The Other (when written with a capital "o") is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its account
of intersubjectivity. However, the concept has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions
drawn from it differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts. The experience of the Other is the experience of
another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the
Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences), only from "over there", the world
itself is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; a person
experiences the other person as experiencing the same as he or she does. This experience of the Other's look is what
is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze).
While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective, and oneself as
objectively existing subjectivity (one experiences oneself as seen in the Other's Look in precisely the same way that
one experiences the Other as seen by him, as subjectivity), in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of
one's freedom. This is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. As such, when one experiences oneself in the
Look, one doesn't experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something. Sartre's own example of a man peeping
at someone through a keyhole can help clarify this: at first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he
is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a
creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame
for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. The Look
is then co-constitutive of one's facticity.
Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is quite possible that the
creaking floorboard was nothing but the movement of an old house; the Look isn't some kind of mystical telepathic
experience of the actual way the other sees one (there may also have been someone there, but he could have not
noticed that the person was there). It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive him.
The concept of the 'Other' has been most comprehensively used by feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. She
used this concept in great detail in her feminist book "The Second Sex" to show how, despite women's sincere efforts
at proving themselves as human beings firmly established in their own rights, men continue to relegate to them a
status of a lower, inferior "other". It is in this context that this feminist-existential term has to be understood.
Recommended books on Existentialism:
