, constantly transformed by the very fact of the existence of others into something relative. It would be necessary for me to remain alone in the whole world with my beloved for love to retain its character as an absolute point of reference. Hence the constant shame (or pride - which in this case is the same thing) of the lover.
So, my attempts to hide in my objectivity are in vain: my passion will not help me at all; the other sends me, either himself or through others, back to my unjustified subjectivity. Statement of this can provoke complete despair and with it a new attempt to assimilate the other and myself. The ideal will now be something opposite to what we described above: instead of projecting the absorption of the other while preserving his otherness, I will now project my own absorption into the other in order to hide in his subjectivity, getting rid of my own. Such an undertaking will be expressed concretely in the form of a masochistic position: since the other is the basis of my being-for-others, then, having entrusted to another the concern for the foundation of my existence, I will simply become a kind of being-in-itself, relying on his free being. In this case, my own subjectivity turns out to be an obstacle to the fact that another, by an initial act, lays the foundation for my being; It is this subjectivity that I must first of all negate by the decision of my own free will. I try therefore to completely bind myself to my being as an object, I refuse to be anything but an object, I give my selfhood to another; and, since I perceive my object existence with shame, I want to be ashamed and love my shame as a deep sign of my objectivity; since the other takes possession of me as an object through his actual desire, I want to be desired, I shamefully make myself an object of desire. This position would be very similar to love if, instead of trying to become for the other the ultimate object of his transcendence, I did not try, on the contrary, to cause myself to be treated as an object among other objects, as a handy tool; in fact, it is my, not his, transcendence that is to be denied here. I am no longer building projects to capture his freedom; on the contrary, I want this freedom to exist and I want to be absolutely free. So the more definitely I feel that I am being stepped over in the pursuit of other goals, the more I will enjoy the renunciation of my own transcendence. In the limit, I project to be exclusively an object, that is, in a radical sense, a being-in-itself. But since the freedom that absorbs my freedom becomes the basis of this being-in-itself of mine, my being again turns out to be the basis of itself. Masochism, like sadism, is an admission of guilt. Indeed, I am guilty by virtue of the simple fact that I am an object. I am guilty before myself because I have come to terms with my absolute alienation; I am guilty before others because I give them a reason to be guilty if they completely neglect my freedom as such. Masochism is an attempt not to charm another with my objective content, but to charm myself with my own objectivity for others, that is, to force others to make an object out of me so that, in the face of the in-itself that I appear in the eyes of others, I nonthetically perceived my subjectivity as nothing. Masochism can be described as a kind of vertigo - vertigo not in front of a rocky cliff, but in front of the abyss of someone else's subjectivity.
However, masochism as such turns out and cannot help but turn out to be a failure: in fact, in order to charm myself with my objective self, I would have to be able to intuitively perceive this objective self as it is for another, which is in principle impossible. My alienated self remains fundamentally elusive, so that I cannot even begin to fascinate myself with it. The masochist crawls on his knees in vain, shows himself in funny poses, forces himself to be used as a simple inanimate instrument: after all, it is only for another that he is indecent or simply passive, only for another is he susceptible to these states; for himself, he is forever doomed to enter into them, to impose them on himself. Only by virtue of his transcendence is he able to dispose of himself as a transcendent being; and the more persistent his attempts to get used to his objectivity, the deeper he will drown in the consciousness of his subjectivity, right up to painful anxiety. In particular, a masochist who pays a woman to lash him with a whip is, in effect, using her as a tool and thereby placing himself in a position of transcendence in relation to her. It turns out that the masochist still treats the other as an object and transcends him in the direction of his own objectivity. Here we can recall, for example, the torment of Sacher Masoch, who, in order to force him to despise, insult, and humiliate himself, was forced to manipulate the passionate love that women had for him, that is, to influence them precisely from the side with which they felt themselves an object for him. So the objectivity of the masochist in any case eludes him, and it can even happen, and most often it happens, that, trying to fix himself in his objectivity, he encounters the objectivity of another, which against his will releases his subjectivity. Masochism is therefore, in principle, a failure. We will not see anything surprising here if we think that masochism is a “sin” and that sin is, in principle, falling in love with failure. However, we are not faced with the task of describing the initial structures of sin. Suffice it to say that masochism is a constant effort aimed at destroying the subjectivity of the subject by handing it over to another, and that this effort is accompanied by an exhausting and sweet consciousness of failure, so that the subject ultimately begins to strive for this failure as his main goal
Jean-Paul Sartre "Being and Nothingness", volume 2.
