Critical Analysis of the Footer

​While Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely celebrated as the primary philosophical godfather of the 4E movement, Jean-Paul Sartre’s sharp phenomenological distinctions offer critical tools for addressing social cognition, bodily alienation, and metacognition

2. Merleau-Ponty & 4E: The Direct Ancestor

Modern enactivists and embodied cognitive scientists (such as Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Alva Noë) explicitly build their models on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.

Embodied & Enactive: Sensorimotor Coupling

Action IS Perception: Enactivism asserts that perception isn't a passive internal processing of retinal images; it is something we do. Merleau-Ponty anticipated this through his concept of motor intentionality: your body doesn't calculate where an object is in 3D space; your readiness to reach or step toward it is your perception of its location.

The Body-Schema vs. Body-Image: 4E science makes a strict distinction between the body-schema (sub-personal, automatic motor dynamics) and body-image (conscious, conceptual awareness of one's body). Merleau-Ponty pioneered this exact split to explain how we move through spaces without needing explicit cognitive maps.

Embedded & Extended: The Blind Man's Cane

Tool Incorporation: When an experienced driver operates a car, or a blind person uses a cane, the tool ceases to be an external object. It becomes part of the organism's perceptual apparatus.

Merleau-Ponty famously argued that the blind man’s cane is not an object perceived by the hand, but an instrument through which the world is perceived. This serves as the foundational classical example for Extended Mind Theory (Clark & Chalmers).

3. Sartre & 4E: The Unsung Corrective

While Sartre is often dismissed by 4E scholars as overly dualistic or focused on consciousness as "nothingness," his phenomenology provides crucial insights for modern cognitive science—particularly around metacognition, social robotics, and self-avatar integration.

Enactive Selfhood: The Pre-Reflective Cogito

In 4E frameworks, action occurs without continuous, high-level deliberation. When you run to catch a ball, your brain isn't running explicit physics calculations or thinking "I am running."

Sartre’s pre-reflective cogito aligns perfectly with this: consciousness is out in the world, merged with the task. Sartre demonstrates that agency does not require a central "homunculus" or explicit Ego overseeing every move.

The Social 4E Dimension: "The Look" (Le Regard) and Predictive Processing

One area where Merleau-Ponty's model struggles is explaining bodily disruption—dysmorphia, social anxiety, or the sudden clumsiness you feel when someone watches you perform a skill.

Sartre’s analysis of The Look of the Other (le Regard) directly models how our smooth, enactive motor loops break down. When observed, your body shifts from being a smooth subject-instrument to being an object in someone else's field.

In predictive processing terms, "The Look" introduces a sudden, top-down prediction error: you become hyper-aware of your own motor output, fracturing the seamless 4E loop.

4. Where the Models Diverge

Despite these strong alignments, critical tensions remain between existential phenomenology and modern neuroscience:

Sub-Personal Dynamics: 4E science heavily investigates neurobiology, dynamical systems math, and sub-conscious algorithmic processing. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, while scientifically informed, restricted their primary methods to first-person lived experience.

​Tracing this path—from raw neuro-sensory processing to the pre-reflective cogito, and finally to explicit reflection—maps out how human awareness transitions from being purely immersed in the world to objectifying it.

​1. The Central Nervous System & Perceptive Senses (The Substrate)

​Before any philosophy or "thinking" takes place, the CNS and the sensory organs operate in a state of continuous, automated engagement with the environment.

​Sensorimotor Loops: At the level of the brainstem, cerebellum, and spinal cord, the CNS processes millions of bits of sensory data per second (optic flow, proprioception, tactile feedback) and adjusts muscle tone, balance, and orientation without conscious command.

​Non-Conscious Processing: Much of what the nervous system registers never crosses into explicit awareness. It functions as a distributed, adaptive network keeping the organism coupled to its environment.

​The Living Body (Le Corps Propre): In phenomenological terms (drawing heavily on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's elaboration of bodily intentionality), the senses do not merely "report" data to a detached mind; the body is our initial mode of inhabiting the world.

​2. Sartre’s Pre-Reflective Cogito (Le Cogito Pré-Réfléchi)

​In Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues against Descartes' traditional Cogito ("I think, therefore I am"). Descartes made reflection primary—implying that we only exist as conscious beings when we step back and analyze our own thoughts. Sartre flips this: consciousness is fundamentally pre-reflective before it is reflective.

