ABSTRACT
The problem arose for modern philosophy from Descartes' method, which rose up a bright self-awareness against a dark backdrop of always 'dubitable' physical matter. There is a limitation in consciousness as a being-for-itself. Jean-Paul Sartre uses his physical metaphor to place the reader as an outside observer of being-for-itself's struggle to externalise itself. The 'realism' which Sartre is seeking to expose, treats mind and body as separate and real things. Sartre counters dualistic 'realism' no less than idealism. The child flushes with pride rather than shame, happy perhaps to relinquish a solitary musical consciousness, but Sartre's point about how the view of another changes one's own sense of being remains. In Sartrean terms –beauty is a quasi-object state that disintegrates. To approach Sartre's language, to 'be-for-another' is a mode, not of knowing, but of living or existing.