If we start from the primary revelation of the other as a gaze, then we must admit that we perceive our elusive being-for-another in the form of possession. I am possessed by another: the gaze of another manipulates my body in its nakedness, forces it into the light, fashions it, brings it out of uncertainty, sees it in a way that I will never see. The Other holds the secret: the secret of what I am. He gives me existence and thereby owns me, I am possessed by him, and this possession of me by him is nothing more and no less than his consciousness of possessing me. This is how I come to understand this ontological structure: I am responsible for my being-for-others, but I myself am not its basis. In fact, if my being-object, on the one hand, is an unbearable accident and pure “possession” of me by another person, then, on some other hand, this being of mine is, as it were, an indication of what I am obliged to conquer and justify as my own. But this cannot be imagined otherwise than by appropriating the freedom of another by me. It turns out that my project of reconquering myself is essentially a project of absorbing the other. For all that, this project must leave the nature of the other intact.
To clarify this, we could turn to a problem that seems purely psychological: why the lover wants to be loved. Indeed, if Love were a pure desire for physical possession, it could in many cases be easily satisfied. For example, Proust's hero, who settles his mistress with him, can see her and possess her at any time of the day and managed to put her in a position of complete material dependence, should have been cured of his anxiety. However, on the contrary, as you know, he is consumed by concern.
The concept of “property,” so often used to explain love, in fact cannot be primary. Why should I want to appropriate another into my property? I need this exactly to the extent that my being turns out to be a function of the Other. However, this presupposes a very specific method of appropriation: we want to take possession of the freedom of the other as such. And not through the will to power: the tyrant mocks love; he's had enough of fear. If he seeks the love of his subjects, it is only for the sake of politics, and if he finds some more economical way to enslave them, he immediately seizes on it. He who wants to be loved, on the contrary, does not want the beloved being to be enslaved. He is not attracted by the prospect of becoming an object of oppressive, mechanical passion. He does not want to have a machine gun, and if you intend to insult him, you only have to portray to him the passion of the beloved as the result of psychological determinism: the lover will feel his love and his being inferior. He missed his target; if the beloved has turned into an automaton, the lover remains alone. Thus, the lover remains alone. Thus, the lover does not want to possess the beloved as one possesses any property; he dreams of a very special kind of appropriation. He wants to have freedom, just like freedom.
But on the other hand, he cannot be satisfied with such, in general, a sublime form of freedom, as a free voluntary obligation. Who will be satisfied with love, which is the pure probability of a vow once made? Who would agree to be told: “I love you, because by my free will I have bound myself to love you and I do not want to change my word; I love you for the sake of my loyalty to myself”? Therefore, the lover demands vows - and vows irritate him. He wants to be loved by freedom - and demands that this freedom, as freedom, should no longer be free. He wants the freedom of the Other to give itself the image of love - and not just at the beginning of a love affair, but at every moment of it - and at the same time he wants this freedom to be captivated by him, the lover, precisely as freedom , so that she returns to herself, as in madness, as in a dream, and desires her captivity. And this plan must be a free and at the same time enchanted surrender of oneself into our hands. In love, we do not want from the other either the determinism of a terrible obsession or an unattainable freedom: we want a freedom that plays the role of a passionate obsession and is itself captured by its role. And in relation to himself, the lover claims to be not the cause of a radical modification of freedom, but a unique and privileged reason for it. In fact, as soon as he wishes to be the cause, he immediately makes the beloved simply a thing among the things of the world, a kind of instrument. This is not the essence of love. In Love, the lover wants, on the contrary, to be “everything in the world” for the beloved; this means that he places himself next to the world; he concentrates in himself and symbolizes his world, he is this, which embraces all the other “these,” he is an object and agrees to be an object.. But, on the other hand, he wants to be an object in which the freedom of another is ready to drown ; an object in which the other agrees to find, as it were, a second reality, his being and the meaning of his being.
This allows us to finally understand what, in fact, the lover demands from the beloved: he does not want to act on the freedom of the Other, but wants to be a priori the objective limit of this freedom, that is, the same original given as itself, and from the very first steps to act as the limit that she must accept precisely in order to become free. And such a prohibition is necessary for the lover at the same time as a fact of life, as something passively experienced - in a word, as an inapplicable circumstance - and at the same time as a freely made decision. The prohibition must be a freely made decision, because it inextricably merges with the formation of freedom, which chooses itself as freedom. But it must also be a simple fact of life, because it must be an always present imperative, a fact that permeates the freedom of the Other right down to its core; and this is expressed psychologically in the demand that the free decision to love me, made in advance by the lover, lurks as a fascinating driving force within his conscious free affection.
