“The Look a-like”

About the work

Jean-Paul Sartre's thought experiment "the look" is about a young man walking alone through a park. He hops and skips between the flowers and the trees, at the centre of his own consciousness, his own universe. Then, all of a sudden, he notices there's another person in the park — watching him. And just like that he goes from being a subject to being an object, projecting onto himself whatever he imagines the other person is thinking about him.

But what if there'd been a mirror in the park instead? What would he have seen then? An object, or a subject? Would he have looked himself in the eyes — the very windows to the soul, to consciousness — or at his clothes, his skin, his hair, the outward social markers that fix his place in society and the universe? The whole job of a mirror is to show you how the world sees you from the outside. There's an enormous amount of information in what we choose to put on our outsides, all of it saying something about who we are, or who we'd like to be.

Even the Vikings cared about looking good. In one often-quoted English text, the writer grumbles that the Norse men were more attractive to English women because they combed their hair every day, bathed once a week and changed their clothes often. Even hardened raiders from the north knew the power of a well-groomed exterior!

But you can also get far too wrapped up in your own reflection and fall in love with it, like Narcissus. The old Greek myth tells of the strikingly beautiful man who spurned every suitor, man or woman alike. He fell in love with his own reflection, and — unable ever to embrace it — took his own life in frustration. A flower grew from his ashes and carries his name to this day; in English we know it as the narcissus.

In Eastern philosophy, Confucius and his idea of the individual as part of a harmonious whole held sway for two and a half thousand years. It's through your interplay with the society around you that you find your worth — like the ant, scurrying about with purpose, working for the queen and the mound. Ants may have passed the mirror test and know themselves, yet they have no individual wants or desires beyond serving the collective. Here Sartre disagrees completely: the human being, he says, is "condemned to be free," creating itself through its own free choices. That freedom, though, leaves us wide open to anyone who wants to steer those choices.

The Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was the first to map out the human unconscious. But it was his American nephew, Edward Bernays, who first put that insight to work manipulating the choices of the masses on a grand scale. Back in the 1920s, he grasped that we'd buy things we didn't actually need, as long as he could convince us they'd broadcast our identity to the world. He set out to turn the masses into narcissistic flowers who no longer saw themselves as part of an ecosystem, a society, but as individuals — individuals who'd prove their individuality by buying things. Among other things, he got women to start smoking, by having young, healthy upper-class girls light up in the 4th of July parade on 5th Avenue. He'd tipped off the press beforehand that the girls were demonstrating for women's rights, calling their cigarettes "torches of freedom." And so he taught women to link smoking with the fight for equality, and with elegance.

In the park where our young subject stands gazing at his reflection, the trees appear to stand there as separate individuals. But underground they're bound together in a vast network, sharing nutrients and information with one another. Various fungi join this symbiosis, drawing up nitrogen and phosphorus for the plants and getting sugar in return. And should you happen to eat one of those fungi, you might just become one with nature again — and, taken to its limit, reach ego death.

So now you've got something to chew on the next time you meet your own reflection. And what will YOU see then? The subject, or the object?