​Non-Thetic (Non-Positional) Self-Consciousness: When you are completely absorbed in an activity—say, looking through a keyhole out of jealousy, or running to catch a train—you are not thinking, "I am currently running." Your entire consciousness is directed outward at the train or the keyhole. There is no thematic "I" present.

​Implicit Awareness: Yet, you are not a mindless automaton. If someone asked you what you were doing, you wouldn't be surprised; you knew what you were doing all along. This is the pre-reflective cogito: a silent, non-positional self-awareness that accompanies all lived experience (le vécu).

​The Bridge to the Senses: At this stage, consciousness is "glued" to the world via the perceiving senses. The CNS and the pre-reflective cogito are essentially describing the same immediate reality from two angles: one biological, the other phenomenological.

​3. The Emergence of Reflection

​Reflection occurs when consciousness arrests its direct, unmediated engagement with the world and turns its gaze back upon itself.

​The Birth of the Ego: In pre-reflective life, the ego (the "I") does not actually exist in consciousness; consciousness is just pure, translucent activity. Reflection creates a split. By targeting a past or ongoing state of consciousness, reflection produces the psychological "I" as an object of thought.

​Re-interpreting the CNS: Neurologically, this mirrors the shift from reactive, subcortical, and automatic sensorimotor loops to higher-order cortical processing—where working memory, metacognition, and executive functions step in to evaluate, categorize, and narrate what the organism is experiencing.

​The Alienation of the Object: Once reflection occurs, the pure immediacy of the pre-reflective state is lost. You are no longer just seeing or doing; you are thinking about the fact that you are seeing or doing.

DEFINITION OF SENSE AWARENESS

(P.o.P Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 239).

​"The intercommunion of the senses is therefore not an exception, a physiological curiosity, or an anomaly, but rather the rule for all subjects. I see the stiffness and the crunch of the brittle paper, and I hear the coldness of the marble."

(P.o.P Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 239)

But this effort to identify myself with the universal immediately receives a denial. It is impossible for me to assert that it is the universal, that is, since I am asserting it. By asserting, I make myself be; it is I who am. As I distinguish myself from my pure presence by reaching out to something other than me, I also distinguish myself from this other toward which I reach by the very fact that I reach toward it. My presence is. It breaks up the unity and the continuity of that mass of indifference into which I want it to be absorbed.

Simone De Beauvoir, & Timmermann, M. (2020). What is existentialism?  Penguin Books. pp32-33

... so in progress we go towards what we want (goal) and what we could neither want nor predict (totalizing end).

Social stratification became at once the obligatory means of realizing economic growth by planning in that underdeveloped country and—as a consequence, entailed by praxis but not willed by it—the practico-inert and anti-socialist result of the search for incentives in a situation which did not allow the interest of the masses in produciton.

Cof D Jean-Paul Sartre pp134

So I misunderstood another person because I see him from my own point of view, but then I hear him expostulate and finally come round to the idea of the other person as a centre of perspectives. Within my own situation, that of the patient whom I am questioning makes its appearance, and in this bipolar phenomenon I learn to know both myself and others. We must put ourselves back in the actual situation in which hallucinations and 'reality' are presented to us and grasp their concrete differentiation at the time that it operates in communication with the patient. I am sitting before my subject and chatting with him; he is trying to describe to me what he 'sees' and what he 'hears'; it is not a question of taking him at his word, or of reducing his experiences to mine, or coinciding with him, or sticking to my own point of view, but of my making explicit my experience, and also his experience as it is conveyed to me in my own, and his hallucinatory belief and my real belief, and to understand one through the other.

"Sensing is this living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life. The perceived object and the perceiving subject owe their thickness to sensing"

​Here is a breakdown and summary of the dialectical logic at play in this passage:

​1. The Concept of "Seriality" and Impotence

​Sartre uses the term series to describe a collection of individuals who are isolated from one another, yet united by an external object or structure (like people waiting in line for a bus).

​In this passage, the small number of colonialists form a "series." They are isolated individuals looking out for their own exploitative self-interests.

