What is Le Penseur seeing?

This work of Jean Paul Sartre exploits the concept of the influence of the outside looks in our psyche. It starts from the idea that the eyes of others is what shows the reality of human beings. And from this, the individual is constantly judged and condemned forever, unblinking no interruptions, no rest or pause. The escape of the judgment of others is then an illusion, it is not possible because we will be in the thoughts of others for all eternity, even after death.

For Sartre, "Hell is other people" and he accurately reflects it in the suffering and anguish of Agnes, Estelle and Garcin, who cannot boot from its permanent looks, but also rely on each other to remain being. They look forward to the torturer, but they realize that torturers are themselves for others. To escape this torturous experience, they connect with their lives on earth and see that they are present in the thoughts of people who is still alive. 

In the own existentialist thought of Sartre, "existence precedes essence", that is the essence and ideas are built by man after his existence and responding to it. The man is a being who lives in perpetual action and by acting freely, man is constructing and defining itself. The man is the set of his acts and nothing else. This thought has 2 faces:

1) On the one hand it is hard for those people unhappy with what they are, for those who have not succeeded in life. These people may deceive themselves by saying that all its actions don´t show its true worth and that the world has prevented them from giving itself all what they really are.

2) On the other hand, this doctrine could be optimistic, as it says that the fate of each one is in our hands. Man makes himself through action and therefore in his hands and in his decisions is his being, he can choose be what he wants to be.

This second view gives me hope, because every day is an opportunity to begin to "be yourself": the coward isn´t born coward, he makes itself coward. But the good news is not only that we choose how we want to be, but we have always the possibility to stop being as we are being and to begin being as we want to be. 

In “No Exit”, I found that the vision of Sartre about human´s existence is quite pessimistic and full of anguish, as if our existence is the sum of our actions and if hell is the gaze of others we must assume that our actions were not moral, because if the judgment of others towards us is positive, why would this be a hell?. Or it is the gaze of the other that plays the role of a mirror to which we look before looking at ourselves for fear to meet with our miseries? In this case, the "mirror" would reflect an image of ourselves more benevolent that the reality of our being. 

Many questions and few certainties left me this book. But there is something I agree with Sartre: We are slaves of the others thought of us and we live much of our lives trying to please to the gaze of others rather than to our own view of ourselves. For me the hell not in others, but in my behavior towards others. In my opinion, the hell is in the constant effort of trying to be what the others want us to be, and thus, being very differently as who I am. Pretending to be someone I'm not is like living upstream , producing a vital contradiction and an empty huge inside , because if there is something we are slaves, is of our own truth. Maybe we can deceive sometime of our own eyes, but never escape. 

According to the history of this sculpture, Le Penseur of Auguste Rodin is sitting down in front of The Gate of Hell . What is he seeing? For Garcin in No Exit, the thinker is seeing the others. For me, the thinker is looking at itself in a mirror.