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 the look, part and/or chapter:
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Usages of age, but it’s both there
And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight,
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)