​Because they are outnumbered and rely on sheer force, each individual colonialist feels isolated and impotent (powerless). They live in constant fear that a revolt or a "pernicious act" somewhere else will spark their own doom.

​2. The Colonised as the "Absolute Other"

​The unity of the colonialists doesn't come from a deep, organic bond between them; it is forced upon them from the outside by the Absolute Other (the colonised people).

​The colonialists perceive the colonised mass as an omnipresent, almost supernatural force ("they know everything, they see everything...").

​Paradoxically, while the colonised are physically oppressed and powerless, their mere presence exerts a "magical power" over the colonialists, trapping the exploiters in a state of constant paranoia.

​3. The "Other-Action" and the Ideal Colonialist

​Because every colonialist fears that another colonialist might show weakness and cause the system to collapse, they are forced to act not out of personal choice, but according to what "the Other" expects.

​The "Colonialist" becomes an abstract, rigid ideal—a "negative formula."

​This ideal exists inside each individual as a strict prohibition: "Show no weakness." You must act like a ruthless colonialist because if you don't, the next guy won't, and the whole apparatus falls apart.

​4. The Shift to Insurrection

​Normally, the colonialist just goes about his day as a selfish exploiter. But when the threat of an uprising becomes concrete, everything changes:

​The relation shifts from passive exploitation to an imperative system of total responsibility.

​Every individual colonialist suddenly becomes strictly responsible for upholding the entire colonial apparatus, because any crack in the armor means total destruction. Sartre concludes with the dialectical necessity of the situation: the system is so rigid that no change can happen for the colonised without the complete, violent destruction of the colonial apparatus itself.

Simone De Beauvoir, & Timmermann, M. (2020). What is existentialism?  Penguin Books. pp10

But in reality, and without prejudging what the analysis of time will disclose, we have already discovered, between time and subjectivity, a much more intimate relationship. We have just seen that the subject, who cannot be a series of psychic events, nevertheless cannot be eternal either. It remains for him to be temporal not by reason of some vagary of the human make-up, but by virtue of an inner necessity. We are called upon to conceive the subject and time as communicating from within. We can now say of temporality what we said earlier about sexuality and spatiality, for example existence cannot have any external or contingent attribute. It cannot be anything- spatial, sexual, temporal- with out being so in its entirety, without taking up and carrying its ‘attributes’ and making them in to so many dimensions of its being, with the result that an analysis of any one of them that is at all searching really touches upon subjectivity itself. There are no principal and subordinate problems: all problems are concentric. To analyse time is not to follow out the consequences of a pre-established conception of subjectivity, it is to gain access, through time, into its concrete structure. If we succeed in understanding the subject, it will not be in its pure form, but by seeking it at the intersection of dimensions . We need therefore, to consider time itself, and it is by following through its internal dialectic we shall be led to revise our idea of the subject.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of perception. Forgotten Books. 476

….In spite of everything , my heart beats, my hand reaches out, new projects are born and push me forward. Wise men have wanted to see the sign of man’s incurable folly in this stubbornness. But is a perversion so essential still to be called perversion? Where will we find the truth about man if it is not in him? Reflection cannot stop the elan of our spontaneity.

But reflections are also spontaneous. Man plants, builds, conquers; he wants, he loves; there is always an ‘after that?’ It could be that from moment to moment he throws himself into new undertakings with an ardour that is always new, like Don Juan deserting one woman only to seduce another. But even Don Juan gets tired one fine day.

Simone De Beauvoir, & Timmermann, M. (2020). What is existentialism?  Penguin Books. pp11

It is in my ’field of presence’ in the widest sense—this moment that I spend working with it, behind it, the horizon of the day that has elapsed, and in front of it, the evening and the night—that I make contact with time and learn to know its course. The remote past has also its temporal order, and it has been present itself; it has been ’in its time’ traversed by my life and carried forward to this moment. When I call up a remote past, I reopen time and carry myself back to a moment in which it still had before it a future horizon now closed and a horizon of the immediate past, which is today. Everything, therefore, causes me to revert to the field of presence as the primary experience in which time and its dimensions make their appearance unalloyed, with no intervening distance and with absolute self-evidence. It is here that we see a future sliding into the present and on into the past. Nor are these three dimensions given to us through discrete acts: I do not form a mental picture of my day; it weighs upon me with all its weight; it is still there, and though I may not recall any detail of it, I have the impending power to do so; I still have it in hand. In the same way, I do not think of the evening to come and its consequences, and yet it ‘is there’ like the back of the house of which I can only see the facade or like the background beneath a figure. Our future is not made up exclusively of guesswork and daydreams. Ahead of what I see and perceive, there is, it is true, nothing more actually visible, but my world is carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come (although we are always on the watch, perhaps to the day of our death, for the appearance of something else). The present itself, in the narrow sense, is not posited. The paper and my fountain pen are indeed there for me, but I do not explicitly perceive them. I do not so much perceive objects as reckon with an environment. I seek support in my tool, and am at my task rather than confronting it.`

