Being-for-others

Being-for-others (être-pour-autrui) is Sartre's term for the third irreducible ontological structure of human reality, alongside being-in-itself and being-for-itself. It names the dimension of existence in which the for-itself is constituted as an object by another consciousness through the Look (le regard). Being-for-others is not derivable from being-for-itself as a logical consequence; it arises as a "factual necessity" — a "primary and perpetual fact" — through the reciprocal internal negation in which each consciousness constitutes itself by not-being the Other. This mutual but asymmetrical negation produces the "Me-as-object": my being as fixed, spatialised, temporalised, and rendered opaque to myself by an ineliminable exterior perspective. The Look, first disclosed phenomenologically through shame, reveals that the Other holds a dimension of my being I can never fully appropriate — "the secret of what I am."

Being-for-others ramifies across all domains of Sartrean ontology. The body, language, absence/presence, disease, desire, love, masochism, sadism, and hate are all analysed as structures or "fundamental modes" of this ontological category. Being-for-others is both necessary (human reality as such implies it) and contingent (its facticity cannot be grounded in any totalising synthesis, not even the "mind"). It represents the most radical "ekstasis" of the for-itself — a scissiparity externalised as two opposed internal negations separated by an irreducible phantom exteriority — and it is irremediable: once instituted, even the death of the Other cannot annul it, since it is fixed as a permanent possibility and past dimension of the self.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre develops being-for-others systematically as the third ontological dimension of human reality — a move that distinguishes his project both from Hegel's dialectical absorption of otherness and from Husserlian solipsism. The concept first emerges in the analysis of bad faith (Part I), where the "equal dignity of being" possessed by being-for-others and being-for-itself is shown to supply bad faith with a structural escape route: one can always flee from self-perception to the Other's perception or vice versa, since neither is privileged as "truth." The concept is then formally introduced in Part III via the phenomenon of shame and the analysis of The Look, where being-for-others is declared an "absolute event" of "prehistoric historization" — prior to all history but making history possible.

Through the middle sections of the work, being-for-others is progressively extended: to the structure of the body (the body-for-others as a distinct ontological plane irreducible to the lived body); to absence and presence (absence as a mode of being-for-others between human realities); to language (identified outright as "originally being-for-others"); and to all concrete relations with Others — love, desire, sadism, masochism, hate. Each of these is revealed as a "fundamental mode" of being-for-others, each attempting and failing to resolve the irresolvable tension between freedom and objecthood.

In the final parts of Being and Nothingness, being-for-others is linked to death and freedom. Death is assigned specifically to the being-for-others dimension — "it is the Other who is mortal in his being" — distinguishing Sartre sharply from Heidegger's being-unto-death. Freedom, by contrast, belongs to the for-itself's own ontological structure and cannot be extinguished by the Other's look, though it is permanently alienated in its situational face. The "dubious battle" between being-for-itself and being-for-others is thus left permanently unresolved, with death giving the final, external, and irrevocable victory to the Other's perspective.

Within Sartrean commentary and reception, being-for-others has been read as a structural anticipation of Lacanian alienation: the subject's being as constituted in the field of the Other, the irreducible gap between lived experience and its objectified, knowable form. The connection is made explicit in Sartre's own discussion of existential psychoanalysis, where the "project-for-itself" can be "experienced only as a living possession" while its "existence for-itself" remains "incompatible" with "objective existence" — a formulation that maps closely onto Lacan's distinction between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (page unknown)

I discover with it for human reality another mode of existence as fundamental as being-for-itself, and this I shall call being-for-others.

The formal introduction of being-for-others as a third, irreducible ontological structure — not derived from the for-itself and not subordinate to it — is the conceptual hinge on which Sartre's entire intersubjective ontology turns.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.280)

Being-for-others is a constant fact of my human reality, and I grasp it with its factual necessity in every thought, however slight, which I form concerning myself.

Establishes the ontological status of being-for-others as a 'factual necessity' rather than an essential or logical derivation — the key move that prevents it from being absorbed into either idealism or solipsism.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.364)

the Other's look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret—the secret of what I am.

The most condensed phenomenological articulation of being-for-others: the Other's look constitutes a dimension of my being that is irrevocably outside my own grasp, generating both alienation and the structure of all concrete intersubjective conflict.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (page unknown)

Language is not a phenomenon added on to being-for-others. It is originally being-for-others; that is, it is the fact that a subjectivity experiences itself as an object for the Other.

Identifies language as structurally co-extensive with being-for-others, not a secondary expression of it — a pivotal move linking the ontology of intersubjectivity to the theory of signification.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (page unknown)

He who has once been for-others is contaminated in his being for the rest of his days even if the Other should be entirely suppressed; he will never cease to apprehend his dimension of being-for-others as a permanent possibility of his being.

Establishes the irremediability of being-for-others: it is not dissolved by the Other's death but is fixed as a past and permanent ontological dimension, which is precisely why hate — the project of abolishing the Other — necessarily fails.

