JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Politics317from Others without adding anything to his characteristic as Other as the sole socialdetermination of his existence. Serial unity, as common interest, therefore imposesitself as exigency and destroys all opposition. The ticket no doubt refers to a temporaldetermination. But this is precisely why it is arbitrary: the time in question is not apractical temporalisation, but a homogeneous medium of repetition. Taking his ticketas he arrives, everyone does the same as the Other. He realises a practicoinert exigencyof the ensemble; and, since they are going to different jobs and have different objectives,the fact of having arrived first does not give any distinctive characteristic, but simplythe right to get on the bus first. The material justifications for the order have meaning,in fact, only after the event: being the first to arrive is no virtue; having waited longestconfers no right. (Indeed, one can imagine fairer classifications —waiting means nothingto a young man, but it is very tiring for an old woman. Besides, war wounded havepriority in any case, etc.) The really important transformation is that alterity as such,pure alterity, is no longer either the simple relation to common unity, or the shiftingidentity of organisms. As an ordering, it becomes a negative principle of unity and ofdetermining everyone’s fate as Other by every Other as Other. It matters a lot to me,in effect, that I have the tenth number rather than the twentieth. But I am tenththrough Others in so far as they are Other than themselves, that is to say, in so far asthe Reason for their number does not lie in themselves. If I am after my neighbour, thismay be because he did not buy his newspaper this morning, or because I was lateleaving the house. And if we have numbers 9 and 10, this depends on both of us andalso on all the Others, both before and after.On this basis, it is possible to grasp our relations to the object in their complexity.On the one hand, we have effectively remained general individuals (in so far as we formpart of this gathering, of course). Therefore the unity of the collection of commuterslies in the bus they are waiting for; in fact it is the bus, as a simple possibility oftransport (not for transporting all of us, for we do not act together, but for transportingeach of us). Thus, as an appearance and a first abstraction, a structure of universalityreally exists in the grouping; indeed, everyone is identical with the Other in so far asthey are waiting for the bus. However, their acts of waiting are not a communal fact,but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act. From this point of view,the group is not structured; it is a gathering and the number of individuals in it iscontingent. This means that any other number was possible (to the extent that theindividuals are considered as arbitrary particles and that they have not collectedtogether as a result of any common dialectical process). This is the level whereconceptualisation has its place; that is to say, concepts are based on the molecularappearance of organisms and on the transcendent unity of the group (common interest).