To start off this hectic week, here is a tweet I saw the other day when I was scrolling on twitter.
Although we’re on Sartre now just thought I’d share this because there’s a lot of unpack here.
OR if they pronounced Camus with a french accent, RUN!!!
So, being perceived.
I think there’s really two moods I have: when I want to be perceived at the hub and when I don’t want to be perceived at the hub. Actually three, my third mood is perceiving people at the hub.
So what’s the main difference between being perceived and not being perceived? Or how would Sartre categorize the two?
Being perceived is being looked at. Someone is looking at me at my body. Is it my crush staring at me from across the hub? Are they getting Ath tea while I’m trying to do my protocol? Do they think my outfit is cute? Am I cute? Who am I?
Sartre characterizes this as “The look”
Basically, when you are perceived by someone else you are forced to recognize your own consciousness
First off, not to objectify anyone but to objectify everyone, everyone we perceive is perceived as an object.
For example, I see my roommate going to class in Kravis. I see the cube behind her and the buildings surrounding her. Her existence is not an additive type to the other objects surrounding her but more as a relation.
As Sartre would call this “object-lawn”, this would be object-cube. There is a distance between the other (my roommate) and the cube. Even though my roommate is “the other” she’s still an object. The other is a “probable object for me-as-subject” (Sartre 232).
Sartre goes on to describe the man looking into the keyhole in the door.
Sartre states “I am alone and on the level of a non-thetic self-consciousness. This means first of all that there is no self to inhabit my consciousness, nothing therefore to which I can refer my acts in order to qualify them” (Sartre 235).
In this moment, he is not being perceived.
“But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me. What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure – modifications which I can apprehend and fix conceptually by means of the reflective cogito” (Sartre 236)
However in this moment he is perceived. Being perceived by others alters your own being. Imagine a bunch of people looking at you during a presentation. You feel all eyes on you, altering how you feel internally.
This is why I hate being perceived. There is an interruption of the self, just existing as my unreflective consciousness. Seeing myself because somebody sees me.
