I didn’t read any of Sartre until I became an undergrad, maybe aged 19 or so. It was unusual in a UK university to be introduced to existentialist thought as part of a philosophy course, dominated as the discipline was them by often-dry and unambitious Anglo-Saxon linguistic philosophy. We owed our neophyte understanding to Irene Brennan.
Possibly the first time Sartre’s thinking had a personal impact was when, later, I happened to reflect back on my rugby playing days at school. We first played aged 11, and during those first few years it was common when playing another school to assess one’s opponents largely in terms of their size as they exited their changing room. Needless to say, big was not welcome. Here’s where, years later, one aspect of the salience of Sartre’s early writings struck me. I distinctly recalled occasions when one was put on the defensive when first seeing opponents, especially if they were on the large side. This defensiveness occurred when the self was made an object for others through the experience of the ’gaze’ or ‘look’. One was, in short, defined by them. But it was always possible to flip things around, to make them an ‘object for self’. Moreover all this could occur in the privacy of one’s own mind: the gaze/look could be imaginary. The challenge on the cusp of kick off was to banish any lingering notion that one was an object for others and make one’s opponents objects for self.
Of course as the years went by, maybe by mid-teens, this sometimes stressful flip-flop in thinking was succeeded by a more strategic approach to opponents based on training, ability and tactics.