When Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil their relationship undergoes a striking change. They begin accusing each other of wrongdoing (3:12-13), becoming ashamed (3:7,10) and being defensive (3:12-13). Their relationship becomes a zero sum game of power and domination (3:16b) in which each is trying to outsmart and outmanoeuvre the other. This power battle is vividly illustrated in Genesis 3 by many references and allusions to the gaze, and in particular to looking at another or preventing oneself from being looked at:

  • Verse 6: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”
  • Verse 7: “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” to hide their nakedness from the gaze of the other.
  • Verse 8: “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden” so that, as they thought, he could not see them
  • Verses 9-10: “But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’” Protecting oneself from the gaze of the other here seems to be a way of managing guilt and shame.

Being exposed to the judging gaze of God, or of another person, becomes intolerable for Adam and Eve in this passage. It is a reality vividly captured by twentieth-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in a chapter of his Being and Nothingness entitled ‘The gaze’.

For the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, the passion of an individual’s life is to preserve and exercise her freedom to define the meaning of her own existence, but other people are a threat to that autonomy. This is vividly illustrated in Sartre’s famous account of the park. As I walk through a park, all the items in the park are objects for my subjectivity: flowers, benches, lawns. They all receive their meaning from me. But then I see another person emerge from behind a tree. I feel his look, his gaze. I feel him defining me, judging me. Suddenly, I’m not the only subjectivity in the park any more. Something in the park now always escapes me, namely the meaning that things have for the other person. Things will have for him the meaning he gives them, not the meaning I give them. Even more than that, in his gaze I apprehend that I myself am an object for his subjectivity, an object in his park. In Sartre’s words, “[t]he Other […] is presented in a certain sense as the radical negation of my experience, since he is the one for whom I am not subject but object.”[1] But if I am a character in his story, not he in mine, then my freedom is limited. I am defined by him. I am, Sartre says, a slave.

Thus being-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom. It is in this sense that we can consider ourselves as “slaves” in so far as we appear to the Other. But this slavery is not a historical result—capable of being surmounted—of a life in the abstract form of consciousness. I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at the center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my being. […] This danger is not an accident but the permanent structure of my being-for-others.[2]

So my encounter in the park, and indeed any encounter between two people, is a fight that will result in one party being a master, and the other a slave: I struggle to make the other an object in my world, with the meaning I give to him, and he seeks to make me an object in his world, with the meaning he gives me.

While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me. […] Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.[3]

There is no peaceful way out of this impasse. It is a state of perpetual and ineradicable conflict. And it is as an extension of this struggle that Sartre rejects God. In his lecture ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ he says that if there is a God who has a plan for this world, then I have no freedom to define the meaning of my own existence, just as if I acquiesce to becoming objectified by the man I see in the park. Here is the syllogism: Freedom exists. God and freedom cannot coexist (Sartre thinks). Therefore there is no God.

And so in Sartre’s fiction we see a portrayal of human relationships as agonistic, irreducibly conflictual, and violent. The most famous example is his No Exit, in which three characters are locked together unable to leave, and each wants the other two to see them as they see themselves. The perpetual frustration this causes is captured in the famous line ‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’: hell is other people. In the extract below, Estelle is seeking Garcin’s recognition, and Inès’s gaze is a constant reminder to him of the truth of his crimes:

Garcin: Will night never come?

Inès: Never.

Garcin: You will always see me?

Inès: Always.

Garcin: This bronze. Yes, now’s the moment; I’m looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I’m in hell. I tell you, everything’s been thought out beforehand. They knew I’d stand at the fireplace stroking this thing of bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is… other people![4]

In the “hell” of the other’s gaze here we can see a painful shadow of the gaze of God, Adam and Eve in the garden, a gaze they try to avoid by hiding and wearing fig leaves. In trying to subject the other to one’s dominating gaze, each party in Sartre’s dyad is seeking to play the role occupied by God in Genesis 3, only without the grace and compassion that, we shall shortly see, God extends to Adam and Eve later in the chapter. The will to domination is a will to self-divinisation: by  denouncing  and blaming  the  Other  it  gives  us  “the  illusion  of sinlessness and strength”.[5] The tragedy for Sartre’s characters, however, is that for them there is “no exit” from the intolerable gaze of the other, whereas Genesis 3 is thankfully not the final chapter in the Bible.

 

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London: Routledge, 1969) 228.

[2] Sartre, Being and Nothingness 267-8.

[3] Sartre, Being and Nothingness 364.

[4] Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit: And Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1955) 47. CW’s emphasis.

[5] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace 78; quoted on Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World (New York: Penguin, 2018) 144.