Have you ever wondered how philosophy approaches the idea of multiple consciences existing in the same space? One great place to start is with the philosopher Sartre’s theory of “The Look”. Understanding the concept of ‘The Look’ allows us to grasp how we perceive and interact with the 7 billion other consciences around us.
To Sartre it all begins with an understanding of how we perceive inanimate objects. For example, how might you go about describing the presence of a chair on a classroom floor. Sarte would recon you may comment on its proximity to other objects. You may comment on its size and positioning in the room as well. In short, you perceive the chair consistently as an object to your subjectivity. The chair a mere small part of the reality you have created in your consciousness.
Now let’s imagine that a fellow human walk into the room and sits on that very same chair. Sarte asserts that the situation changes as follows, “Instead of a grouping toward me of the objects, there is now an orientation which flees from me.” The presence of another human shifts one’s reality to momentarily be centered around the other human. We become aware of how the rest of the room is situated in comparison to this new human. We may shift our observation from ‘the chair is near the desk’, to ‘the man sitting on the chair is near to the desk’. We become intimately aware of a perspective that we do not share but know probably exists. We wonder what the man may be fixated on attempting to place ourselves in their shoes. Sartre creates an example of a man reading. In this case we witness a reality in which there is just a mind focused on a book, the rest of their reality we perceive to have momentarily dissolved.
Where things get interesting is when Sartre describes what is known as ‘The Look’. The look can simply be described as the moment in which we feel the subjective conscience of another focused upon up. Oddly enough, the look does require us to catch someone staring at us. It can even be the uneasy feeling of being watched, such as hearing rustling in the bushing while walking during the night. Sartre describes the feeling, “Observe while truly being ‘looked at’, this transcends perception as you become conscious of your state as an object instead of subject”. To be looked at is to stop perceiving and instead become conscious of yourself as an object under someone else’s subjectivity. It’s the radical switch from the subject of the world to the object, a fleeting and temporary state of uneasy existential anxiety.