The Existentialism of Tiny People
This piece was initially published in my weekly newsletter, The SneakyArt Post Issue #53. Click to view it there and consider subscribing!
Tiny people have a lot to say. These portraits, distilled out of so much reality, nonetheless possess a distinct personhood. They have personality, pose, character, fashion, and hair-styles. This means that while you may never have visited Vancouver, it is still possible you recognize some of them.
Maybe they resemble someone in your world - someone you’ve seen on your streets or in your cafes. Someone you have not paid much attention to, just a side-character on the edges of your vision.
Tiny people populate your world, and add to its richness and depth.
Here is something to consider. You also populate their world. In their world, you occupy a place not unlike the one they occupy in yours - nearly out of sight, and nearly out of mind. Some years ago, I learned this word from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
If you can dwell on sonder, and appreciate the beauty of what it means, you are ready to make an important philosophical breakthrough.
One of Jean-Paul Sartre’s most famous quotes is this,
Hell is other people.
It does not mean other people are terrible. It means that other people externalize us to ourselves. Taking Sartre’s example, imagine yourself walking alone in a park. Everywhere you look, everything presents itself to you. You are the subject around whom the universe shapes itself.
Then, another person appears. And immediately the equation changes. Whether you like it or not, you are suddenly conscious that the other person also exists in their own universe. Inside that universe, you are just another object. You are no longer able to see yourself as the subject. Suddenly all sorts of “object words” run through your mind. Are you thin, or do you look fat? Are you standing straight, or are you slouching? Are you dressed well? Is your hair in place? Or, for our current times, are you wearing your mask? Being subject to such judgments in your mind, simply because of the appearance of another person in your world, is what Sartre describes as hell.
It is the transformation of self from subject to object that externalizes us. Existentialist philosophers have pondered over this small but significant fact for a very long time. Hegel analyzed how rival consciousnesses wrestle for dominance in a master-slave dynamic. Who has control? Who sets the narrative? The master perceives everything from their own viewpoint, and the slave perceives even their own self from the viewpoint of the master. We need not think about literal slaves here. Any of us could be a ‘slave’ in various social situations, e.g. beta-personalities confronted by alpha-personalities.
It is a feeling often described as becoming self-conscious. “Don’t be so self-conscious,” people will tell you.
Or, “It’s nothing, you’re just being self-conscious.”
Or, “Why do you have to be so self-conscious all the time?”
Here’s another glass-shattering moment from Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Cafe”. In her groundbreaking book on feminism - “The Second Sex” - Simone de Beauvoir details how the lived experiences of women are fundamentally different from men. Men are conditioned to see themselves as free agents, as creators, as observers, as controllers of their destiny and their world. But women are conditioned to see themselves as “objects”, to externalize themselves to the male gaze. To be self-conscious. To be free, the slave must rebel against the master and reassert their self-identity.
Reading this passage made me acutely conscious of how much insight we lose in our histories, philosophies, and sciences, when we only consider the male perspective. We only understand about half the world, and sometimes less.
