The Others East–West: from pleaser to presence

Nonduality has the bad habit of claiming it’s about everything. That’s a tough sales pitch: People prefer a story over the whole universe in one gulp. Luckily, the universe has a sly sense of humor: it slips in through the back door of daily life. A worry before a meeting. A pause in conversation. The twitch of “What will they think?” That’s where the universal makes its entrance.

So rather than beginning with grand truths about “the Others,” let me start smaller: me, in a Zoom call full of nonduality practitioners, trying (unsuccessfully) not to be a pleaser. Spoiler: Presence carried the moment, and in time I saw it needed a companion: reason. Together they make the radical middle way. But theory can wait; let’s first unmute that Zoom call.

I’ve always been a pleaser. There it is—the embarrassing truth. On the surface that looks admirable: agreeable, dependable: the perfect team player. I even made a career of it. Clients trusted me. Colleagues relied on me. Friends praised me. But beneath ran a constant stream of rehearsals: What if they say this? What if they expect that? What if I disappoint them?

And I don’t think I’m all that unusual. Most of us know that quiet pressure of other people’s expectations: the invisible measuring sticks we carry around, the speeches we rehearse for audiences that aren’t even in the room.

So when that Zoom call came, I thought I was just being considerate. Turns out I was acting out one of the central dramas of twentieth-century existential philosophy: the question of the Others.

Emmanuel Levinas is less famous than Sartre or Camus, but his voice is among the most piercing of the last century. Born in Lithuania, raised in the Jewish tradition, he studied in France under Husserl and Heidegger. Then came the war.

Levinas spent five years as a prisoner in a German camp. He survived; most of his family did not. Out of that devastation came his central claim: philosophy must begin with ethics, not with being.

When you encounter another person, Levinas says, you don’t meet a neutral object. You meet a face that silently commands: “Do not kill me. Do not reduce me. You are responsible.”

This responsibility is infinite. You can never finish it. You can’t say, “I’ve done my part.” The face always demands more.

It was a profound antidote to indifference. Levinas had seen what happens when people are reduced to objects—the Holocaust—and his response was urgent: never again. He framed ethics as asymmetric and unending: I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity. Morally bracing, yes. But also unbearably heavy.

Taken as a universal rule, it quickly becomes a recipe for exhaustion. Life turns into endless anticipation, accommodation, apology. Worse still: when infinite responsibility meets infinite rights, both collapse. If everyone is owed without limit and everyone owes without limit, then nothing can ever be fulfilled. As the American legal theorist Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld pointed out in 1913, a right only exists if someone else can actually discharge the duty that corresponds to it. Make them infinite, and you end up with none at all.

The deeper problem is that a philosophy of endless guilt isn’t really philosophy at all, but religion. In Christianity, infinite obligation is carried by the promise of forgiveness. In Judaism, endless commandments are sustained within a covenant. Without some transcendent source to bear the weight, there’s no balance; just an open tab that never closes. Translated into today’s secular dualism, infinite responsibility hardens into guilt that never lifts.

Levinas called this the ground of ethics. I call it a doomscroll philosophy, hardwired for burnout.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Levinas’s contemporary, approached the Other differently. He too was a prisoner of war, captured in 1940 and held for almost a year before returning to occupied Paris. His wartime book, Being and Nothingness (1943), introduced the problem of the gaze. For Sartre, the Other is not first a face that commands responsibility but a look that turns me into an object.

The example is simple: You’re singing in your room, carefree and unselfconscious—until you notice someone watching through the door. In an instant, your freedom evaporates. You’re no longer a subject in the flow of music but that embarrassing person caught singing.

This is Sartre’s “look.” It freezes, defines, imprisons. That’s why in No Exit (1944) he wrote the line that still echoes: “Hell is other people.”

He also illustrated it with the waiter in the café—a man too much a waiter, moving too briskly, bowing too exactly, playing the role with theatrical precision. More than just doing his job, he is swallowed by it, defined by how others see him. For Sartre, that was bad faith: when we let the gaze of others pin us into a script, and then pretend that’s all we are.

