Freedom-as-object

Freedom-as-object describes how another person’s freedom appears to an observer: as an objective power to make a situation exist and to modify it. It is not freedom grasped as inward subjectivity, but transcendence made visible as an object, inseparable from the body and the circumstances through which that person acts.

Freedom disclosed as character

The Other’s character is immediately apprehended as a synthetic whole, though its differentiated features may take time to articulate and organize. This first intuition can be mistaken, and general or statistical knowledge may help interpret it; nevertheless, understanding develops what was initially grasped rather than uncovering a hidden character behind it. Character is therefore encountered as facticity, the Other’s original contingency, and as freedom: the unconditioned power to make a situation exist by modifying it.

That power is freedom-as-object. It appears through a situation perpetually altered, so the Other’s body presents a past that has already been surpassed. Character is accessible as what the Other has made of facticity, but only as something being gone beyond. Even irascibility is apprehended as a surpassed promise of anger. To get angry is already to surpass and give meaning to that irascibility: anger appears as its recovery by freedom-as-object.

The body in its surroundings

The Other’s anger appears as free because it is judged as an act, yet it can also be stirred up or calmed down by the observer. It becomes intelligible through this surpassing, not as an isolated inward state. The body is accordingly the facticity of transcendence made object: at once situated in space and extended through time as freedom-as-object.

For this reason the body-for-others is called the “magic object par excellence” and “a body-more-than-body.” It never appears alone, whether considered as organism, character, or tool; its surroundings help determine what it is. The body must not be confused with the Other’s objectivity, which is transcendence as transcended, but corporeality and objectivity remain strictly inseparable. The body is more than a bounded organism because it points beyond itself into the situation that gives it meaning.

Objectification and alienation

The Other’s arrival fixes the for-itself’s pursuing flight in the in-itself. A freedom that had escaped through temporalization and remained a detotalized totality with a perpetual elsewhere now appears as a totality for another person, who transcends it toward an elsewhere of their own. From the Other’s perspective, the self is irrevocably what it is, and even its freedom becomes a given characteristic.

This fixed version of the flight is not the flight the for-itself lives from within; it is fixed outside. Its objectivity is experienced as an alienation that cannot be transcended or known, yet the for-itself must turn back toward it and adopt attitudes in relation to the object it is for the Other. Freedom-as-object thus marks both the visibility of another’s agency and the estrangement produced when freedom is apprehended as an external fact.