Part 3, Chapter 1: The Look
The mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at themselves as an object and see their 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 are believing it is a person, their world is transformed, and everything exists as an object that partially escapes them. During this time the world comes on to you differently, and you can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now his world, a foreign world that no longer comes from you, but from him. 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."
- 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". The person is occupied and too busy for self-reflection. This process is continual, unavoidable, and ineluctable.
Famous quotes containing the words part 3,, part and/or chapter:
“...there was the annual Fourth of July picketing at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. ...I thought it was ridiculous to have to go there in a skirt. But I did it anyway because it was something that might possibly have an effect. I remember walking around in my little white blouse and skirt and tourists standing there eating their ice cream cones and watching us like the zoo had opened.”
—Martha Shelley, U.S. author and social activist. As quoted in Making History, part 3, by Eric Marcus (1992)
“We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)