And I recognize the pull. I didn’t need anyone to actually look at me; I carried their gaze inside me. My pleaser-self was not far from Sartre’s waiter: over-rehearsed, too eager, too tightly bound to the expectations I imagined in others. I lived in anticipation of judgment, performing for an invisible tribunal that never adjourned.

Sartre’s proposed solution was radical freedom. Consciousness, he argued, is nothingness—no fixed essence, just pure possibility. Even if others try to define me, I can reclaim freedom by choosing. Authenticity means never being reduced to what others think.

It sounded heroic, and sometimes it was. Sartre risked his life in the Resistance, publishing under censorship and teaching under occupation. There his freedom wasn’t a pose but a real defiance.

But outside those moments, the gap between his philosophy and his life grew obvious. He became a cultural celebrity, endlessly photographed in Paris cafés. He feuded bitterly with Camus, denouncing him in absolute terms. And even his refusal of the Nobel Prize in 1964—meant as a declaration of independence—ended up as another performance before the very audience he longed to escape.

In the end, Sartre diagnosed how the gaze of others objectifies us, then lived under that same gaze. He became, in a sense, the very waiter he had described: performing a role too perfectly, too absolutely. Only this time the role was “the authentic man,” serving verdicts on a silver tray to those hungry for judgment. His philosophy of radical freedom, meant to free us from roles, slid into its own bad faith: a secular dualistic bind where even defiance became a performance.

But before piling on Jean-Paul, let’s check our contemporary feed. We still chase “authenticity” like it’s an Instagram filter, shout about freedom while checking who’s watching, and call it rebellion while waiting for the likes to roll in. Sartre just put into words a performance the West still can’t retire: forever rebelling on stage, but never quite leaving the theater of the gaze.

Both Sartre and Levinas, forged in the crucible of war, became fiercely anti-authoritarian. Understandably so: they had seen what blind obedience could unleash. But their rebellion calcified into judgment.

Sartre’s radical freedom left little room for gray. He turned his pen into a weapon, denouncing not only fascism but also liberalism, capitalism, and even friends who strayed from his line. Fiercely anti-clerical, he burned bridges, most famously with Camus. His radical humanism became a kind of secular creed: moral absolutism dressed up as freedom.

Levinas’s infinite responsibility, meanwhile, came not from rejecting religion but from deep roots in Jewish thought. Yet once uprooted from that soil and read as philosophy alone, his language of endless obligation could function like a moral bludgeon: You can never say, “enough.” The demand becomes bottomless.

Both, in different ways, objectified, canonized their insights. Caught in the regress of absolutes, they ended up founding their own church of secular truths—with themselves as reluctant yet zealous clergy.

Here’s where I raise my social critique flag: the secular, dualistic moral absolutism born from their time didn’t end with them; it still circulates in the Western bloodstream.

We inherited Sartre’s glare and Levinas’s demand. We scold one another online. We measure ourselves against impossible yardsticks. We cancel, condemn, compete in contests of responsibility. Most vividly in Europe, we live in a culture that claims to be anti-authoritarian yet shows its authoritarian streak in practice: judgment without forgiveness and activism without rest.

That’s why I titled my 2024 book Sanity: Humanism Is a Dualism—a playful wink at Sartre’s 1945 lecture-turned-book Existentialism Is a Humanism. Sartre’s version turned “human freedom” into an absolute; mine points out how that this absolutism was bound to mutate into yet another dualism—one that still tears through the West today, fueling judgment, division, and our strange obsession with being endlessly righteous.

The question of the Others came home to me during the Zoom call with a circle of nonduality practitioners—trainers and coaches working with “no-self.”

We were discussing whether to use nondual terms with “clients.” I slipped back into my consultant’s reflex: “It depends on the client. Some prefer plain talk, others resonate with spiritual words. You adapt.”

To me, that was obvious. But the group gently pushed back. Juan Nosenada said: “It’s not about adapting to the client’s what-ifs. The conversation is best guided by presence, not prepared attitudes. You don’t need to hold a stance; you just let it unfold.”