Thus, the desire to be loved is tantamount to “infecting” the other with one’s own facticity; tantamount to the desire to force him to constantly recreate me as a condition of his freedom, freely subordinating and obliging himself; and at the same time tantamount to the desire for this freedom to give life to a fact, for a fact to rise above freedom. If such a result could be achieved, then I would be provided, first of all, by the consciousness of the Other. Indeed, the reason for my anxiety and my shame is that I perceive and feel myself in my being-for-another as something like this , over which another can always step over in the pursuit of something else - as a simple object of value judgment, a simple means, a simple instrument. The source of my anxiety is that I have to, albeit involuntarily, take upon myself the existence imposed on me by others in his absolute freedom: “Only God knows what I am for him! God knows what he thinks of me." This means? “God knows what he makes of my being”; and I am haunted by this being, with which I am threatened one day with meeting at some crossroads, which is so alien to me and which, however, is my being, although as I well understand, to meet it, despite all my efforts, I will never succeed. But if the Other loves me, I become unsurpassable, and this means that I am the absolute goal; thereby I am saved from being used; my existence in the midst of the world becomes an exact correspondence to my own transcendence, because my independence is absolutely guaranteed. At the same time, being the absolute limit of freedom, i.e. absolute source of all values, I am protected from any depreciation: I am an absolute value. And to the extent that I accept my being-for-others, I understand myself as such a value. Thus, to want to be loved means to want to place oneself outside any system of evaluations posited by others as a condition for any evaluation and as the objective basis of all values. This requirement is a common topic of conversation between lovers. The lover demands that the loved one actually sacrifice traditional morality for him, asking whether the loved one will betray his friends for him, “will he steal for him,” “will he kill for him,” etc. From such a point of view, my being inevitably eludes the gaze of the lover; or, rather, it becomes the object of a gaze of a different structure: it is not me who should now be considered against the background of the world as “this one” among other “these”, but, on the contrary, the world should be revealed thanks to me. In a sense, if I want to be loved, then I am an object, by commission, of which the world begins to exist for another; but in some other sense I am the world. Instead of being “this one”, considered against the background of the world, I become that object-background in the light of which the world is revealed.
Until now, this description could coincide with the description of the relationship between master and slave. The lover wants to be for the beloved what the master is for the slave. But here the analogy ends, because for another to love me, I must be freely chosen by him as his beloved. We know that in the common terminology of love, the concept of “chosen one” is attached to the beloved. This choice, however, should not be relative, made in relation to the circumstances: the lover becomes upset and feels inferior when he thinks that the beloved has chosen him from among others. “Yeah, so if I hadn’t come to this city, if I hadn’t visited so-and-so, you wouldn’t have met me, you wouldn’t have loved me?” This thought torments the lover: his love turns out to be one of many others, limited by the facticity of the lover and his own facticity, by the random circumstances of the meeting: it becomes love in the world, an object that presupposes the existence of the world, and, perhaps, existing for some other objects. He demands something completely different, however, expressing his demand in awkward formulas that smack of “materialism”; he says: “We are made for each other,” or perhaps he uses the expression “soul mate.” This requires interpretation: he knows very well that the words “made for each other” refer to the original choice. This choice may come from God as a being with absolute choice; however, God here simply designates the ultimateity of the absolute requirement. After all, he who loves
essentially requires one thing - that the beloved make him the subject of his absolute choice. And at the same time, if a loved one can love us, he is completely ready to be appropriated by our freedom: our objective essence presupposes the existence of another, and vice versa, it is freedom
another serves as a basis for our essence.
When the spell is broken, the other becomes a means among other means: he is now, of course, an object for the other, which is what he wanted to be, but the object-tool, the illusion, the play of mirror images that constitute the concrete reality of love, immediately dissipates. Secondly, in love, each consciousness tries to take refuge in the freedom of the other, handing over to him its being-for-others. However, as soon as someone else looks at both lovers, each of them begins to feel not only himself, but also the other as an object. Here is the real reason why lovers want to be alone. The appearance of someone third, no matter who he is, destroys their love. However, actual privacy (we are alone in my room) is in no way legal privacy. In fact, even if no one sees us, we exist for all consciousnesses and we ourselves are aware that we exist for all consciousnesses; it turns out that love, as a fundamental mode of being-for-others, carries in its being-for-others the germ of its destruction. We have just outlined the threefold destructibility of love: firstly, it is essentially deception and a system of endless references, because to love means to want to be loved, that is, to want the other to want me to love him. And the pre-ontological understanding of this deception is present in the love impulse itself; hence comes the eternal dissatisfaction of the lover. Secondly, the awakening of another is always possible; at any moment he can make me an object in his eyes: hence the eternal insecurity of the lover. Thirdly, love is an absolute, constantly transformed by the very fact of the existence of others into something relative. It would be necessary for me to remain alone in the whole world with my beloved, so that love would retain its character as an absolute point of reference. Hence the constant shame (or pride - which in this case is the same thing) of the lover.
