Pride

Pride, or vanity, is an unstable response to discovering oneself as an object for another person: it takes responsibility for that object-status, then tries to turn the qualities conferred by the Other into a means of securing admiration or love. Its defining contradiction is that it seeks confirmation from the Other as a free subject while trying to control that subject and recover from them a fixed account of the self.

Recognition and the Ground of Pride

Pride does not replace the original shame of being an object; it is built on that shame. In the account of the Other’s look, shame is the recognition that the self is indeed the object another person sees and judges. This is not simply knowledge about oneself. The self is lived as an object for the Other, beyond the self’s own control, and the world around it—including its walls, door, and keyhole—seems to turn toward the Other as well.

Pride acknowledges the Other as the subject through whom the self acquires its object-status, but it also emphasizes and assumes responsibility for being that object. The assumption begins with resignation: to take pride in being a certain way, the self must first accept that it is that way as an object for someone else. Pride is therefore a reaction to shame, but not a recovery of control over how the self appears. It is a bid to make use of an identity whose defining authority still lies beyond the self.

Pride, Shame, and Arrogance

Shame and arrogance mark two contrasting acknowledgments of the relation between the self and the Other. Shame recognizes the Other as the subject through whom the self becomes an object. Arrogance, by contrast, apprehends the self as a free object through which the Other becomes an Other. Pride, or vanity, is neither of these stable attitudes. It is an unbalanced attempt to act on the Other from within the object-status the Other has given it.

The distinction matters because vanity does not simply accept being seen, nor does it straightforwardly affirm freedom against the Other. It wants to be an object that can affect the person who sees it, while also requiring that person’s response to come from freedom. Its effort to make objecthood active thus remains dependent on the very subject whose power it hopes to overcome.

The Attempt to Secure Admiration

In vanity, the self takes a quality the Other has attributed to it—beauty, strength, or intelligence—and tries to return that quality as an influence on the Other. The aim is to produce admiration or love passively in the other person. Yet vanity also demands that this response validate the self’s status as an object and that the Other experience it as a free subject. The requested confirmation must therefore satisfy incompatible conditions: it must be elicited by the self and remain genuinely free in the Other.

That contradiction prevents the feeling from serving as secure proof of the self’s being. The Other’s response cannot both be guaranteed by the self’s effort and function as independent recognition. Pride seeks an absolute object-status through a response that, because it must be freely given, can never be made absolute in this way.

The Failure of Vanity

To recover the identity it seeks, vanity tries to get hold of the Other and make the Other an object. It hopes to penetrate that object and discover there the secret of its own being. But once the Other is made an object, the self encounters itself only as an image within the Other-as-object. That image no longer supplies the desired reunion with the self: the self instead attributes it to the Other as one of that person’s subjective properties.

The effort consequently defeats its own purpose. The Other’s objectification deprives the image of the recognition vanity wanted from a free subject; the self is left confronting the Other-as-object and its own selfhood without relief. Shame, fear, and pride are presented as original reactions through which the self recognizes the Other as a subject beyond reach. They also disclose the self’s own selfhood, which can motivate the attempt to turn the Other into an object. Vanity’s failure thus follows from the structure that first made it possible: the self wants the Other to certify its object-status, yet the certification loses its force when the Other is no longer treated as free.