JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

104Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsbe realized as an immediate and magical presence confronting the consciousness. Forexample, this face that I see ten yards away behind the window must be lived as animmediate, present threat to myself. But this is possible only in an act of consciousnesswhich destroys all the structures of the world that might dispel the magic and reducethe event to reasonable proportions. It would require, for instance, that the window as“object that must first be broken” and the ten yards as “distance that must first becovered” should be annihilated. This does not mean in the least that the consciousnessin its terror brings the face nearer, in the sense of reducing the distance between it andmy body. To reduce a distance is still to be thinking in terms of distance. Similarly,although the terrified subject might think, about the window, “it could easily bebroken”, or “it could be opened from outside”, these are only rational explanationsthat he might offer for his fear. In reality, the window and the distance are seizedsimultaneously in the act of consciousness which catches sight of the face at thewindow: but in this very act of catching sight of it, window and distance are emptiedof their “usable” and necessary character. They are grasped in another way. Thedistance is no longer grasped as distance— for it is not thought of as “that whichwould first have to be traversed”, it is grasped as the background united with thehorrible. The window is no longer grasped as “that which would first have to beopened”, it is grasped simply as the frame of the frightful visage. And in a general way,areas form themselves around me out of which the horrible makes itself felt. For thehorrible is not possible in the deterministic world of the usable. The horrible canappear only in a world which is such that all the things existing in it are magical bynature, and the only defences against them are magical. This is what we experienceoften enough in the universe of dreams, where doors, locks and walls are no protectionagainst the threats of robbers or wild animals for they are all grasped in one and thesame act of horror. And since the act which is to disarm them is the same as that whichis creating them, we see the assassins passing through doors and walls; we press thetrigger of our revolver in vain, no shot goes off. In a word, to experience any object ashorrible, is to see it against the background of a world which reveals itself as alreadyhorrible.Thus consciousness can “be-in-the-world” in two different ways. The world mayappear before it as an organized complex of utilizable things, such that, if one wants toproduce a predetermined effect, one must act upon the determinate elements of thatcomplex. As one does so, each “utensil” refers one to other utensils and to the totalityof utensils; there is no absolute action, no radical change that one can introduceimmediately into this world. We have to modify one particular utensil, and this bymeans of another which refers in its turn to yet another, and so on to infinity. But the