J.-P. SartrePrimary relationship to another: love, language, masochism
What is true for me is true for others. While I am trying to free myself from the other's grasp, the other is trying to free myself from my grasp; while I am trying to subdue the other, the other is trying to subdue me. This is not at all about some one-sided relationship with a certain object-in-itself, but about mutual and moving relationships. The following descriptions must therefore be viewed in light of the conflict. Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.
If we start from the primary revelation of the other as a gaze, then we must admit that we perceive our elusive being-for-another in the form of possession. I am possessed by another: the gaze of another manipulates my body in its nakedness, forces it into the light, fashions it, brings it out of uncertainty, sees it in a way that I will never see it. The Other holds the secret: the secret of what I am. He gives me existence and thereby owns me, I am possessed by him, and this possession of me by him is nothing more and no less than his consciousness of possessing me. And I, recognizing my objectivity, feel that he has such a consciousness. In terms of consciousness, the other for me is both the thief of my being and the one thanks to whom the being that is my being “has.” This is how I come to understand this ontological structure: I am responsible for my being-for-others, but I myself am not its basis; my being-for-another thus appears in the form of an accidental givenness, for which, however, I am responsible, and the other lays the foundation for my being insofar as this being has the form of “being”; but the other is not responsible for it, although he creates it according to his own free will, in his free transcendence and with its forces. So to the extent that I reveal myself to myself as responsible for my being, I win back for myself the being that, in fact, I already am; that is, I want to conquer it or, in more precise terms, I am a project of conquering my being for myself. This thing, my being, appears to me as my being, but from a distance, like the food of Tantalus; I want to reach out to grab her and place her on the foundation of my own freedom. In fact, if my being-object, on the one hand, is an unbearable accident and pure “possession” of me by another person, then, on some other hand, this being of mine is, as it were, an indication of what I am obliged to conquer and justify as my own reason. But this is impossible to imagine otherwise than by appropriating to myself the freedom of another. It turns out that my project of reconquering myself is essentially a project of absorbing another. For all that, this project must leave the nature of the other intact. In other words: 1) Trying to absorb the other, I nevertheless do not cease to affirm the other, that is, I do not cease to deny my identity with the other: after all, if the other, the basis of my being, dissolves in me, then my being-for-another will evaporate . If, therefore, I project to bring about union with the other, then this means that I project to absorb the otherness of the other as such, as my own possibility. For me, the point is, in fact, to give my being the ability to absorb the point of view of another. The goal, however, is not to acquire just another abstract cognitive ability. After all, I project to assign to myself not just the category of another: such a category is unknown and even unthinkable. No, starting from the concrete, hard-won and felt experience of another, I want to absorb this concrete other into myself as an absolute reality, in its otherness. 2) The Other whom I try to assimilate is in no way an object-Other. Or, if you like, my project of incorporation of the other is in no way identical with my reconquest of my being-for-itself, my true self, and overcoming the transcendence of the other by realizing my own possibilities. I do not at all intend to destroy my own objectivity by objectifying the other, which would be tantamount to ridding me of my being-for-another; quite the contrary, I want to assimilate the other as the other-looking-at-me, and such a project of assimilation includes an increased recognition of my being-under-the-other's gaze. In a word, I completely identify myself with my being-under-the-gaze in order to preserve the freedom of the other looking at me, which is external to me, and since my being-object is my only relation to another, in so far this being-object turns out to be the only instrument I have for my appropriation of someone else's freedom. Thus, in terms of reaction to the failure of the third ecstasy, my for-itself wants to identify itself with the freedom of the other, acting as the guarantor of its being-in-itself. To be different in oneself is an ideal that always concretely appears in the form of absorbing this other into oneself - this is the primary content of relations to another; in other words, over my being-for-other hangs the shadow of some absolute being, which would remain itself, being another, and another, being itself, and which, freely giving itself as another its being-by itself and as its own being-other , would be no less than the being of ontological proof, that is, God. This ideal will remain unrealizable unless I overcome the original contingency of my relationship to the other, i.e. the fact that there is no relation of internal negativity between the negation by virtue of which the other becomes other in relation to me, and the negation by virtue of which I I become different for another. We have seen that this contingency is irresistible: it is a fact of my relationship with another, just as my body is a fact of my being-in-the-world. Unity with another is virtually impossible. It is also legally unfeasible, because the assimilation of being-for-oneself and the other within the same transcendence would necessarily entail the disappearance of the other’s features of his otherness. Thus, the condition for me to project the identification of the other with me is my constant denial that I am this other. Finally, this project of unification is a source of conflict, since I perceive myself as an object for the other and project to assimilate him, remaining such an object, while he perceives me as an object among other objects of the world and in no way projects to absorb me into himself. It is necessary, therefore, since being for another presupposes a double internal negation, to act on that internal negation by virtue of which the other transcends my transcendence and forces me to exist for the other, that is, to act on the freedom of the other.
