Transcendence-transcended

Transcendence-transcended names the Other’s freedom as it appears once objectified within another person’s world. It is not a view into the Other’s living act of consciousness: it is freedom encountered from outside, as a given power and bodily presence that can be interpreted, used, or resisted. The concept also clarifies the reciprocal cost of being seen: the Other’s objectifying perspective fixes one’s own ongoing freedom as an external fact.

The Other as an Object in the World

The Other’s body is not the first or fundamental basis of one’s relation to the Other. That relation is internal: one first apprehends the Other as the person for whom one exists as an object, and only subsequently encounters the Other’s body. Bodily appearance is therefore a secondary episode within a more basic relation of objectification.

In this encounter, the Other appears as transcendence-transcended: one’s own projection toward possibilities surpasses the Other’s transcendence and puts it out of play as a subjectively lived freedom. The Other is nevertheless indicated in the world through the arrangement of instrumental things. Their secondary organization suggests another center of reference, a person who organizes or benefits from them in pursuit of an end. These indications are contingent rather than constitutive features of the objects, and the end they disclose can itself be surpassed and used for one’s own purposes.

The Body as Instrument and Situation

The Other’s body is encountered through this worldly arrangement as a tool that one is not but can use—or that can resist. Unlike one’s own body, which cannot be taken up as just another instrument without disrupting the world organized around it, the Other’s body can be treated as an instrument among instruments. It has an objective coefficient of utility and adversity, and is integrated into one’s world by indicating other objects and, ultimately, one’s own body. The Other is thus apprehended bodily as a transcendence-instrument, not as a subject whose knowledge can be directly entered.

The Other’s senses likewise become knowable as objects only within this relation. The Other’s capacity to know is revealed fundamentally through one’s own being-as-object for the Other, rather than by inspecting the Other’s sense organs. Once the Other is apprehended as an object within one’s universe, the Other’s knowing appears as a property that is there and can itself be known. But this gives access only to knowledge as an external fact, never to the act of knowing as lived transcendence.

Freedom, Character, and the Body-More-Than-Body

The Other’s freedom appears objectively as the power to modify situations, a power inseparable from making situations exist at all. As freedom-as-object, it is apprehended through situations that are perpetually modified, not from the standpoint of the Other’s unobjectified subjectivity. The Other’s body is consequently given as past: character and facticity are available to intuition only as what has already been surpassed.

Irascibility, for example, appears as a promise of anger that has already been surpassed. When anger occurs, the Other’s freedom-as-object gives that facticity a meaning; the observer may also stir or calm the anger, and apprehends it through this surpassing. The body for others is therefore both situated in space and expressive of freedom-as-object in time. It is a body-more-than-body because it never appears in isolation: organism, character, and tool are each determined through their surroundings. The Other’s corporeality and objectivity remain inseparable, though the body is the facticity of the Other’s objectivity rather than identical with that objectivity.

Alienation and Reciprocal Objectification

The Other’s upsurge reaches the for-itself at its core by fixing its pursuing flight in the in-itself. What had been a detotalized totality, continually escaping itself through temporalization, is now totalized from the Other’s standpoint and projected toward the Other’s own elsewhere. For the Other, one is irremediably what one is, and even one’s freedom appears as a given characteristic. The freedom one lives as an open flight is thus fixed outside as a foreseen, contemplated flight.

This objectivity is experienced as alienation: one cannot appropriate or know the being that the Other confers from outside, yet one must turn back toward it and take an attitude toward it. The Other appears to hold the secret of one’s being, which is now outside oneself, while the possibility of making the Other an object in turn offers a way to contest that object-status. Transcendence-transcended therefore marks both sides of the encounter: the Other’s living transcendence becomes an object in one’s world, while one’s own transcendence is fixed as an external fact in the Other’s.