There are volatile phrases, the authorship of which is erased from memory — their even not quite understandable content seems so universal. For example, what did Sartre mean when he said: “Hell is others”? Writer Nikolai Kryshchuk reflects.
Victor Pelevin said about this expression: “These are truly amazing words — it rarely happens that such an amount of truth could be squeezed into a single sentence.”
However, he did not explain what is the meaning of the immortal saying. Recently, I came across an explanation of Sartre himself on the Internet. That’s really whose interpretation can not be ignored. I will cite it in a clumsy, as he himself admits, translation by an anonymous author (with abbreviations):
“…the phrase ‘Hell is others’ has always been misunderstood. Everyone thought that I wanted to explain to her that our relations with others are always spoiled, that this is a living hell. But I meant… that if our relationship with others is distorted, damaged, then the other person can only be hell.
Why? Because in the depths of other people lies the most significant thing that we have — our self-consciousness … In everything that I tell about myself, what I feel in myself, there is a bit of judgment of others.
Therefore, if my relationships with others are bad, then I am completely dependent on them, and in fact this means that I am going to hell. There are quite a few people in the world who are in hell, because they depend too much on other people’s judgments …
We are judged in prison, assuming the worst and common
I also wanted to say that these people are not like us … I wanted to show that many are definitely mired in established habits, customs, that they carry judgments from which they suffer, but do not even think of changing them.
Such people are as if dead, because they cannot get out of the circle of their own worries, habits and interests, and thus they often become victims of other people’s judgments.
Here, it turns out that: Sartre believed that we are in a circle of conventional judgments, dead, stereotyped assumptions about the motives of our behavior. In fact, we are different, and our motives for behavior are different.
And we are judged in prison, assuming the worst and common. They do not take into account our noble impulse, our love hidden from the world, our attachment to voices, faces and details, our wonderfulness.
All this is real and serious. The interlocutor catches you on a vulgar thought and a vulgar interest, which were not even in sight. So in a production or school team they determine a thief and do not know how to apologize if they made a mistake.
And he remains with a military wound in his soul, namely with the conviction that all people are like that and all relationships are like that. He has been corrupted forever by the false accusation, and is now suspicious of thoughts and feelings of a different order.
However, the main thing, in my opinion, is that the consciousness of another person is arranged really differently. We are all aliens in some way to each other.
There is something common in individual experiences, and civilized, perhaps Christian, relations are built on this. Everyone experiences pain, suffers from loneliness, wants love and understanding, fears death, strives for beauty and comfort.
If we keep this in mind, relations will become more tolerant, perhaps even friendly.
But the other is still different. He wants love in the wrong way, he understands justice in the wrong way, he feels comfort from another. I will tell a story that is strong for me, because it happened to my friends.
We have known each other since childhood. Once, three families went on vacation with children near Odessa, to the village of Sanzheyka, sung by Paustovsky. It was youth, we all seemed to want one thing, lived one, read the same books, and we had common ideas.
No one has done anything particularly wrong. We are just different people.
The first obstacle arose when they threw off money for a week. Prosperity, it turns out, was different. But we are friends — somehow agreed. Then, I don’t remember by what trend, they suddenly decided to arrange a watermelon day. That is, today we eat only watermelons.
Maybe it was the dacha beauty of the idea that seduced us. The children responded, of course, with enthusiasm, but pretty soon they realized that this height of intentions was beyond their strength and dislike. However, we stick to the general solution. We encourage each other, we ironize ourselves over ourselves.
And suddenly we see by chance (the house is large, there are many rooms, small rooms and corridors) that one of our children is finishing the scrambled eggs. This trifling episode was tantamount to disaster. Agreement broken. How so?
And Denis is hungry. Everyone got hungry. We ourselves thought that it was time to end this experiment. But let’s finish together, just as fun as it started. And so what happens?
Our children walk around with a defiant expression on their faces, as if they are performing a feat, and your bad boy is secretly eating scrambled eggs and sausage. Nonsense, of course, a common thing, a domestic situation. But I remember it well.
And most importantly: no one has done anything particularly bad, in general. We are just different people.