The they

The they names an anonymous mode of everyday existence in which people encounter themselves and others as interchangeable members of a social world. In Sartre’s account of Heidegger, however, the expression also points toward a different phenomenon: the elusive, undifferentiated presence of others who look at someone in public. The first is a way of existing that can be left behind through authenticity; the second vanishes as soon as one tries to apprehend it as a group of objects. Together, these uses place anonymity between social conformity and the ungraspable presence of others.

Anonymous Everyday Existence

For Heidegger, being-with is not originally a face-to-face contest between distinct consciousnesses seeking mutual recognition. It is an ontological solidarity in the use of a shared world: each person makes the world available as an interrelated field of instruments and purposes, and is thereby determined in being by others who do likewise. Within this account, the they names the anonymous form in which that shared existence can be lived.

This everyday mode is not simply imposed from outside. The account insists that a person is responsible for the way they realize being-with, including the choice to exist anonymously. When someone lives in the mode of the they, the world reflects back a kind of impersonal self-image through things made for general use: ready-made clothes, common transportation, parks, gardens, public places, and shelters open to anyone. These objects and places do not identify a unique person; they indicate someone as a user among users, with purposes understood as belonging to everybody and therefore to anyone.

The result is interchangeability. In inauthentic everyday existence, the relation between people is not yet a meeting of unique personalities, each irreducible to the other. Nor is the individual simply positioned in opposition to another individual. Instead, the terms remain undifferentiated within the social unity of the they. Sartre describes this as the ordinary condition until a conversion to authenticity has been realized, not as an unavoidable final account of human existence.

Authenticity and the Call of Conscience

The movement beyond anonymity requires more than declaring oneself an individual. Authenticity and individuality must be earned. Under the influence of the call of conscience, a person resolutely projects toward death as their own most distinctive possibility. In that decision, the person discloses themself to themself authentically and, in the account presented, raises others toward authenticity as well.

Death thus marks a decisive contrast with the everyday world of ready-made possibilities. The public instruments through which someone recognizes themself as anybody belong to a world shared with everyone; resolutely facing death, by contrast, makes the person stand out through a possibility that is their own. Authentic existence does not cancel being-with. Rather, the discussion portrays the disclosure of one’s own being-toward-death as capable of bringing others along into authenticity, even as it distinguishes each person from anonymous interchangeability.

The Crew as an Image of Being-With

To convey Heidegger’s idea, Sartre offers the image of a crew rather than a confrontation between a you and a me. Rowers share an existence that becomes perceptible through the rhythm of their oars and the regular movements of the coxswain. Their common goal gives that coordination direction: they may be trying to overtake a boat or a yacht. Spectators, the performance, and the surrounding world appear on the horizon of this shared undertaking.

The crew’s relation is not primarily a matter of one member inspecting or knowing another. It is a mute existence in common, made sensible through coordinated activity and a goal held in common. This image clarifies why Heideggerian being-with cannot be reduced to isolated individuals who happen to occupy the same setting. Their solidarity is already active in the shared world they organize and the undertaking that brings their movements into a common rhythm.

Yet the image also makes room for singularity. Against the crew’s common existence, an abrupt revelation of being-unto-death can make one person stand out in what Sartre calls a common solitude, while raising the others to that solitude as well. The collective does not simply disappear; rather, the shared ground becomes the setting against which an individual’s most distinctive possibility can be disclosed.

The They as an Elusive Public Look

Sartre also uses the they for the pre-numerical presence experienced when a person appears in public to act in a play or deliver a lecture. While speaking and attending to the ideas being developed, the speaker remains aware of being looked at. That presence is not yet a clearly identified audience, a class, or a collective consciousness, and it is not experienced as a collection of separately perceived gazes. It is an intangible, fleeting, and seemingly omnipresent reality that helps constitute the self presented before others, a self that escapes the speaker.

Trying to verify that the audience has understood changes the experience. When the speaker looks back, heads and eyes appear; the formerly undifferentiated presence is objectified and divided into many people. But the look as such has disappeared in that act of enumeration. For Sartre, the they in this passage names the concrete pre-numerical presence, not simply the inauthentic condition of human reality. Wherever someone is, they are perpetually looking, yet they cannot be apprehended as an object: once objectified, the presence immediately disintegrates.

This second use of the they should not be collapsed into the first. In Heidegger’s account, it describes an anonymous way of existing through which people understand themselves in a common world. In Sartre’s discussion of the public look, it names a presence that precedes the division of others into identifiable individuals. One concerns everyday self-understanding and the possibility of authenticity; the other concerns how the self is disclosed under a look that cannot be held still as an object.

Limits of the Account

Sartre presents Heidegger’s being-with as a promising answer to the problem of how one being can imply the being of others. It avoids making the Other merely one more object among the instruments of the world, and it replaces a model of direct opposition with one of oblique interdependence. But Sartre does not treat the substitution of being-with for being-for as a complete demonstration. Without a foundation, he argues, it remains an assertion, even if certain empirical states seem to disclose coexistence rather than opposition.

The image of the crew therefore illuminates the character of being-with without settling why coexistence is the unique foundation of human relations. Likewise, the public look reveals the Other’s undeniable presence for the person who is looked at, but it does not by itself explain the fundamental relation between self and Other. Across these limits, the they remains significant precisely because it marks two different problems: how anonymous social existence can be transformed, and how the presence of others can be felt before they become countable objects.