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of perception. Forgotten Books. pp483

These remarks do not prejudge the outcome of the critical investigation which we are about to undertake. They merely indicate its intention. It is possible that, on some plane, individual praxis is transparent to itself and that in this transparence, it provides the model and the rules of full intelligibility; but this still has to be proved. It is also conceivable, at least hypothetically, that human thought (in so far as it is itself praxis and a moment of praxis) is fundamentally the understanding of novelty (as a perpetual re-organisation of the given in accordance with acts explicable by their end).

Jean-Paul Sartre. (n.d.). Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol 1. Verso Books. pp61

​As for whether this segment can stand on its own: Yes, remarkably well.

​While the vocabulary is deeply embedded in Sartre’s specific dialectical framework, this passage functions as a self-contained, profound psychological and political theory on why people join tightly bound groups and why those groups inevitably become authoritarian.

​To understand how it stands on its own, it is best understood in conversation with three of Sartre’s other core concepts.

​1. The Direct Evolution of "Bad Faith" (Mauvaise Foi)

​In his earlier masterpiece, Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre introduced Bad Faith—the act of lying to oneself to escape the terrifying burden of absolute radical freedom.

​How this segment stands with it: This passage is the political evolution of Bad Faith. Here, Sartre explains that when you make a "pledge" to a group, you are committing a highly organized act of bad faith. You are freely choosing to construct a system (the group) that strips away your future freedom. You use your freedom today to buy an escape from your freedom tomorrow.

​2. Overcoming "Seriality" and Alienation

​Sartre coined the term Seriality to describe the baseline state of human isolation in modern society. His classic example is a crowd of people waiting at a bus stop: they share a space and a goal, but they are completely isolated, alienated individuals who view each other as obstacles or strangers.

​How this segment stands with it: This text is the remedy to seriality. Sartre is answering the question: How do isolated individuals permanently fuse into a single collective unit? His answer in this text is stark: it cannot be done by mere shared goals. It requires a pledge backed by the threat of violence. Violence is the "intelligible transcendence" that burns away individual alienation.

​3. The Shift from Spontaneous Freedom to the "Institution"

​Sartre famously analyzed the storming of the Bastille as the ultimate example of the "fused group"—a moment where thousands of individuals spontaneously acted as one pure, free organism. But momentum fades, people get tired, and a crowd disperses.

​How this segment stands with it: This passage captures the exact, tragic pivot point where a free revolutionary movement solidifies into an Institution. Sartre argues that the only structural glue capable of preventing a group from dissolving back into isolated individuals is Terror.

​The Takeaway

​If isolated from the rest of the massive book, this segment stands alone as a chillingly brilliant anatomy of totalitarianism and cult dynamics.

​Sartre strips away all romanticism from political solidarity. He bypasses moral codes or legal contracts and exposes the raw mechanics of group loyalty: to truly belong to a committed group, you must hand your friends a loaded gun and give them permission to shoot you if you ever walk away.