This unrealizable ideal, to the extent that it towers over my project of conquering myself in the presence of others, cannot be likened to love insofar as love is an enterprise, that is, an organic set of projects for the development of my own possibilities. However, he is the ideal of love, its driving principle and its goal, its own content. Love as a primary relationship to another is a set of projects through which I intend to realize this content.
These projects put me in direct connection with the freedom of another. It is in this sense that love is conflict. In fact, we noted that the freedom of the other is the basis of my being. But precisely because I exist at the expense of the freedom of another, I am, as it were, not provided with anything, I am under threat from this freedom; she freezes my being and forces me to be, she endows me with contents and takes them away from me, because of her my being turns out to be an eternal passive evasion from myself. Without any responsibility to me and unattainable, this protean freedom to which I am attached can, for its part, bind me to a thousand different ways of being. My project of reconquering my being cannot be realized except if I take possession of this freedom and reduce it to a freedom that is subordinate to my freedom. At the same time, this is the only way in which I can act on that free negation of interiority, by virtue of which the Other constitutes me into the Other, i.e., by virtue of which the paths for the future identification of the Other with me open up before me.
To clarify this, we could turn to a problem that seems purely psychological: why does the lover want to be loved? Indeed, if Love were a pure desire for physical possession, it could in many cases be easily satisfied. For example, Proust's hero, who settles his mistress with him, can see her and possess her at any time of the day and managed to put her in a position of complete material dependence, should have been cured of his anxiety. However, on the contrary, as you know, he is consumed by concern. Consciousness is the space into which Albertine escapes from Marcel even when he is next to her, and that is why he knows no peace except in the moments when he sees her sleeping. It is clear, therefore, that love wants to captivate “consciousness.” But why does he want to? And how?
The concept of “property”, so often used to explain love, in fact cannot be primary. Why should I want to appropriate another into my property? I need this exactly to the extent that my being turns out to be a function of the Other. However, this presupposes a very specific method of appropriation: we want to take possession of the freedom of the other as such: And not through the will to power: the tyrant mocks love; he's had enough of fear. If he seeks the love of his subjects, it is only for the sake of politics, and if he finds some more economical way of enslaving them, he immediately seizes on it. He who wants to be loved, on the contrary, does not want the beloved being to be enslaved. He is not attracted by the prospect of becoming an object of oppressive, mechanical passion. He does not want to have a machine gun, and if you intend to insult him, you only have to portray to him the passion of the beloved as the result of psychological determinism: the lover will feel his love and his being inferior. If Tristan and Isolde are driven mad by some love potion, they become less interesting; and it happens that the complete enslavement of a beloved being will kill the love of the lover. He missed the mark: if the beloved has turned into an automaton, the lover remains alone. Thus, the lover does not want to possess the beloved as one possesses any property; he dreams of a very special kind of appropriation. He wants to have freedom precisely as freedom.
