Is Hell Other People?
On Sartre, and the ground from which something else can grow.
I read Huis clos – No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre – in French, in France, many years ago when I lived in France (before I began to wish I had never left).
Reading Sartre helped me learn French - I can’t recommend that method though. He wrote: L’enfer, c’est les autres – Hell is other people. I think he meant it as a diagnosis. I think he was a man who had stopped hoping.
Having said that, I don’t think Sartre was being cynical. In some ways he was accurate. He had noticed something true about the structure of experience. The moment someone sees me, the moment I come under their gaze, I’m no longer the free centre of my world; I become an object in someone else’s world. I acquire a story that I have no control over. Someone is making me mean something, in a mind that I have no access to, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.
I recently wrote an article on Sartre’s idea. I was going to put it here but decided I’d make a video of it. I really like making videos - almost as much as I like doing philosophy. Video is a great way of sharing ideas. I also wanted to experiment making a video using images generated with AI - the text and voice is my own of course.
If my way of thinking interests you, then my book In the Becoming (Arvan Press, 2025) might float your boat too. Logontology is an affirmative existentialism concerned with becoming, place, and the ways meaning discloses itself in the world.