Editing Being and Nothingness (section)

===Part 3, Chapter 1: The look===
The mere possible presence of another person causes one to [[gaze|look at oneself as an object]] and see one's world as it appears to the other. This is not done from a specific location outside oneself, but is non-positional. This is a recognition of the [[subjectivity]] in others.

This transformation is most clear when one sees a [[mannequin]] that one confuses for a real person for a moment.
*While they believe it is a person, their world is transformed. Objects now partly escape them; they have aspects that belong to the other person, and that are thus unknowable to them. During this time one can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now the other person's world, a foreign world that no longer comes from the self, but from the other. The other person is a "threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world...Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other's values, over which you have no control".<ref name="earthlink">{{cite web| url=http://home.earthlink.net/~mazz747/id12.html|title=An analysis of "The look"| first= Paul Vincent|last= Spade|access-date=July 2, 2006|archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20060615060533/http://home.earthlink.net/~mazz747/id12.html <!-- Bot retrieved archive -->|archive-date=June 15, 2006}}</ref>
*When they realise it is a mannequin, and is not subjective, the world seems to transfer back, and they are again in the center of a universe. This is back to the pre-reflective mode of being, it is "the eye of the camera that is always present but is never seen".<ref name=earthlink/> The person is occupied and too busy for self-reflection.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/teaching/503/sartre_links.htm|title=Jean-Paul Sartre – Being and Nothingness|access-date=July 2, 2006|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060708133710/http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/teaching/503/sartre_links.htm|archive-date=July 8, 2006|url-status=dead}}</ref> This process is continual, unavoidable, and ineluctable.<ref name=earthlink/>

====Being for Others====
Sartre states that many relationships are created by people's attraction not to another person, but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them. This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with "the look" of the other. The consequence is conflict. In order to maintain the person's own being, the person must control the other, but must also control the freedom of the other "as freedom". These relationships are a profound manifestation of "bad faith" as the for-itself is replaced with the other's freedom. The purpose of either participant is not to exist, but to maintain the other participant's looking at them. This system is often mistakenly called "love", but it is, in fact, nothing more than emotional alienation and denial of freedom through conflict with the other. Sartre believes that it is often created as a means of making the unbearable anguish of a person's relationship to their "[[facticity]]" (all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited, such as birthplace and time) bearable. At its extreme, the alienation can become so intense that due to the guilt of being so radically enslaved by "the look" and therefore radically missing their own freedoms, the participants can experience [[Sadomasochism|masochistic and sadistic]] attitudes. This happens when the participants cause pain to each other, in attempting to prove their control over the other's look, which they cannot escape because they believe themselves to be so enslaved to the look that experiencing their own subjectivity would be equally unbearable.

====Sex====
Sartre explains that "the look" is the basis for [[sexual desire]], declaring that a biological motivation for [[sex]] does not exist. Instead, "double reciprocal incarnation" is a form of mutual awareness which Sartre takes to be at the heart of the sexual experience. This involves the mutual recognition of subjectivity of some sort, as Sartre describes: "I make myself flesh in order to impel the Other to realize for herself and for me her own flesh. My caress causes my flesh to be born for me insofar as it is for the Other flesh causing her to be born as flesh."

Even in sex (perhaps especially in sex), men and women are haunted by a state in which consciousness and bodily being would be in perfect harmony, with desire satisfied. Such a state, however, can never be. We try to bring the beloved's consciousness to the surface of their body by use of magical acts performed, gestures (kisses, desires, etc.), but at the moment of [[orgasm]] the illusion is ended and we return to ourselves, just as it is ended when the skier comes to the foot of the mountain or when the commodity that once we desired loses its glow upon our purchase of it. There will be, for Sartre, no such moment of completion because "man is a useless passion" to be the ''[[ens causa sui]]'', the God of the [[ontological proof]].

====Nothingness====
Sartre contends that human existence is a conundrum whereby each of us exists, for as long as we live, within an overall condition of nothingness (''no thing-ness'')—that ultimately allows for free consciousness. Yet simultaneously, within our ''being'' (in the physical world), we are constrained to make continuous, conscious choices.

It is this dichotomy that causes anguish, because choice (subjectivity) represents a limit on freedom within an otherwise unbridled range of thoughts. Subsequently, humans seek to flee our anguish through action-oriented constructs such as escapes, visualizations, or visions (such as dreams) designed to lead us toward some meaningful end, such as necessity, destiny, determinism (God), etc. Thus, in living our lives, we often become unconscious ''actors''—Bourgeois, Feminist, Worker, Party Member, Frenchman, Canadian or American—each doing as we must to fulfill our chosen characters' destinies.

However, Sartre contends our conscious choices (leading to often unconscious actions) run counter to our intellectual freedom. Yet we are bound to the conditioned and physical world—in which some form of action is always required. This leads to ''failed dreams of completion'', as Sartre described them, because inevitably we are unable to bridge the void between the purity and spontaneity of thought and all-too constraining action; between the ''being'' and the ''nothingness'' that inherently coincide in our ''self''.

Sartre's recipe for ''fulfillment'' is to escape all quests by ''completing'' them. This is accomplished by rigorously forcing order onto nothingness, employing the "spirit (or consciousness of mind) of seriousness" and describing the failure to do so in terms such as "[[Sartre and bad faith|bad faith]]" and "[[false consciousness]]". Though Sartre's conclusion seems to be that being diminishes before nothingness since consciousness is probably based more on spontaneity than on stable seriousness, he contends that any person of a serious nature is ''obliged'' to continuous struggle between two things:

:a) The conscious desire for peaceful self-fulfillment through physical actions and social roles—as if living within a portrait that one actively paints of oneself

:b) The more pure and raging spontaneity of ''no thing'' consciousness, of being instantaneously free to overturn one's roles, pull up stakes, and strike out on new paths

====Phenomenological ontology====
In Sartre's opinion, [[consciousness]] does not make sense by itself: it arises only as an awareness of objects. Consciousness is therefore always and essentially consciousness ''of something'', whether this "something" is a thing, a person, an imaginary object, etc. Phenomenologists often refer to this quality of consciousness as "[[intentionality]]". Sartre's contribution, then, is that in addition to always being consciousness ''of something'', consciousness is always consciousness ''of itself''. In other words, all consciousness is, by definition, ''self-consciousness''. By "self-consciousness", Sartre does not mean being aware of oneself thought of as an object (e.g., one's "ego"), but rather that, as a phenomenon in the world, consciousness both appears and appears ''to itself'' at the same time. By appearing to itself, Sartre argues that consciousness is fully transparent; unlike an ordinary "object" (a house, for instance, of which it is impossible to perceive all of the sides at the same time), consciousness "sees" all aspects of itself at once. This non-positional quality of consciousness is what makes it a unique type of being, a being that exists ''for itself''.