The history of philosophy is full of round phrases that (in theory) synthesize the way of thinking of their authors. Also from ambiguous interpretations or directly wrong. Perhaps the clearest case is made by Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the icons of existentialism. Often his phrase “Hell is other people” It is understood in its most literal and stark sense, as if it were the misanthropic cry of someone tired of living in society. It’s not like that.
Sartre himself was in charge of clarifying it.
An unexpected hell. In Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) there was a double quality that does not always accompany the great philosophers. A deep look. And an ability to express complex theories in a clear, even engaging way. Hence, he expressed his way of seeing the world both in essays and in novels, scripts and plays. The phrase in question comes from one of the latter, ‘Huis Clos’from 1944, which is usually translated into Spanish as ‘In camera’.
In it, the French philosopher presents us with three characters (one man, two women) trapped in a room. The interesting thing comes when we understand that the room in question is hell and the actors we see on stage represent condemned souls. The three of them expect the kind of torture they have read about and seen in pictures, but as time passes they realize that nothing happens. No devils with tridents or flames. No Dantesque scenes. Nothing remotely resembling ‘The Garden of Delights’ of Bosco.
“L’enfer, c’est les autres”. Throughout the play, each of the three characters confesses their story and the sins they committed in life, weaving a frustrating love triangle. Towards the end of the performance, one of them, Garcin, utters what is perhaps the most resounding and certainly the most famous phrase, not only of the work itself, but of Sartre’s entire legacy:
“I would never have believed it… Remember? The sulfur, the bonfire, the grill… Ah! What a joke. There is no need for grills, hell is the Others.”
To be more precise, what Sartre wrote in the original, in French, was “L’enfer, c’est les autres”so there are those who have believed that the translation “Hell is the Other” better fits the author’s intention.
Well, it’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Not so much, actually. If literature (art in general) has something good, it is that it can be discussed, but since practically the 1940s, readers and viewers of ‘Huis Clos’ have tended to interpret Garcin’s phrase in a way that is not entirely correct. Not so much because it is erroneous in itself but because it impoverishes the meaning that its author wanted to give it.
We know that Sartre was an atheist, so it is not unreasonable to think that when he presents us with a personal hell, without torture, devils or rivers of lava, what he wants to suggest to us is that in reality our authentic condemnation is “the Other”, the obligation to understand each other with the people with whom we share our time, just like the prisoners of ‘Huis Clos’, right? “The executioner is each one for the other two”, comes to say at one point in the play one of the characters.
“It has been misunderstood”. The truth is that the above is a simplistic approach. Of course, that is not the meaning that Satre wanted to give to his words. And we know this not because critics or academics dedicated to studying the work and life of the French author have suggested it. No. It was Sartre himself who, in 1964, years after premiering the work, he complained that his misinterpretation.
“‘Hell is other people’ has always been misinterpreted. It has been thought that with that phrase I meant that our relationships with others are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relationships. But what I really mean is something totally different,” clarifies the philosopher.
“I mean that if relationships with another person are distorted, flawed, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because… when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves… we use the knowledge that others have about us.”
And what does that mean exactly? The fundamental thing is not so much how we deal with others or whether this is easy or complicated for us, but how we build our self-understanding. It is best understood with the metaphor of “mirrors”, a tool that is also very present in Sartre’s play.
When we want to know what we are like physically, on the outside, it is easy for us: we resort to the reflection that the glass returns to us. But… How do we form our self-knowledge? “When we try to know ourselves, we use the knowledge that others have about us,” Sartre explains to uswho warns however that the ‘reflection’ we receive in that case is not like that of the crystals.
“We are judged with the means that others have and have given us. In everything I say about myself, someone else’s judgment always enters. In everything I feel inside, another’s judgment enters. That does not mean at all that one cannot have relationships with other people. It only highlights the fundamental importance of all other people for each of us,” insist the philosopher
Trapped characters. The three characters in ‘Huis Clos’ are trapped, but not (alone) in a closed room. Each one of them is a prisoner of the judgment that the rest have made of him in a complex relationship. That is his true punishment, his hell, not the monsters and flames that we see in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings.
Their penance is that the three characters are condemned to define themselves through the “distorting mirrors” of their companions, people who give them a negative reflection and in turn cause the same effect, adds Kirb Woodward..
Sartre himself poses this concept of the tyranny of “being for others” in another way in ‘Being and nothingness’: “By the mere appearance of the Other I see myself in the position of judging myself as an object, since it is as an object that I present myself to the Other.” When Garcin expresses himself as he does, what he is pointing out is that he is trapped by the judgments of his companions, exactly like the two women with whom he shares his stay in hell.
Isn’t that a little discouraging? Not necessarily. From the outset, Sartre himself recognized that this relationship with the gaze of the other does not always have to be as tragic as in his play. “It doesn’t mean we can’t have other relationships; it just highlights the crucial importance of each person to each of us,” clarified in his 1964 interview. Furthermore, awareness of dependency does not mean that a resigned attitude has to be adopted.
As explains Larmagnac-Mathron in Philosophy Magazine We may always be exposed to the “risk of a tyrannical distortion” to the extent that we depend on others (we are influenced by the judgments of others), but this condition also helps us to know ourselves. What we do from there is in our hands. In fact, one of the pillars of existentialism is that man must embrace the challenge of assuming his freedom, choosing his course and giving meaning to himself.
Images | Wikipedia 1 and 2 and Prado Museum
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