But, on the other hand, he cannot be satisfied with such, in general, a sublime form of freedom, as a free and voluntary obligation. Who will be satisfied with love that acts as pure fidelity to a once-given oath? Who would agree to be told: “I love you, because I, by my free will, committed myself to loving you and do not want to change my word; I love you for the sake of my loyalty to myself”? Therefore, the lover demands vows - and vows irritate him. He wants to be loved by freedom - and demands that this freedom, as freedom, should no longer be free. He wants the freedom of the Other to give itself the image of love - and not just at the beginning of a love affair, but at every moment of it - and at the same time he wants this freedom to be captivated by him, the lover, precisely in its quality of freedom , so that she returns to herself, as in madness, as in a dream, and desires her captivity. And this plan must be a free and at the same time enchanted surrender of oneself into our hands. In love, we do not want from the other either the determinism of passionate obsession or unattainable freedom: we want freedom that plays the role of passionate obsession and is itself captured by its role. And in relation to himself, the lover claims to be not the cause of such a radical modification of freedom, but the unique and privileged reason for it. In fact, as soon as he wishes to be the cause, he immediately makes the beloved simply a thing among the things of the world, a kind of instrument that can be transcended. This is not the essence of love. In Love, the lover wants, on the contrary, to be “everything in the world” for the beloved; this means that he places himself next to the world; he concentrates in himself and symbolizes the whole world, he is this, which embraces all the other “these,” he is an object and agrees to be an object. But, on the other hand, he wants to be an object in which the freedom of another is ready to drown; an object in which the other agrees to find, as it were, his second reality, his being and the meaning of his being; the ultimate object of transcendence, an object, in the pursuit of which the transcendence of the Other transcends all other objects, but which itself is in no way amenable to transcendence for it. And first of all, the lover wants the freedom of the Other to close itself in a certain circle; that is, so that at every moment of conscious acceptance of the beloved as the insurmountable limit of one’s transcendence, the freedom of the Other is driven by the already accomplished fact of internal acceptance. He wants to be chosen as a target that, in fact, has already been chosen in advance. This allows us to finally understand what, in fact, the lover demands from the beloved: he does not want to act on the freedom of the Other, but wants to be a priori the objective limit of this freedom, that is, the same original given as itself, and from the very first steps to act as the limit that she must accept precisely in order to become free. Thus, he wants, as it were, to “glue”, to bind the freedom of another by itself: this limit built into freedom is essentially a given, and the very appearance of this given as the limit of freedom means that freedom comes to exist within this given, being its own prohibition to transcend the latter. And such a prohibition is necessary for the lover at the same time as a fact of life, that is, as something passively experienced - in a word, as an immutable circumstance - and at the same time as a freely made decision. The prohibition must be a freely made decision, because it inextricably merges with the formation of freedom, which chooses itself as freedom. But it must also be a simple fact of life, because it must be an always present imperative, a fact that permeates the freedom of the Other right down to its core; and this is expressed psychologically in the demand that the free decision to love me, made in advance by the lover, lurks as a fascinating driving force within his conscious free affection.
We now grasp the meaning of this demand: facticity, destined to become a meaningful limit for the Other (in my demand to be loved by him) and which should ultimately turn out to be his own facticity, is my facticity. Precisely to the extent that I am an object that begins to exist in the eyes of the Other, I must be the limit inherent in his very transcendence - so that the Other, ascending to being, gives me the existence of an insurmountable absolute, not as a destroyer for - oneself-being, but as being-for-another-in-the-middle of the world. Thus, the desire to be loved is tantamount to “infecting” the other with one’s own facticity; tantamount to the desire to force him to constantly recreate me as a condition of his freedom, freely subordinating and obliging himself; and at the same time tantamount to the desire for this freedom to give life to a fact, and for the fact to rise above freedom. If such a result could be achieved, then I would be provided, first of all, by the consciousness of the Other. In fact, the reason for my anxiety and my shame is that I perceive and feel myself in my being-for-another as something that another can always step over in the pursuit of something Else - as a simple object of evaluative judgment, a simple means, a simple instrument. The source of my anxiety is that I have to, although unwillingly, take upon myself the existence imposed on me by others in his absolute freedom: “Only God knows what I am for him! God knows what he thinks of me.” This means: “God knows what he makes of my being”; and I am haunted by this being, with which I am threatened one day with meeting at some crossroads, which is so alien to me and which, however, is my being, although, as I well understand, to meet it, despite all my efforts, I'll never succeed. But if the Other loves me, I become unsurpassable, and this means that I turn out to be an absolute goal; thereby I am saved from being used; my existence in the midst of the world becomes an exact correspondence to my own transcendence, because my independence is absolutely guaranteed. The object that the other forces me to be is now an object-transcendence, an absolute point of reference around which all things-instruments of the world are grouped as simple means. At the same time, being the absolute limit of freedom, that is, the absolute source of all