Do we all need to be seen? If we do, is there a kind of look we wish to live under? People behave according to how they are being seen or not seen. This is something I intuitively understood. But it never occurred to me that we could also have preferences - not just for how we’re being seen, but by whom.
When I came across this in Milan Kundera’s classic “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, it immediately caught my attention. He categorizes people into four groups:
- The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes: The public.
- The second have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes.
- The third need to be constantly before the person they love.
- Finally, the people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present.
Confronted with such neatly drawn boundaries, my mind immediately started wondering where to place myself. But first I had to figure out if there is one category that is objectively superior over the others. It seemed obvious to me that the final category is the most noble, but I can’t really explain why it should be.
I can’t tell if the fourth group seemed superior because that’s where I belong, or if I placed myself there because it seemed superior. But that was just in passing. The more I think about it, is it really necessary to place oneself in one group or another? To be seen by one kind of gaze or another was not something I had ever reflected on, and it was interesting to contemplate. Beyond that, I do not see any reason.