The holidays are here and like always I had to seize this one rare opportunity to tidy up things a bit- especially my room! Well, obviously there was a lot of things that lazed around- but what caught my eye in particular was a piece of paper I had filed in my "2010 Diary". That got me thinking about things- and here I am- sitting down to write about it!
From the top view one might say that I want to live the life in my own way wherein I’d be allowed to do what I want to; I’d be allowed to speak what I want to; live the life the way I want to and act in the way I want to. One would find this behaviour or ideology common amongst the teenagers and children. We always love to do things in our own way. But, “What does living the life for one’s own self mean?”
The main question of this article is that whom should we live this life for; for others or for self?
There are many situations wherein we behave and act according to the outside world. We dress up in a way to look well organized to the world and there is nothing wrong in that. Many of our routine tasks of self-cleanliness and staying fit are small examples where we – to some extent only – do act according to the outside world. We stay in families and groups of relatives, neighbours, colleagues and friends. We deal with different types of people day in and day out.
With all these in place, do you really think one can avoid acting as per others? It is difficult. One has to think, speak and act according to the time, place, situation, people and the context in which they are dealing with. When all these factors are in sync, only then one can be known to have acted appropriately.
"Sartre states that many relationships are created by people's attraction not to another person, but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them.
This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with "the look" of the other. The consequence is conflict. In order to maintain the person's own being, the person must control the other, but must also control the freedom of the other "as freedom".
These relationships are a profound manifestation of "bad faith" as the for-itself is replaced with the other's freedom. The purpose of either participant is not to exist, but to maintain the other participant's looking at them. This system is often mistakenly called "love", but it is, in fact, nothing more than emotional alienation and denial of freedom through conflict with the other.
Sartre believes that it is often created as a means of making the unbearable anguish of a person's relationship to their "Facticity" (all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited, such as birthplace and time) bearable. At its extreme, the alienation can become so intense that due to the guilt of being so radically enslaved by "the look" and therefore radically missing their own freedoms, the participants can experience masochistic and sadistic attitudes.
This happens when the participants cause pain to each other, in attempting to prove their control over the other's look, which they cannot escape because they believe themselves to be so enslaved to the look that experiencing their own subjectivity would be equally unbearable."
Thus, being for others could actually mean being for our own self- given that the whole experience is a pleasing, reveling and endearing journey! So we do not have to be extremely or radically selfish to be for our own self. Living for Others could be great- after all, are we not all one?!
P.S. Don't we "be" for our parents?! ;)