JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Others227foundation of my being-in-itself, I can seek to recover that freedom and to possess itwithout removing from it its character as freedom. In fact if I could identify myselfwith that freedom which is the foundation of my being-in-itself, I should be to myselfmy own foundation. To transcend the Other’s transcendence, or, on the contrary, toincorporate that transcendence within me without removing from it its character astranscendence—such are the two primitive attitudes which I assume confronting theOther. Here again we must understand the words exactly. It is not true that I first amand then later “seek” to make an object of the Other or to assimilate him; but to theextent that the upsurge of my being is an upsurge in the presence of the Other, to theextent that I am a pursuing flight and a pursued-pursuing, I am—at the very root of mybeing—the project of assimilating and making an object of the Other. I am the proof ofthe Other. That is the original fact. But this proof of the Other is in itself an attitudetoward the Other; that is, I can not be in the presence of the Other without being that“in-the-presence” in the form of having to be it. Thus again we are describing the foritself’sstructures of being although the Other’s presence in the world is an absoluteand self-evident fact, but a contingent fact—that is, a fact impossible to deduce fromthe ontological structures of the for-itself.These two attempts which I am are opposed to one another. Each attempt is thedeath of the other; that is, the failure of the one motivates the adoption of the other.Thus there is no dialectic for my relations toward the Other but rather a circle—although each attempt is enriched by the failure of the other. Thus we shall study eachone in turn. But it should be noted that at the very core of the one the other remainsalways present, precisely because neither of the two can be held without contradiction.Better yet, each of them is in the other and endangers the death of the other. Thus wecan never get outside the circle. We must not forget these facts as we approach thestudy of these fundamental attitudes toward the Other. Since these attitudes areproduced and destroyed in a circle, it is as arbitrary to begin with the one as with theother. Nevertheless since it is necessary to choose, we shall consider first the conductin which the for-itself tries to assimilate the Other’s freedom.I. First attitude toward others: love, language, masochismEverything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him aswell. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying tofree himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslaveme. We are by no means dealing with unilateral relations with an object-in-itself, butwith reciprocal and moving relations. The following descriptions of concrete behavior