Last week, I asked my twelfth-grade philosophy students to apply Jean Paul Sartre’s idea of “the look” to their experiences of online learning. Specifically, I assigned a “journal entry discussing to what extent we experience Sartre’s ‘the look’ differently between a classroom in real life versus online learning via Teams.” In today’s post, I take a stab at answering it. I suggest that the solution to the-look-induced existential anxiety in the virtual classroom is that we reflect on how others perceive us even when we cannot see others seeing us.
Philosophers across space and time have grappled with the question of what the self is. Rene Descartes attempted to settle centuries of questions regarding whether any self exists by declaring “I think, therefore I am.” Students seemed excited about this owing to a recent Billie Eilish song. The famed phrase “I think, therefore I am,” means that since my thoughts exist, I must be something. What the self is seemed less interesting to Descartes than the fact that the self does exist and is something. How could subsequent philosophers argue against Descartes’s point that the self is something? Martin Heidegger – referred to in class as “that Nazi Heidegger” – challenged “I think, therefore I am” by changing the question. Instead of asking whether a self exists, as an existentialist Heidegger accepted the premise that existence precedes essence and sought to distill the essence.
Exactly twenty years later, Jean Paul Sartre built on Heidegger’s Being and Time with Sartre’s own Being and Nothingness, in which he introduced the idea of “the look.” Sartre constructs an example of a man who witnesses his wife cheating on him, and the man feels jealousy. But when his wife and the other man notice that this husband can see them, the husband then feels new shame and a sense of being seen on top of his jealousy. Therefore, our experience of self can differ depending on whether another can see us or not. Sartre calls the process of changing another self’s experience of self by seeing them, “the look.”
In mid-March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic transformed education and learning as we knew them. Classes that had once met in a lecture hall or around a seminar table moved online. Whether we use Zoom or Microsoft Teams or another digital venue, we look at each other on a screen instead of in real life. A huge difference between class in person and synchronous class on a screen is that now we see ourselves in addition to others. Previously, a student might have looked around the class at her peers. Now, said student looks around class to see peers but also to see herself on the screen. This new dynamic elevates our awareness of how we might appear to others and how others perceive us.
“The look” is both part of a long history of philosophizing the self and a key step in an existentialist argument. Existentialist thinking begins with the premise that existence precedes essence; claims that each person has absolute freedom and therefore absolute responsibility; defines the self as partially shaped by the perceptions of others; points out that the fact that any of us is here in the world is profoundly unlikely and that is “absurdity”; defines authenticity as being toward death or living a way that you would want to repeat each time; and all steps of this argument are deeply interconnected. Therefore, when a student or a teacher sees themselves on the screen as part of a classroom, they become acutely aware of their freedom and responsibility, the absurdity that they exist, the reality of others perceiving them, and the profound challenge of striving for authenticity among all these absurdities. For one or all of those reasons, seeing oneself on screen can be anxiety-provoking.
When I assigned a journal entry to twelfth grade philosophy students in which they applied Sartre’s “the look” to virtual learning, their insights were brilliant. I was delighted by one student’s response, which imagined my perspective as the teacher. She wrote that when no students turn on the cameras, the teacher becomes acutely aware of how she is seen. This student added that when all students turn off their cameras, the teacher might even feel objectified like her only purpose is to disperse information. Other students reflected on their own experiences of not only being seen but seeing themselves being seen during class and how that might create anxiety.
When we see ourselves being seen in a Microsoft Teams classroom or on a Zoom call, we might consider our own freedom among others, the absurdity that we are anything at all, or intense self-consciousness about what others perceive. I do not require cameras on for a variety of educational philosophies regarding equity and inequity, bandwidth and Wi-Fi, home environments and self-image struggles. However, my point about virtual learning epitomizing “the look” is not an argument for cameras off in the digital classroom. Rather, I mean to suggest that we are unlikely beings, responsible for our actions, and dynamic, unstable selves whether we can see ourselves on the screen or not.
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Rebecca Brenner Graham’s sketch of Sartre’s notion of the self-other relationship is a welcome exploration of the various accounts of self-formation. It is also a creative application of Sartre’s idea to say the least. Sartre’s own thinking on the subject was powerfully influenced by Hegel’s master-slave(lordship and bondage) discussion in his Phenomenology of Spirit. It is an inexhaustible topic and one of modern philosophy’s most suggestive themes. But let me just mention one other name, an American name, whose line of thinking echoes those European antecedents. I refer to the American pragmatist thinker, George H. Mead, who was a contemporary of Dewey’s. I would urge those of you interested in the intellectual history of the idea of the self to take a look at some of Mead’s work. All the very contemporary work in social psychology/ the significant other owes a debt to Mead, while the notoriously difficult work of Jacques Lacan on the “mirror stage” and the “mirror self” clearly belongs in the same tradition as Mead, though Mead was a sociologist not a psychoanalyst.