Sartre illustrates this idea this way: You see a man in a local park, walking across the grass. You know he’s a man, a human consciousness, but the fact of that is still remote, self-contained. It is when you meet his eyes that he is no longer just the possibility of a human consciousness but rather the inescapable certainty of one. “Each look makes us concretely experience…that we exist for all living men.”[37] In other words, it’s seeing him see you, paying you social attention that makes you fully aware that you exist as an object of attention for others. The gaze is the moment that social
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