'Hell is other people.'
As one of Jean-Paul Sartre's most famous and supposedly most misunderstood quotes, academics and the like love to eulogize about the popular conception of the line from the Frenchman’s play, 'No exit.' Saying that the thread the quote offers toward Sartre's greater ontology lacks precision in how it's used by the every-person. Ostensibly, the issue those who supposedly understand Sartre have with its existence in popular nomenclature is that Sartre is not simply suggesting that the mere presence or existence of other people is the issue, instead that the quote speaks more to the metaphysical concept of 'the gaze' and its relation to the philosopher's complex ideas about the nature of the self and being.
While I wouldn't necessarily disagree with this preference for precision, the popular understanding of the quote isn't too far off base either. Though we have to make broad, sweeping assumptions in imagining how this quote has been generally misinterpreted, the idea that Sartre's concept cannot, in some sense, be captured by a more general view is unfair to those without as much time and privilege.
To try and break it down more simply, Sartre's impenetrable 'Being and Nothingness' speaks to ideas of the self. How our immediate understanding of being, as a person in time, is fundamentally 'ruined,' or at least cast into doubt, by a perception of ourselves that does not come from within. Effectively, our actions and the things that influence said choices come under scrutiny when not in the purview of our minds.
Think, mindlessly dancing with yourself in your bedroom only to learn your neighbor has had a clear view the entire time. The subsequent sense of embarrassment or anxiety about being perceived stems from the fact that there was no implicit understanding of why you might have been doing this. Dance at a nightclub or prom and the expectation is incited by a variety of things. From environment to other people, the security blanket of collective action makes space for normative action. Actuating something on your own, however, predicates itself upon the understanding that you're the only one in the presence of the act.
While there's much more to say on the former -societal critiques could base themselves off the banality of something so insignificant- clarifying the nature of Sartre's contingent 'self' is necessary. In complicated metaphysical terms, Sartre is attempting to solve the issue of describing 'being.' My reading of 'Being and Nothingness' tells me that he's trying to describe an entry point for 'being' so that we may understand why the presence of another person could elicit such an emotional reaction. Effectively, we are in one sense gifted with the experience of 'being.' Of being conscious and able to feel the inherent control of our thoughts and actions, only to have that ruined by understanding that there's another thing out there looking at us. We understand that it is, like us, conscious and perceptive, yet we lack the control to manipulate it in the same way we do our internal self.
On a fundamental level, I think this is why art, in its many disciplines and iterations, is so magnetic. For the creator, the ability to elicit a response from 'the other' is inherently fulfilling. To actuate ourselves not only in our mind, where we experience a constant actualization of self through thought and even some sense of action, we actualize ourselves in the exterior, uncontrollable world. For the appreciator, ascribing whatever intangibles may or may not be present onto someone who commands a reaction from large swathes of people is like a superpower. This dynamic, however, perhaps underlines the depressive connotation of Sartre's work and maybe even a greater idea of his concept of 'bad faith.' As an excerpt from Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy puts it, 'bad faith (self-deception) to try to coincide with our egos since the fact is that whatever we are we are in the manner of not being it due to the "othering" nature of consciousness.'
Sartre intended to rail against the practice of shortsighted self-deception for long-term happiness- or at least a more sustainable idea of being. To coincide with our egos is perhaps to say; to chase fulfillment in that which garners reaction from the exterior. To imagine that we understand all the reasons why people respond positively (or negatively, for that matter) to the things we do only comes when we've tasted the ecstasy of what it is to garner positive acclaim. No matter what it is, we cannot look to find ourselves in that which exists outside our own mind, as we will never truly know it.
Yet, to leave on a more positive note, I would suggest something of a Sartre-ian dialectic to break up this impossibility of being (as much as he'd hate it). For however negatively Sartre may have viewed the experience of the gaze of the other, I would argue it is a necessary point of inflection on the road to a more sustainable sense of understanding of our place in the world. To assume that we will always vie for total control of our sense of conscious being and thus suffer from some sadness or anxiety is to limit ourselves to the initial state, the one that finds itself 'in hell' when pondering the nightmare of external perception. But it's perhaps having spent a considerable bit of time in that place that one can gain a new understanding of being and perception.
Learning that said sense of control, the one born in the initial stage of consciousness, can never be had again, but also that every perceptive being struggles with the same task brings comfort and a sense of solidarity. The fact that we can both experience pain and pleasure, wonder and woe, elation and existential dread, and that it is likely shared at one point or another is the collective individualism that can be thought about with a smile on our face. To engage in Sartre’s self-proclaimed liberal humanism then, we can say that though the popular conception of his most famous excerpt may not illustrate every morsel of understanding said to be writhing within his works, it nonetheless holds some well-intentioned truth.
We are alone together, and whatever fleeting moments of happiness result from the reprieves of our sadness should be enjoyed in their totality. The impossibility of each bettering moment made better by its inexplicable yet more than welcome return to our life.