The Sartrean Account of the Look as a Theory of Dialogue

Abstract

At the center of his ontological treatise, Being and Nothingness,1 in a section titled The Look, Sartre creates a small narrative moment of dubious virtue in which he is able to resolve one of the truly vexing problems of phenomenology up to his time. It is the problem of the Other. How is it that one can appre hend the Other as subject? Previously, philosophy had sought to understand the other through reflection or attribution (and Sartre deals in particular with the Hegelian and Heideggerian accounts). But to regard the other as a reflec tion of oneself ends in an obvious solipsism: all others would be only reflections of oneself.2 To define the other as a subject simply because one saw a person standing there reduces subjectivity irretrievably to object status. And to attri bute subjectivity to the other as an extension of experience with oneself as a subject renders one a source of mere doctrine through which to see others. Yet to proclaim the other to be unknowable as a subject leaves no basis upon which to speak about personal and social relations. In the context of twentieth-century Euro-American society, characterized by alienation and a closing down of public or political space, each of these possibilities (reflection and attribution) becomes egregious in providing a mechanical solution to the question—a collaboration with that sense of alien ation. Hence, the importance of Sartre's argument. A coherent response to the question of the Other as subject that avoids the classical traps renews the necessary sense that in others there is someone there, and that one has the possibility of real interaction. Sartre's account of the look, of one's visibility to another, reverses the terms of the problem. For Sartre, the Other-as-subject is a subject known not through