Kafka's The Trial and The Castle (literature)

Cited by Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.265). Sartre invokes Kafka's protagonists K. and the Surveyor as literary illustrations of being-in-the-midst-of-the-world-for-others: their acts are entirely their own and succeed in their immediate terms, but their 'true meaning' constantly escapes them and belongs to an inaccessible outside perspective. This gloomy, evanescent atmosphere of total opacity felt through total translucency captures the lived structure of being-for-others.

The young coquette (from the discussion of bad faith) (case_study)

Cited by Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (page unknown). Sartre uses the case of the young woman on a date who lets her hand remain in her companion's without acknowledging or refusing his desire to illustrate how being-for-others provides bad faith with a means of escape: she can oscillate between her own self-perception and the Other's perception of her conduct, since neither has ontological privilege over the other.

Pierre's absence in relation to Thérèse (case_study)

Cited by Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.280). Sartre uses Pierre's absence from a location in relation to Thérèse to demonstrate that absence is not an empirical spatial fact but a mode of being-for-others: it is a bond between human realities that presupposes a fundamental presence of these realities to one another, showing that being-for-others persists across spatial distance.

The doctor examining the patient's wounded leg (case_study)

Cited by Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (page unknown). Sartre uses the scene of a doctor looking at a patient's leg to illustrate the two ontologically incommunicable planes of the body: there is no essential difference between the doctor's perception of the leg and the patient's own visual perception of it, which reveals that seeing one's own body is already apprehending it as being-for-others — the body as object, not as lived possibility.

Within the corpus

Is being-for-others an ontological necessity or a contingent factical fact? Sartre simultaneously claims it is constitutively required for human reality ('our human reality must of necessity be simultaneously for-itself and for-others') and that it cannot be derived from being-for-itself as an essential necessity, making it irreducibly contingent ('as a fact—as a primary and perpetual fact—not as an essential necessity').

• Sartre (occurrence 6): being-for-others is not an ontological structure of the for-itself and cannot be deduced from it; it is a factual necessity, a primary and perpetual fact, not an essential necessity. — cite: jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological p.None (occurrence 6)

• Sartre (occurrence 8): being-for-others 'can be only if it is made-to-be by a totality which is lost so that being-for-others may arise' — suggesting it requires a founding totality (the mind) — yet simultaneously 'can exist only if it involves an inapprehensible and external non-being which no totality, not even the mind, can produce or found.' — cite: jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological p.None (occurrence 8)

  This tension between necessitated contingency and contingent necessity is Sartre's own acknowledged aporia: the metaphysical question of the plurality of consciousnesses simultaneously demands and refuses a founding answer.

Across frameworks

vs Object Oriented Ontology

Lacanian: For Lacanian theory, the subject's constitution through the Other's gaze is not an accidental encounter between two pre-formed entities but the very site at which subjectivity is produced. The gaze is not possessed by the Other as a thing but is itself a structural object (objet petit a) that precedes and exceeds any empirical looker. Alienation in the field of the Other is constitutive, not contingent.

Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman) insists that all objects, including human subjects, withdraw from any relation — including the gaze of the Other. No object is fully constituted by its relations; each retreats into an inaccessible interior. The Other's look cannot exhaust or produce the subject's being because both looker and looked-at withdraw from the encounter.

Fault line: Lacanian/Sartrean theory holds that the subject is constitutively produced in and through the Other's gaze (alienation is originary); OOO holds that every object, including the subject, withdraws from all relations and cannot be constituted by them.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: Lacanian theory (and Sartre's being-for-others) holds that there is no authentic core self awaiting actualization; the subject is constitutively split between being-for-itself and being-for-others (or between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement), and this split cannot be healed. The Other's gaze does not distort a pre-given self but is constitutive of the subject's very being.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Rogers, Maslow) posits a core self whose authentic potential is distorted by conditions of worth imposed by others. The therapeutic goal is to strip away these external impositions (the equivalent of being-for-others) and recover an inner, organismic, self-actualizing core. The Other's gaze is ultimately an obstacle to be overcome, not a constitutive dimension of being.

Fault line: Sartrean/Lacanian theory treats being-for-others as irremediable and constitutive of the self (there is no 'original' self prior to the Other's look); humanistic theory treats the Other's evaluative gaze as a secondary distortion of a primary authentic self that pre-exists and can survive it.

vs Frankfurt School

Lacanian: For Lacan (and Sartre), the alienation produced by being-for-others is an ontological structure, not a historical or socio-economic one. It cannot be overcome by changed social conditions or emancipatory praxis; the split between being-for-itself and being-for-others is constitutive of subjectivity as such, not a distortion produced by capitalism or reification.

Frankfurt School: Frankfurt School critical theory (Hegel–Marx lineage in Honneth, Adorno) tends to treat alienation as historically produced through specific social relations of recognition or reification. Alienation in the Other's gaze is, on this view, not a permanent ontological structure but a product of social pathologies that a rational, recognitive social order could in principle overcome.

Fault line: Sartrean/Lacanian ontology universalises the alienating structure of being-for-others as a permanent feature of intersubjectivity; the Frankfurt School historicises alienation as contingent on social structures and potentially remediable through critique and transformed recognition.