JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Others223What is the relation between conscious and this body that I am? Sartre’sview is that being-for-itself is primordial with regard to both consciousnessand the body. Unless there were the subjective type of being called ‘Beingfor-itself’there could not obtain the distinction between consciousness andthe body.By ‘being-for-others’ Sartre means my mode of being, my overall state ofexperience, when I take myself to be as others perceive me, or when I makemyself be as others perceive me, or both. My taking myself to be an object or‘thing’ in the world is a paradigm case of being-for-others. It is adoptingtowards myself the kind of perspective that others have on me. Being-forothersis therefore a kind of bad faith. It is not a false belief about myselfbecause there is a way in which I appear to others and this is thinkable byme. However, it is not how I am and it is not how I experience myself to be. Tothis extent it is inauthentic and unreal. It does not correspond to my ownlived experience.Consciously or not, the phenomenology of human relations that Sartreoffers essentially operates with the parameters of Hegel’s Master and SlaveDialectic in the 1807 The Phenomenology of Spirit. There self-consciousbeings are depicted as mutually constituting through a struggle forrecognition: a power struggle where one party may bestow or withholdpsychological identity from another, a complex dialectic where the freedomof one is sought in the control of the other.Sartre says that his descriptions of human relations have to be understoodwith in the perspective of conflict. The possibility, if not the actuality, of conflictis a necessary condition for there being any human relations whatsoever.Conflict is ultimately conflict over freedom. In trying to define my own essencethrough the exercise of free choice I try to repress the freedom of the other.Simultaneously, the other is doing the same. It follows that the perverseform of bad faith called ‘being a swine’ (‘salaud’) is at the root of humanrelations.It is Sartre’s view that there is no human encounter where one party doesnot psychologically dominate the other: one is master and one is slave. Iftwo strangers pass in the street ‘the look’ (‘le regard’) of one will make theother uncomfortably subservient.This is not simply a psychological generalisation. Sartre has philosophicalpremises for why it should be so. He subscribes to the Hegelian doctrinethat my being what I am is partly due to the recognition or acceptance by