Jean-Paul Sartre:
" Man, says, Marx, is an object to man. That is true. But it is also true that I am a subject to myself insofar as my fellow man is an object to me. And that is what separates us. He and I are not homogeneous: we cannot be a part of the same whole except in the eyes of a third person who perceives us both as a single object. If we could all be, simultaneously and reciprocally, both object and subject for each other and by each other, or if we could all sink together into an objective totality, or if, as in the kantian city of ends, we were never anything but subjects recognizing themselves as subjects, the separations would cease to exist."
" But we cannot carry matters to an extreme in either direction: we cannot all be objects unless it be for a transcendent subject, nor can we all be subjects unless we undertake the impossible liquidation of all objectivity.
As for absolute reciprocity, it is concealed by the historical conditions of class and race, by nationalities, by the social hierarchy. A leader is never a subject to his subordinates; if he is, he loses authority. He is rarely a subject to his superiors. Thus, we live in a state of familiar and unthinking vagueness; we pass unnoticed. In our profession, our family, our party, we are not quite objects and not quite subjects.
The Other is that instrument which obeys the voice, which regulates, divides, distributes, and it is, at the same time, that warm, diffused atmosphere which envelops us; and that is what we, too, are for others and consequently for ourselves.
However, this immediate vagueness contains the germ of disequilibrium: you are with all, you write for all, you take God to witness, or the human race, or your next door neighbor; you are the docile instrument of a family, of a social group, of a profession, of a party, of a church; you receive your thoughts from the outside by means of newspapers, the radio, lectures and speeches and immediately redistribute them; not a moment goes by without your speaking and listening, and what you say and hear is whatever anyone would have said or heard in your place; from morning to night you submit to the tyranny of the human visage, you have no secrets, no mystery, nor do you want to have any-- and yet, in a certain way, you are alone.
And I do not locate this solitude in our private life, which is only a sector of public life, nor in our tastes, which are public and shared:
I find it everywhere."
--from "Saint Genet: Comedien et Martyr", 1952. Translated from French by Bernard Frechtman, 1963.