You cannot escape — not if you approach the problem as a simple matter of technique or strategy. The Self is always caught within the gaze of Others. It is mediated, distorted, pinned down. In this world we appear as objects, frozen in judgment, stripped of the freedom we imagine we possess.
Yet in a Sartrean sense, “escape” takes on a different meaning.
1. Re‑owning the Self
Instead of fleeing the gaze, we confront it. We accept that others will objectify us, but we refuse to let that objectification define us. We reclaim our subjectivity through action, choice, and transcendence.
Hell, in Sartre’s formulation, is not an active torture — it is a passive one. A shy hell. A quiet suffocation.
This is why Sartre warns against la mauvaise foi (bad faith). Every day we lie to ourselves to avoid responsibility: pretending others don’t matter, pretending we are fixed, pretending we have no choice. But that, too, is a trap.
The real escape is to act as if we are free, even when others try to pin us down.
(Key & Peele captured this dynamic brilliantly in a sketch that dramatizes the absurdity of the gaze: https://youtu.be/9-GRzu6zbS0?si=-oGvs60_Tf8VLYxY)
2. Art as a Counter‑Gaze
People often dismiss contemporary or modern art as nonsense. But art, writing, performance — these are ways of bending the gaze, distorting it, reflecting it back. They are acts of resistance. They destabilize the objectifying look and reassert the creator’s freedom.
3. Toward a Collective Ethics
In his later years, Sartre shifts from individual existentialism to a more collective ethics. We do not escape hell by fleeing others, but by transforming the social conditions that make objectification inevitable.
There is a line of his that has shaped my own path:
“I cannot take my freedom as a goal unless I also take the freedom of others as a goal.”
(Je ne puis prendre ma liberté pour but, que si je prends également celle des autres pour but.)
Freedom is never solitary. It is relational, interdependent, and always under construction.