values, I am protected from any depreciation: I am an absolute value. And to the extent that I accept my being - for - another, I accept myself as such a value. Thus, to want to be loved means to want to place oneself outside any system of evaluations posited by others as a condition for any evaluation and as an objective basis for all values. This requirement forms a common theme of conversations between lovers both when, as in “The Narrow Gate,” the one who wants to be loved identifies himself with the ascetic morality of self-overcoming and dreams of becoming the embodiment of the ideal limit of such self-overcoming, and then when, as happens more often , the lover demands that the beloved in fact sacrifice traditional morality for him, asking whether the beloved will betray his friends for his sake, “will he steal for his sake,” “will he kill for his sake,” etc. From such a point of view, my being inevitably escapes from the gaze of a lover; or, rather, it becomes the object of a gaze of a different structure: it is not me that should now be considered against the background of the world as “this is this” among other “these,” but, on the contrary, the world should be revealed thanks to me. Indeed, to the extent that the formation of freedom brings the world into existence, I, as the limiting condition of this formation, also turn out to be the condition for the emergence of the world. I turn out to be a being whose function is to bring into existence forests and waters, cities, fields, other people, in order to hand them over to another who will build a world out of them, just as in matronymic societies a mother receives titles and a name not for this purpose. in order to keep them for themselves, but in order to immediately pass them on to their children. In a sense, if I want to be loved, then I am an object by whose commission the world begins to exist for another; and in some other sense I am the world. Instead of being “this thing”, considered against the background of the world, I become the background object in the light of which the world is revealed. My position is thereby ensured: the gaze of another no longer pierces me through and through, turning me into a finite thing; it no longer captures my being simply as it is; he can no longer regard me as unattractive, as short, as base, because these features necessarily represent a limitation of the fact of my being and the perception of my finite thingness as precisely finite thingness. Of course, my possibilities remain transcended possibilities, “extinguished possibilities”; but I have all the possibilities; I am all the extinguished possibilities of the world; thereby I cease to be a being that can be understood from other beings or from my own actions; I demand that the one who loves with his inner gaze sees in me such a given, which absorbs absolutely everything and serves as the starting point for understanding any beings and any actions. We can say, slightly distorting the famous stoic formula, that “a loved one is able to do a triple somersault.” The ideal of the sage and the ideal of the one who wants to be loved really coincide in that both want to be an object-totality, accessible to such a global intuition that perceives actions in the world of the beloved and in the world of the sage as partial structures to be interpreted on the basis of totality . And just as wisdom appears as a state achieved through absolute metamorphosis, in the same way the freedom of another must be absolutely transformed in order for me to achieve the status of the beloved.
What is true for me is true for others. While I am trying to free myself from the other's grasp, the other is trying to free myself from my grasp; while I am trying to subdue the other, the other is trying to subdue me. This is not at all about some one-sided relationship with some object-in-itself, but about mutual and moving relationships. The following descriptions must therefore be viewed in light of the conflict. Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.
If we start from the primary revelation of the other as a gaze, then we must admit that we perceive our elusive being-for-another in the form of possession. I am possessed by another: the gaze of another manipulates my body in its nakedness, forces it into the light, fashions it, brings it out of uncertainty, sees it in a way that I will never see it. The Other holds the secret: the secret of what I am. He gives me existence and thereby owns me, I am possessed by him, and this possession of me by him is nothing more and no less than his consciousness of possessing me. And I, recognizing my objectivity, feel that he has such a consciousness. In terms of consciousness, the other for me is both the thief of my being and the one thanks to whom the being that is my being “has.” This is how I come to understand this ontological structure: I am responsible for my being-for-others, but I myself am not its basis; my being-for-another thus appears in the form of an accidental given, for which, however, I am responsible, and the other lays the foundation for my being insofar as this being has the form of an “existent”; but the other is not responsible for it, although he creates it according to his own free will, in his free transcendence and with its forces. So to the extent that I reveal myself to myself as responsible for my being, I win back for myself the being that, in fact, I already am; that is, I want to conquer it or, in more precise terms, I am a project of conquering my being for myself. This thing, my being, appears to me as my being, but from a distance, like the food of Tantalus; I want to reach out to grab her and put her down
