The discussion of the other was an interesting topic. It was a fun idea to entertain and it made a
lot of sense. The idea being that, a
part of ourselves comes from how other people view us. This was one of those things that I don’t
often think about. I don’t mean to say
that I don’t think of what other people think of me, but the idea that how
these others view me is just as much a part of me as how I view myself. In my own life I’ve noticed that what other
people think of me is highly important to me.
But I think that this comes from my desire to make people happy. When someone views me negatively, I notice
that I tend to focus on the single negative opinion rather than those which are
positive. I think I am living in bad
faith because of this. My understanding
of bad faith in this context is that we are in bad faith when we only see
ourselves through others, or we only see ourselves through us. What I think is the major point of this, is
that when we only look through one lens, we are deceiving ourselves. This self-deception causes a lot of
problems. Letting ourselves fall into
this deception prevents us from seeing the whole picture. What I’ve really got from Sartre so far is
that there is more to people than what lies on the surface. That humans are complex, and that who we are,
what our meaning in life is, is a combination of many different aspects of our
lives. The other thing that I’ve gotten
from Sartre is that people often let one aspect of who they are overshadow the other
aspects, and that we should strive to maintain a balance between these aspects
in order to live life to the fullest.
Andrew,
ReplyDeleteI am really glad my group was assingned this section, because I really found the concept of being-for-others interesting. We often think things like “It’s mind over matter” and “What other people think of you doesn’t count so long as you believe in yourself.” But Sartre is saying that even if we firmly believe in that those ideas, just the look from a person can make us feel judged. And that look objectifies us to the point that we feel like we must do what is expected of us just to please the other. So say a person were to “look” at me for walking my dog on their grass—I won’t walk my dog there again. It’s in the small things that we see how much the Other has an influence over us. And the most interesting thing is that without the Other, we might not even have that grasp on who we, ourselves, are!
Overall, what I have gotten from Sartre comes down to two things: freedom and balance. The whole idea of bad faith was built around this concept of balancing transcendence and facticity to the point of being able to have one foot in both, with equal weight on both.