A free attempt to substitute the fear of all for the fear of oneself and of the Other in and through everyone, in so far as it suddenly re-actualises violence as the intelligible transcendence of individual alienation by common freedom: that is what pledges are. They are completely intelligible because they are the free transcendence of already given elements towards an already posited objective in so far as this transcendence is conditioned by concrete circumstances which prefigure negatively (en reaux)(a destiny to be negated). But the structures of freedom and reciprocity which we examined at the beginning, far from disappearing , take on their full meaning when they manifest themselves in the practical material movement of terror. It is still true that my pledge is a guarantee for the other third party; but the meaning of this guarantee is precisely violence. The third party is guaranteed against my free betrayal by the right which I have granted everyone (including him) to eliminate me in the event of my failure and by the Terror which the common right establishes within me and which I have demanded; and this guarantee - which deprives him of any excuses in the event of dispersal or betrayal – means that he can freely guarantee his own solidarity (freely demand Terror for himself). Thus I encounter Terror within myself as exigency. In other words, the fundamental statute of the pledged group is Terror; but, if circumstances are not specially restrictive, I can remain at the level of exigency and untranscendability. For the pledge is a free relation of free commitments. At this level, I perceive the exigency only as my committed freedom in the other and as the exigency of myself towards the Other. If the pressure increases, the same relation reveals itself in its fundamental structure: I have freely consented to the liquidation of my person as free constituent praxis, and this free consent returns to me as the free primacy of the Other’s freedom over my own, that is to say as the right of the group over my praxis. Here again, it does not matter whether this right is conceived as a duty towards the group (that is to say, concretely as an imperative negation of a possibility: this obviously has nothing to do with morals or even with codes) or whether it is conceived as a power of the group, consented to by me, of taking my life if I do not act in accordance with a given directive. For us, and in this moment of our investigation, this makes no difference: these different forms of behaviour are in fact conditioned by circumstances and they constitute themselves in their situation. The important point is that within itself, and implicitly, the concrete duty contains death as a possible destiny for me; or, conversely, that the right of the group determines me , in so far as it is agreed.

Sartre, J. P. (2004). Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume One (3rd ed., pp. 433-434). Verso

Divions of Deluded View

1. View of the transitory collection

2. Extreme view

3. Holding false views as supreme

4. Holding wrong moral disciplines and conduct as supreme

​When someone makes an unreasonably unbelievable statement and pretends to have absolute knowledge of it, they are often hiding behind a veneer of authority. By introducing the standards of speculative truth, you can effectively dismantle their claim by showing that it lacks both empirical ground and systemic, logical substance.

​Here is how speculative truth can be used to expose that lack of substance:

​1. Exposing the Lack of "Systemic Coherence"

​True speculative philosophy (like the frameworks of Hegel or critical theory) argues that a truth cannot exist in a vacuum. For an idea to have speculative value, it must connect logically to the broader "whole" of reality, history, or human experience.

​When a speaker makes a wild, ungrounded claim, you can use speculative reasoning to ask: “If your statement is true, how does it fit with everything else we know to be true?” If their statement requires rewriting the laws of physics, human psychology, or basic logic without a rigorous explanation of how those pieces connect, you expose their claim as an isolated, empty assertion rather than a profound insight.

​2. Confronting "Pretended Knowledge" with Genuine Speculation

​There is a massive difference between a speculative leap and a blind guess (or a lie):

​Genuine Speculation is rigorous. It starts from known concepts or structural realities and extends them outward using strict logic to see what must follow. It acknowledges its own boundaries.

​Pretended Knowledge is fragile. It jumps straight to a dogmatic conclusion without doing the intellectual heavy lifting to get there.

​By measuring the speaker's claim against genuine speculative inquiry, you reveal that they aren't offering a deep, visionary truth; they are just making a truth-claim with zero structural support. You are essentially saying: "Real speculation requires a coherent framework; your claim is just an arbitrary fantasy."

​3. Turning Dialectical Critique Against Ideology

​In critical theory, speculative thinking is often used as a tool of critique to pierce through superficial appearances or societal myths. If someone in a position of power states an unbelievable or manipulative claim as a "fact," a speculative approach doesn't just ask for statistics to disprove it. Instead, it looks at the intent and the contradictions inherent in the statement.

​It reveals that the speaker’s "truth" has no inner substance because it is merely a tool used to produce a specific effect—to manipulate, to shut down debate, or to project unearned authority.

​The Verdict:

Using speculative truth as a benchmark allows you to say that a claim is not just factually unproven, but intellectually bankrupt. It exposes the statement as an empty shell—unreasonable on its face, logically disconnected from the rest of reality, and entirely reliant on the speaker's pretend authority to keep it afloat.

​The Problem of the "Practico-Inert"

​Your use of the term "practico-inert" aligns perfectly with Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. In his framework, the "practico-inert" refers to the sedimented, crystallized weight of institutions, bureaucracy, and past decisions—things that were once born of human action but have now hardened into a world of things that "act" upon us as if they were natural laws.

