“The existential struggle between being a ‘we’ and an ‘us’”:
In extending the existential and phenomenological importance of ‘the Look’ to collective (rather than individual) experience, Sartre draws a distinction between the ‘we-subject’ (le nous-sujet) and the ‘we-object’ (le nous-objet). Since nous in French is used for the first-person plural, in English we could translate Sartre (as his American translator Hazel Barnes did) as drawing a distinction between the ‘we’ and the ‘us’. Sartre himself was wary of deriving theoretical insights from mere grammatical categories, especially when many languages do not even use or differentiate between a first-person plural pronoun. But, as the philosopher Sarah Pawlett-Jackson argues in The Phenomenology of the Second-Person Plural (2025), pronouns came into use precisely in order to capture a particular form of lived experience, a particular phenomenological standpoint.
In order to experience the world from a ‘we-perspective’, certain basic criteria need to be met. First of all, there must be a plurality of subjects who are undergoing the experience. If I am the only person enjoying the sunset, my enjoyment is felt by me as an individual subject, rather than by we as a plural subject. Secondly, the subjects must be unified in some sense. If a stranger sitting near me is enjoying the same sunset, it would be presumptuous to say that we experienced it together unless our enjoyment has been communicated to one another. We haven’t created the necessary unity.
[W]hereas a we-experience can take place between a dyad, an us-experience is necessarily triadic in its structure. A felt sense of ‘us-ness’ can arise only in relation to an external Third element.
With us-experiences, one can speak of a plural or collective double-consciousness. The members of the ‘we’ are no longer singularly conscious of a shared object of experience, but are doubly conscious of themselves as an object of experience. In this sense, an us-experience arises because of a collective relation to an external Third.
[U]s-experiences can be less harmonious, consensual and self-endorsed than we-experiences since their constitution hinges on these external impositions.
Yet the ‘us’ is not simply the dark and depressing side of the ‘we’. As Sartre went on to show in his later work of existentialist Marxism, it is often from the alienated, marked and stereotyped ‘us’ that collective struggle, political action, and a coordinated and resistant ‘we’ emerges. In becoming conscious of one’s position in the social world, you, and others like you, can prompt a response of resistance to dismantle and overcome the social constraints that one collectively faces with others. An emancipatory transition from an ‘us’ to a ‘we’ takes place when the external Third loses salience in lieu of an internal unification and organisation that comes about to reclaim agency over ‘them’.