The Other as Subject and as Object

The Other as Subject and as Object describes a decisive division in interpersonal experience: another person is encountered either as a subject whose look reveals the self as an object, or as an object located in the world. The first presence is immediate but resists knowledge; the second can be observed and acted upon but remains only probable. Their separation explains why the Other’s subjectivity cannot be reduced to visible features or secured by ordinary perception.

Two modes of presence

The Other-as-object appears among the things of the world, defined by relations to the world and to the perceiver. A person reading while walking, for example, can appear as a closed figure: “man-reading,” a visible form whose relation to the book gives it a distinctive quality. Yet that form also suggests a localized flight from the surrounding world, a small absence at its heart. This perception does not leave the level of objectivity. The apparent withdrawal of the world around the reader may indicate another consciousness, but it remains a probability inferred from an object.

The complementary mode is the Other-as-subject, encountered through the possibility of being seen. The self cannot make itself an object for itself: reflective effort does not turn its own subjectivity into an independently graspable thing. The self’s objectness therefore refers to another subject, a freedom for whom the self can appear as an object. This relation is not deduced from the visible person’s properties. Rather, the visible Other-as-object can be understood as a conversion or degradation of the more original relation in which the self is exposed to another’s look.

The look and being seen

The Other’s look is not simply one more feature of an object in the world. If the Other were first encountered as an object and then happened to direct eyes toward the self, the look would be reducible to a movement within the perceiver’s world. Instead, the look discloses a new dimension of existence: the self is fixed in the midst of the world, exposed to possibilities and properties that it cannot reach, govern, or know. The Other is not thereby presented as an object; objectifying the Other would make the look collapse into something merely seen.

To experience being looked at is to encounter a concrete presence that comes toward the world from beyond it, without an intermediary object or measurable distance. This presence is not reciprocal in the same way: the self is present to the Other through the density of the world, while the Other’s look is experienced as a transcendence that places the self in that world. The encounter brings with it shame and the sense of being fixed, endangered, and unable to determine what the world—or the self within it—looks like from the Other’s position.

The Other’s freedom is essential to this fixing of possibilities. A material obstacle does not, by itself, give the self’s choices an external limit: rain may become a reason to stay indoors, but the self still determines its action in relation to it. A prohibition is different. When another freedom forbids going out, the possibilities of leaving or staying are presented as already surpassed and fixed by that freedom. The distinction shows why the Other’s look cannot be treated as just another physical event: it changes how the self’s possibilities belong to it.

Certainty and perceptual doubt

The look’s certainty must be distinguished from the uncertain identity of the object that seems to convey it. A rustling bush may be mistaken for a person’s eyes; even when a passerby appears to look directly at someone, the passerby’s existence as a person within the world remains open to doubt. That uncertainty does not cancel the experience of being looked at. It concerns the Other-as-object, whereas the look reveals the Other-as-subject and the condition under which the self can experience its own objectness.

The distinction reverses the apparent evidentiary order. Visible eyes can occasion the realization of being seen, but that realization does not depend on proving that those particular eyes truly belonged to a person. The look appears through the disappearance of the object that seemed to manifest it: during the experience, the passerby’s ugliness, obesity, and shuffling cease to define the encounter, and the Other is apprehended as a mediating freedom. What is certain is the experience of being looked at; what remains probable is its attachment to this or that presence in the world.

Objectification and its limits

The self’s defensive response to alienation is to grasp the Other as an object. The Other can then appear as an undifferentiated part of “they,” as an absent person represented by letters and written accounts, or as a particular person physically present. Which form of objectification becomes available depends on the situation and on the instrumental relations and objects organized within the world. The Other’s facticity and the self’s own facticity help determine whether each can see the other, so no single object-form exhausts the relation.

When the Other is objectified, a subjective quasi-totality is reduced to a “this-one,” a determinate object continuous with the world’s totality. The self can know and act upon this appearance, but such knowledge concerns the Other’s being-as-object; it cannot simply be carried back into the subjectivity disclosed by the look. Even while the Other appears to have been escaped or fixed as an object, the possibility remains that the Other can become other. That possibility belongs to the Other-as-subject, not to the dead possibilities assigned to an object, and so cannot be mastered as one more piece of knowledge.

Irreducibility and transition to the body

The two modes therefore cannot be combined into a completed account of another person. When the Other’s existence is experienced with evidence, the self encounters a subject but does not know that subject as an object. When the self knows or acts upon the Other, it reaches only an object in the world whose existence as this particular person remains probable. The self’s objectivity supplies evidence of the Other’s existence, while objectifying the Other serves as a defense against the self’s own alienation before that freedom.

The account ends by turning from this irreducible split to the body. Both the Other as object and the self as an object for the Other are manifested as bodies, making the body the next problem rather than a synthesis that resolves the two modes. The transition preserves the central distinction: embodied appearance provides a worldly form through which another person may be encountered, but it does not erase the difference between the object perceived and the subject whose look makes the perceiver an object.