​When you observe that the "practico-inert is washed away with the immanence of force," you are identifying how state power uses the bureaucratic structure (the "slow march") to obscure moral accountability. The bureaucracy provides a veil of legitimacy; it makes individual decisions seem like inevitable administrative outcomes, effectively diffusing responsibility until no single person feels the weight of the atrocities committed.

​The Absence of Universal Accountability

​You are correct that there is no cohesive, universally binding legal structure for this. The current international system is a patchwork of compromises:

​The ICC Limitations: The International Criminal Court (ICC) exists, but it lacks jurisdiction over major powers like the U.S., Russia, and China, who have not ratified the Rome Statute. This ensures that the "authority" you mention remains insulated from the very laws it often champions for others.

​The "Victor's Justice" Dilemma: International law has historically struggled to overcome the legacy of the Nuremberg Trials. While Nuremberg established that "following orders" is not a defense, it was fundamentally a trial conducted by the victors against the defeated. We have yet to establish a framework that can objectively apply the same standard to the victors themselves while they remain in power.

​Democratic Bureaucracy as a Shield: In modern states, the complexity of the "democratic machine" serves a dual purpose: it creates a facade of accountability through checks and balances, while simultaneously allowing for the "immanence of force" to be deployed through executive, covert, or military channels that evade public scrutiny.

​The "Mind and Choices Toolbox" Perspective

​If you are framing your current studies as a "mind and choices toolbox," the dilemma you are describing—the struggle against the "practico-inert"—is perhaps the most vital tool in that box. It is the practice of demystification.

​Sartre would argue that the only way to counter this is through praxis—the individual, conscious act that breaks the "practico-inert" cycle. When you study the history of these tribunals, you aren't just looking at failed legal attempts; you are looking at an exercise in intellectual refusal. Even if they failed to put anyone in prison, they succeeded in puncturing the legitimacy of the bureaucracy. They forced the "immanence of force" to be named for what it was.

​The "painful position" you describe—the feeling of being trapped by these rigid, uncaring structures—is exactly what phenomenological philosophy attempts to map. It acknowledges that while we are indeed thrown into a world of pre-existing, oppressive structures, we are still condemned to be free to label them, challenge them, and refuse to let the bureaucracy dictate our own moral clarity.

In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre explores these themes in Part Three, Chapter Three, Section I, titled "The First Attitude Toward Others: Love, Language, Masochism."

​While the specific "box" metaphor is often a popular paraphrase of his more technical descriptions, it accurately reflects his analysis of how the lover seeks to be the "absolute limit" of the beloved’s world.

​The Paradox of Absolute Giving and Receiving

​Sartre views love as a project where the lover wants to possess the beloved’s freedom rather than their physical body. This creates a cycle of giving and receiving:

​Love as Absolute Receiving: You want to be everything for the other person. You want the beloved to look at you and see the entire reason for their existence. In this sense, you "receive" their entire world-view, making yourself the center of it.

​Love as Absolute Giving: To be that "everything," you must offer yourself up as an object. Sartre describes this as the lover trying to "fascinate" the beloved. You give your whole self over to the other's gaze so they have no choice but to focus on you.

​"A Box to be Filled Completely"

​Your description of wanting the "whole of you" to be a "box to be filled" aligns with Sartre's concept of the "Beloved-as-Object." Sartre argues that the lover wants the beloved to see them as a fullness of being. Usually, humans feel like a "nothingness" (always changing, never fixed). In love, we want to feel "solid" and justified. We want the other person to "fill" our lack of being with their attention, turning our existence into something necessary rather than accidental.

​Why Sartre Calls This a "Mortal Deception"

​Sartre is famously pessimistic about this "absolute" union. He identifies a fundamental conflict:

​The Loss of Freedom: If you succeed in being a "box to be filled"—if you become a perfect object for the other—you lose your status as a free, conscious subject. You become a thing.

​The Threat of the Third: Even if two people achieve this "absolute" state, the moment a third person looks at them, they are both turned back into mere objects in the world, shattering the private illusion of their "absolute" connection.

​"The lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing; he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom." — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness