In his play No Exit (1943), Sartre's character Garcin famously asserts that “hell is other people”. This declaration has also been taken to exemplify his philosophical account of our relations with others and in what follows we will see that this is at least partly accurate. But first it is helpful to delineate a problem that Sartre's account of relations with others was working against: the problem of solipsism.

The reef of solipsism

In recent times, there have sometimes been complaints that phenomenology does not deal with the Other in their absolute difference, or in their genuine alterity; the term “alterity” is basically synonymous with otherness, although it also has connotations of change and transformation. One reason for this complaint against phenomenology is that it suggests that the perceived object, such as the mountain that I am looking at outside my window, cannot be entirely foreign to those who perceive it. In other words, I bring something to bear upon the appreciation of the mountain, and you might remember that Sartre insists that we never encounter a pure object, or the thing-in-itself. That is just to say that we never encounter the mountain as it really is, but always in relation to the intentions and projects that we have towards it. Or, as in Heidegger's example, we never hear a pure noise but always a noise of some kind of activity, such as a mower starting up, or a motorbike roaring past.