Search for Self in Other in Cicero Ovid Rousseau Diderot and Sartre examines how these five
theorists recognized that searching for self in an idealized other can lead to a variety of
perversions. Cicero warned against seeking friends whom we regard as being everything that we
are not: he advised to first be a good person and then to seek other. Ovid showed that
Narcissus who had no close friends to reinforce his identity was oblivious to his own assets
and tried to live vicariously through other. Rousseau explained why modern man while seated in
a theater feels compassion and is transported by pity anxiety and fear for the welfare of
fictional characters as if it were his own. Diderot showed how the absence of self can be
exploited by the powerful to reshape the minds of the weak. He proves that given the right
environment and length of time any one of us like the victims in The Nun could just as
easily have his life ruined. Sartre reminds us that it is impossible to be-in-exterior. We see
ourselves according to the way that others perceive us based on conditioning and prejudices.
Sartre untangles the snarled web of misperception of self that arises from «the look» of the
other. This book addresses man's growing understanding of the death of self in the mirror of
other across the corridors of time - from Narcissus' ancient pool to Cicero's Roman forum to
Rousseau's Parisian theater to Diderot's convent in The Nun to Sartre's twentieth-century
hell.
