INVISIBILITY DENIED - THE LOOK
Existentialist philosophers emphasize the concepts of the "Other" and the "Look."[1] Together, these terms refer to the experience of being forced to acquire the perspective of another person. Aren’t you usually the primary subject of your thinking? After all, you’ve developed and believe in an image of who you are, what you look like, and how you’re perceived. But the Look of Others contradicts this. The Look forces you to consider yourself as others might see you, a form of self-consciousness based on an awareness of societal expectations. Dealing with the Other, and with Other’s Looks, can be daunting, even frightening. The Look disrupts your life because you’re no longer yourself but a thing, an object examined by the Other.
The Look thwart’s attempts to be invisible. When you go to the market, buy gas, walk down the street, ride the subway, don’t you want, sometimes, to shy away from attention? Don’t we all (except for celebrities) want to be invisible once in a while? But all that’s needed is one jerk, one asshole staring at you, bothering you, telling you he has some special understanding about you, for example a unique perspective on how you should live, and suddenly–your invisibility is gone. Even worse, efforts to be in charge of your own thoughts, to be holy (as in whole), to relax and think for yourself, become impossible because you worry about what the Other may be thinking, and why he or she is Looking at you so strangely. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the Look in a 1943 novel titled L’invitee (She Came to Stay). It’s about a love triangle, and follows the feelings of the older woman. She not only has to deal with the pain of her lover taking a new girlfriend, but she's also forced to respond to the Look of the girlfriend, which leads to murder.
The basic concept should be simple, the Look and the Other can be understood by anyone. Nonetheless, as with many philosophical terms, academics have made it unnecessarily complicated. See, for example, theWikipedia discussion found at (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism).
“The Other (when written with a capital "O") is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity. However, the concept has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn from it differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts. The experience of the Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences)—only from "over there"—the world itself is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same things. This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze).
While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective, and oneself as objectively existing subjectivity (one experiences oneself as seen in the Other's Look in precisely the same way that one experiences the Other as seen by him, as subjectivity), in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of freedom. This is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. As such, when one experiences oneself in the Look, one doesn't experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something. Sartre's own example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole can help clarify this: at first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. The Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity.”
Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is quite possible that the creaking floorboard was nothing but the movement of an old house; the Look isn't some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the other sees one (there may also have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that the person was there). It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive him.”
Bottom line, we live a contradiction. On the one hand, we want to be self-sufficient and exist in an authentic manner. On the other hand, we can’t do it alone. Like it or not, we must survive in mass society, a cog in the advanced-capitalist scheme of things. Living under the Look of Others encroaches upon our basic humanity. At times we’re degraded to an object and reduced to a state of dependent suspension because Others’ opinions. Suddenly Looked upon, we have a vague feeling of shame. At the same, however, without the mediation of Others we never fully become ourselves.
Sartre and Beauvoir chose as an axiom “there is no God,” without much attention to proof. Do the Look and the Other represent a secular conscience? And what of those who believe? Do they welcome the Look of grace? What about the following:
"If you want to learn something that will really help you, learn to see yourself as God sees you and not as you see yourself in the distorted mirror of your own self-importance. This is the greatest and most useful lesson we can learn: to know ourselves for what we truly are, to admit freely our weaknesses and failings, and to hold a humble opinion of ourselves because of them."[2]
[1] See: Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Routledge Classics 1963; Simone de Beauvoir, L’invitee (She Came to Stay), W.W. Norton and Company, 1999; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Existentialism at http://plato.stanford.edu.
[2] Thomas A. Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Ave Maria Press, Inc., 2005.