Being and Nothingness

After establishing certain truths about existence and consciousness—such as the denial of the pre-reflective cogito and being-for-itself—Sartre turns his attention to the problem of existence. He utilizes shame as an example of this problem. Shame is a part of consciousness; it functions in a similar way. However, the existence of shame is predicated upon the existence of the Other. Sartre points to the Other as the source of the problem of existence, as the comparison of the self to the Other produces shame. The Other makes being aware of itself, its qualities both now and in the past, and it inspires new qualities to emerge. In short, the Other turns the being-for-itself into an object to be judged, quantified, and questioned.

One of the issues with philosophical conceptions of the Other is that they fail to provide room for intuition of the soul of the Other. Sartre points to realism as an example. Realism is not concerned with anything beyond what can be seen and experienced regarding the Other and takes its existence for granted. Sartre proposes that humans must consider one another as objects to make sense of their own consciousness through negation, i.