The Other flees me when I seek him and possesses me when I flee him

The Other flees me when I seek him and possesses me when I flee him expresses a persistent reversal in relations with the Other: pursuit makes the Other an object, while retreat exposes the pursuer to the Other’s power to define and possess. Neither stance secures a stable relation between two freedoms. Even benevolent efforts to help can repeat the same contradiction, since acting for another’s freedom requires treating that person as an object within a plan.

The reversal between pursuit and withdrawal

The expression condenses an unstable movement between apprehending the Other as an object and encountering the Other as a subject. When the Other is treated as an object, he can be integrated into one’s world and acted upon; when he appears as a subject, his freedom exceeds that grasp and turns the relation around. The shifts are abrupt and never finally arrested. Each attitude remains unsatisfactory and points toward its opposite, so neither pursuit nor withdrawal can establish a consistent relation.

The reversals frustrate the ideal of apprehending the Other’s freedom and objectivity together. To recognize the Other as free would require a reciprocal recognition of one’s own freedom, yet the relation cannot settle on that plane of equality. The phrase’s paired clauses make this instability memorable: seeking does not secure presence, and fleeing does not secure independence. The Other’s freedom continues to unsettle both strategies.

The paradox of acting for another

The same structure complicates moral action. Even if someone aims to treat the Other’s freedom as an unconditional end, making that freedom an objective turns it into something acted upon and therefore into a transcendence-transcended. To benefit the Other, one must also encounter the Other in a situation as an object-instrument and modify the situation around him. Benevolence cannot simply step outside the relation of power it seeks to overcome.

This is the perilous paradox associated with Rousseau: one must “force” the Other to be free. The force need not take the form of violence to govern relations between people. A person offering comfort or reassurance may hope to free the Other from fear or grief, but the comforter still arranges means toward an end and acts upon the person being comforted. In doing so, the comforter makes the Other part of an instrumental system.

Freedom and affliction

The attempt to console also depends on a distinction that the comforter imposes: freedom is identified with reason and the pursuit of the good, while affliction is treated as the result of psychic determinism. The two are handled as though freedom could be separated from suffering like components of a chemical product. But that separation already takes freedom as an object that can be managed from outside.

The resulting violence is structural rather than necessarily physical. By treating freedom as detachable from affliction, the comforter transcends and constrains the freedom he means to assist. The account’s decisive reversal is that freedom itself makes itself affliction; therefore, acting to free freedom from affliction acts against freedom. The expression’s pursuit-and-flight pattern thus reaches beyond personal approach or avoidance: it names the difficulty of relating to another person without converting that person’s freedom into an object of one’s own project.