Sartre and Looking Past to Societal Roles

Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy is rightly divided by critics into earlier ontological writings and later political philosophy. However, Sartre’s hesitance to apply the ontological concepts in Being and Nothingness to Critique of Dialectical Reason as well as his lack of political commentary in the former work leaves his readers with two incomplete understandings of the world. In this paper, I attempt to inject a degree of the political into Sartre’s famous concept of “the look,” coming to the conclusion that the roles one plays in society directly affects an individual’s possibility of objectification. Ultimately, these societal positions prove to be aspects of individual existence that can allow for the ontological possibility of deflecting the objectifying look through an individual’s distancing of one’s possibilities from one’s present circumstances.