her on the basis of my own freedom. In fact, if my being-object, on the one hand, is an unbearable accident and pure “possession” of me by another person, then, on some other hand, this being of mine is, as it were, an indication of what I am obliged to conquer and justify as my own reason. But this is impossible to imagine otherwise than by appropriating to myself the freedom of another. It turns out that my project of reconquering myself is essentially a project of absorbing another. For all that, this project must leave the nature of the other intact. In other words: 1) Trying to absorb the other, I nevertheless do not cease to affirm the other, i.e. I do not cease to deny my identity with another: after all, if the other, the basis of my being, dissolves in me, then my being-for-another will evaporate. If, therefore, I project to bring about union with the other, then this means that I project to absorb the otherness of the other as such, as my own possibility. For me, the point is, in fact, to give my being the ability to absorb the point of view of another. The goal, however, is not to acquire just another abstract cognitive ability. After all, I project to assign to myself not just the category of another: such a category is unknown and even unthinkable. No, starting from the concrete, hard-won and felt experience of another, I want to absorb this concrete other into myself as an absolute reality, in its otherness. 2) The Other whom I try to assimilate is in no way an object-Other. Or, if you like, my project of incorporation of the other is in no way identical with my reconquest of my being-for-itself, my true self and overcoming the transcendence of the other by realizing my own possibilities. I do not at all intend to destroy my own objectivity by objectifying another, which would be tantamount to deliverance me from my being-for-another; quite the contrary, I want to assimilate the other as the other-looking-at-me, and such a project of assimilation includes an increased recognition of my being-under-the-other's gaze. In a word, I completely identify myself with my being-under-the-gaze in order to preserve the freedom of the other looking at me, which is external to me, and since my being-object is my only relation to another, in so far this being-object turns out to be the only instrument I have for appropriation by me someone else's freedom. Thus, in terms of reaction to the failure of the third ecstasy, my for-itself wants to identify itself with the freedom of the other, acting as the guarantor of its being-in-itself. To be different in oneself is an ideal that always concretely appears in the form of absorbing this other into oneself - this is the primary content of relations to another; in other words, over my being-for-another hangs the shadow of some absolute being, which would remain itself, being another, and another, being itself, and which, freely giving itself as another its being-by itself and as its own being-other , would be no less than the existence of an ontological proof, i.e. By God. This ideal will remain unrealizable if I do not overcome the original contingency of my relationship with another, i.e. the fact that there is no relation of internal negativity between the negation by virtue of which the other becomes another in relation to me, and the negation by virtue of which I become another for the other.
"...Heidegger is right in declaring that I am what I say. Essentially, this language is not the instinct of an already formed human individual, it is not an invention of our subjectivity, but it should not be reduced to pure “being-outside” -itself", inherent in "here-being". Language is part of human nature; it is initially a test of what this or that for-itself can make out of its being-for-another, and then - going beyond this test using it for the realization of my possibilities, which are my possibilities, that is, for the realization of my possibilities of being this or that for others. It does not therefore differ from my recognition of the existence of others.
It goes without saying that by language we understand any phenomenon of expression, and not just an articulate word, which is already a derivative and secondary way of expression, whose formation can constitute an object of historical research. In particular, when seducing, the purpose of language is not to let you know, but to make you feel. However, in this first attempt to find the enchanting language, I proceed blindly, since I am guided only by the abstract and empty form of my objectivity-for-others. I cannot even imagine what effect my gestures and my poses will have, because each time they will be perceived and justified by the freedom that transcends them, and they can only have meaning if this freedom gives them such. The “meaning” of my expressions always eludes me; I never know exactly whether I designate what I want to designate, or even whether I designate anything at all; in this particular situation, I would need the ability to read the thoughts of another, which is basically impossible. And since I do not know what I am really expressing to another, I construct my speech as an incomplete phenomenon that eludes me. At the moment of expression, I can only guess at the meaning of what I express, that is, ultimately, at the meaning of what I am, because from the perspective we are considering, expressing and being are one and the same thing. The Other is always in front of me, he is present and experienced by me as an authority that gives meaning to my speech. Every expression, every gesture, every word is, on my part, a concrete experience of the alienating reality of the other. It is not only a psychopath who can say, as for example in the case of influence psychoses, “my thoughts are being stolen from me.” No, the very fact of expression is the theft of thought, since thought needs the help of alienating freedom in order to be constituted into an object. This is why the primary aspect of language, as I use it to address another, is the sacred. Indeed, a sacred object is an object of the world. Language reveals for me the freedom of the one who silently listens to me, that is, his transcendence.
But at the same time, I remain a meaningful object for another - as I always have been. There is no way for me, while remaining in my objectivity, to let others know about my transcendence. Postures, expressions and words always point to another only to other postures, other expressions, other words. Thus, language remains for another simply a certain property inherent in a magical object, and this magical object itself: it is a certain action at a distance, the effect of which is precisely known to the other. Thus, a word is sacred when I use it, and magical when another hears it. Thus, my tongue is no more known to me than my body is as another person sees it. I can neither hear myself speak nor see my smile. The problem of language is exactly parallel to the problem of the body, and descriptions that are suitable in one case are also suitable in another." /pp. 218-220/
