"Lucien Fleurier é um grande aspargo"

o olhar de outrem e a intersubjetividade em Sartre

Abstract

In phenomenology, the problem of intersubjectivity is presented in the fifth meditation of Edmund Husserl's Cartesian meditations (1931). For the German philosopher, to perceive others is to recognize them. It is through the similarity of my bodily behavior and the bodily behavior of others that I recognize myself in others. I only recognize the other, therefore, by analogy. In this paper, we will try to explain the solution given by Jean-Paul Sartre in his ontophenomenology developed in Being and nothingness: an essay in phenomenological ontology (1943) to the problem of intersubjectivity, which he posed on an ontological level in order to investigate the existence of a way of being of the other, a being-for-the-other. To this end, we will begin by affirming shame as the phenomenon that makes the being of the other explicit, since being ashamed implies the existence of another before whom I am ashamed. Through shame, the being of my conscience becomes the object of another's gaze. We believe that, in this way, Sartre revolutionizes the problem of intersubjectivity from a relational point of view, since the other appears as someone who objectifies me, without me being able to objectify their gaze over me. In this way, Sartre advances on Husserl in terms of resolving intersubjectivity by analogy, since the French phenomenologist starts to consider the knowledge of the other in their individuality, not through the individual Ego. To better understand the place of the gaze in the dimension of intersubjectivity for Sartre, we will use a passage from the short story “The childhood of a leader”, from the collection The wall (1939). We will follow the moment when our protagonist, after reading behind the bathroom door the phrase "Lucien Fleurier is a big asparagus", starts to recognize himself as being thin and tall. In this moment, we can appreciate how the gaze of others constitutes the way Lucien Fleurier knows and recognizes himself, based on how his schoolmates objectify him.