“Lady Power”
Nancy Bauer in The New York Times, June 20, 2010
She is referencing Sartre’s book, Being and Nothingness, which discusses being-for-itself.
Like everything else in the world, we have a nature: we’re bodily, we can’t control what happens around us, and we are constantly the objects of other people’s judgments. Sartre called this part of ourselves “being-in-itself.” But at the same time we’re subjects, or what he, following Hegel, called “being-for-itself”: we make choices about what we do with our bodies and appetites, experience ourselves as the center of our worlds and judge the passing show and other people’s roles in it. For Sartre, the rub is that it’s impossible for us to put these two halves of ourselves together. At any given moment, a person is either an object or a subject.
June 20th, 2010 § Comments Off on Like everything else in the world, we have a nature: we’re bodily, we can’t control what happens around us, and we are constantly the objects of other people’s judgments. Sartre called this part of ourselves “being-in-itself.” But at the same time we’re subjects, or what he, following Hegel, called “being-for-itself”: we make choices about what we do with our bodies and appetites, experience ourselves as the center of our worlds and judge the passing show and other people’s roles in it. For Sartre, the rub is that it’s impossible for us to put these two halves of ourselves together. At any given moment, a person is either an object or a subject. § permalink
Or, they become mesmerized by the mirror-like other and attempt, as they previously had done in controlling their own body, to assert their will.
January 1st, 1807 § Comments Off on Or, they become mesmerized by the mirror-like other and attempt, as they previously had done in controlling their own body, to assert their will. § permalink
Wikipedia, in an article discussing Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic.