Henning Nörenberg / Sartre’s Others

Henning NörenbergJean Paul Sartre considered phenomenology as that kind of philosophy that had ‘restored to things their horror and charm.’ This is supposed to mean that things in the world are indeed significant to us – but also that such significance is not simply projected onto them by our minds or our brains. Rather, significance is something we are to find in the things themselves. Of course, this does not preclude that all the background knowledge, attitudes and projects we have actually play an important role. For instance, my strict adherence to certain preconceptions may result in my inability to get any other aspects out of a given state of affairs, though those aspects nevertheless exist. In this case, I may give reality hardly any chance to surprise me. This is precisely what Sartre’s overall philosophical project opposes.

This view does not only apply to things in the world general – it holds good even more for fellow human beings, the others, as Sartre calls them. The others are not something pacing back and forth which would simply co-occur with other things. Rather, they are fellows and opponents within a complex force field to which we are sensitive by virtue of our bodily existence. Already something apparently harmless such as an exchange of glances entails a trial of strength, a spontaneous struggle for supremacy. Thereby, the other according to Sartre appears more often than not a threat to the primordial form of the ego’s freedom. On a very basic level, self and other are constantly in conflict with each other. Moreover, it looks like the relative strength is unbalanced in favor of the other.

One of my recent papers examines Sartre’s central claims pertaining to the constitution of our togetherness with others. In a first step, I consider one of Sartre’s paradigm cases of the other’s look and its power, the keyhole scene from Being and Nothingness. Subsequently, I distinguish Sartre’s conception of the other’s look from a closely related concept which I have come to call ‘absolutism of the other’. Though I think Sartre’s conception is superior to the absolutism of the other in some of its central points, I argue in the last part of the paper that it underexposes the varieties of possible contacts with other people.

The paper with the title ‘Ich, du, er, sie, es. Und Wir? Sartre und die Anderen‘ appeared recently in a volume on Sartre edited by Katharina Gladisch and Thomas Klie: ‘Geschlossene Gesellschaft’: Identitätsdramen zwischen Text und Performanz. Münster: LIT 2016. The volume is part of a theater project with the aim of reinterpreting Sartre’s Huis Clos.

http://www.uni-rostock.de/aktuelles/pressemeldungen/detailansicht-pressemeldung/news-artikel/geschlossene-gesellschaft

 

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