“The eye cannot see itself”

“The eye cannot see itself” expresses a limit within perception and reflection: a sense makes objects present, but cannot, while functioning for the subject, become an object of that same apprehension. Sartre develops the expression through sight and touch, distinguishing awareness of what is perceived from knowledge of the sensory activity through which it is perceived.

The Sense and Its Objects

The discussion begins by rejecting sensation as a separately encountered, private impression. A person apprehends the green of a notebook or foliage, not an isolated sensation of green. Yet the senses remain undeniable: one sees green, touches cold polished marble, and may lose sight or hearing through accident. The question is therefore how a sense can persist if it does not give the subject a sensation that can be isolated and inspected.

Sartre’s example of an inkwell makes the distinction concrete. The inkwell is immediately given as a thing, and sight is the way it is visibly present. The perceiver is conscious of seeing it, but sight itself slips away from knowledge: there is knowledge of the inkwell, not knowledge of sight as a sensory activity. Reflection can disclose consciousness of the inkwell, but not a separately apprehended visual sense.

Why the Eye Cannot See Itself

The expression, attributed in the passage to Auguste Comte, describes this asymmetry. A hypothetical third eye might view the two eyes as they see, just as a person can see and touch a hand. But this would reveal the eyes or hand as objects, not the seeing eye as it sees or the hand as it touches. The observer would have taken up the point of view of the Other toward the senses.

The same limit applies to reflection and to bodily inspection. Reflective awareness finds consciousness of a thing in the world, not visual or tactile activity as such. Seeing or touching the sense organs reveals objects in the world rather than the revealing activity through which objects appear. The senses are nevertheless there—sight, touch, and hearing—without becoming directly apprehensible to the subject in their lived operation.

From Inapprehensibility to Orientation

Because a sense cannot be defined as an inspectable act or as a succession of lived states, Sartre proposes approaching it through the objects that appear to it. Seen objects are not presented in an arbitrary order: they are oriented. This shifts the inquiry from an imagined inventory of sensations to the structured field in which objects become perceptible.

An object appears against the world as a ground and in relation to other things. Figure and ground are therefore complementary: the particular thing stands out only within a perceptual field. Silence, for example, is not an empty absence of sound but the resonant field of undifferentiated noises in which a focused sound can be submerged. The expression thus marks more than a visual paradox: it opens an account of the senses through the organized relations among perceived objects and their perceptual ground.