JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

314 Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsit has been there since morning, as exigency, as instrumentality, as milieu, etc. And,through the medium of the city, there are given the millions of people who are the city,and whose completely invisible presence makes of everyone both a polyvalent isolation(with millions of facets), and an integrated member of the city (the “vieux Parisien”,the “Parisien de Paris”, etc.). Let me add that the mode of life occasions isolatedbehaviour in everyone—buying the paper as you leave the house, reading it on thebus, etc. These are often operations for making the transition from one group toanother (from the intimacy of the family to the public life of the office). Thus isolationis a project. And as such it is relative to particular individuals and moments: to isolateoneself by reading the paper is to make use of the national collectivity and, ultimately,the totality of living human beings, in so far as one is one of them and dependent on allof them, in order to separate oneself from the hundred people who are waiting for orusing the same vehicle. Organic isolation, suffered isolation, lived isolation, isolationas a mode of behaviour, isolation as a social statute of the individual, isolation as theexteriority of groups conditioning the exteriority of individuals, isolation as thereciprocity of isolations in a society which creates masses: all these forms, all theseoppositions co-exist in the little group we are considering, in so far as isolation is ahistorical and social form of human behaviour in human gatherings.But, at the same time, the relation of reciprocity remains in the gathering itself; andamong its members; the negation of isolation by praxis preserves it as negated: it is, infact, quite simply, the practical existence of men among men. Not only is there a livedreality—for everyone, even if he turns his back on the Others, and is unaware of theirnumber and their appearance, knows that they exist as a finite and indeterminateplurality of which he is a part—but also, even outside everyone’s real relation to theOthers, the ensemble of isolated behaviour, in so far as it is conditioned by historicaltotalisation, presupposes a structure of reciprocity at every level. This reciprocitymust be the most constant possibility and the most immediate reality, for otherwisethe social models in currency (clothes, hair style, bearing, etc.) would not be adoptedby everyone (although of course this is not sufficient), and neither would everyonehasten to repair anything wrong with their dress as soon as they notice it, and ifpossible in secret. This shows that isolation does not remove one from the visual andpractical field of the Other, and that it realises itself objectively in this field.At this level, we recognise the same society (which we just saw as an agent ofmassification), in so far as its practico-inert being serves as a medium conducive tointer-individual reciprocities: for these separate people form a group, in so far as theyare all standing on the same pavement, which protects them from the traffic crossingthe square, in so far as they are grouped around the same bus stop, etc. Above all,