And there it was again—my pleaser instinct, rehearsing Sartrean what-ifs, carrying Levinas’s infinite demand. Even in a group dedicated to dissolving the self, my ego was sneaking back in—not striding through the front door, but slipping in with its old trick: calculating how to be liked.

Lesson learned: watch out what you share with nondual practitioners. They’re so present you might leave with more breakthroughs than you bargained for.

What broke the cycle for me wasn’t more effort but an old insight from the East. Shankara, the eighth-century Advaita Vedānta philosopher, put it simply: “I alone am.”

Not “I” as Marcel. But consciousness itself, the unbounded present before the mind splits it into subject and object. By presence I mean exactly this: the unconditioned present, awareness before role, judgment, or the story of “me” and “the Other.”

The ego spins more than just the illusion of a separate self: in its wake it also invents the Others it feels bound to serve. Self and Other appear together—and vanish together—as projections.

From this vantage, Levinas’s infinite responsibility and Sartre’s radical freedom both soften. The Other is not a crushing creditor, nor a hostile gaze. The Other is simply another ripple in the same ocean.

Responsibility remains, but not as infinite debt. Instead it becomes infinite openness: presence inviting presence. Freedom remains, but not as heroic defiance. Instead it becomes the simple ease of showing up as what already is.

Or in the beautiful words of Douglas Harding, shared by Salvadore Poe: “Can’t you see? I’m just space for you to be.” That space is not a person but nonduality itself—the seamless present—wide open for everyone to be: you, the Others, and even this expression of the infinite I call “me.” In that wholeness, judgment simply has no job to do.

The existentialists were right to notice the fracture. They saw how Western thought, with its obsession for splitting—self and other, duty and desire, freedom and fate—left people stranded in conflict. Their courage was to stare that fracture in the face, to refuse the easy consolations of dogma. In that sense, they set Western philosophy on the right path: honesty about the problem is the beginning of wisdom.

But honesty isn’t the same as resolution. Sartre’s defiance and Levinas’s infinite duty still circled inside the same dualistic frame. They sharpened the split but could not heal it. Shankara, and with him much of Eastern metaphysics, offered what they could not: a vision where the split itself dissolves. “I alone am” is not a slogan of self-aggrandizement but the recognition that self and Other rise and fall together within the undivided present. Where existentialism revealed the wound, nonduality shows the ground that makes healing possible.

And yet, the radical middle way goes further. Presence without reason can drift into mysticism; reason without presence chases its own tail into abstraction. Together they keep balance: presence gives the ground, reason keeps the ground clear.

More than a method, reason is how we take each other seriously: by meeting, listening, and engaging with care. Shankara dissolves the split; Rational Nondualism lets that dissolution be lived. It turns insight into orientation, something steady enough to guide science, gentle enough to shape ethics, and close enough to touch daily life.

This is what I mean by the radical middle way. Radical as in rooted—in the unconditioned present—not as a compromise but as diligent coherence with what comes naturally. Presence anchors it. Reason safeguards it.

This way Rational Nondualism bridges the divide between East and West. In (secular) dualism, authority is sought in external rules and abstract ideals; in nonduality, felt intuitions arising within a mind grounded in rational beliefs—what we might simply call good sense—carry more weight than second-hand commandments.

It’s not obedience. Not rebellion. Not infinite demand. Not radical defiance. It’s presence: the unconditioned present noticing itself.

Levinas and Sartre sharpened ethics for a shattered world. But their solutions hardened into judgmentalism, feeding a secular moral absolutism that still haunts Western culture: the endless policing of words and actions, the restless suspicion that we are never doing enough.

And it doesn’t stop at ourselves—we begin to police others too, imposing our worldview in the name of responsibility or freedom. The result is often counterproductive: interventions that create dependence, a kind of belittling benevolence where the helper’s very generosity reinforces the need it set out to cure. It becomes a strange game in which the helper requires the needy as much as the needy require the helper: help that needs need in order to survive.

Secular dualism makes this game worse. With its utopian dreams, it often rewards the performance of good intentions more than the practice of good sense. What matters is being seen to care, not necessarily caring wisely. The outcome is predictable: activism without rest, moral zeal without balance, and a public theatre of concern that satisfies appearances while leaving the underlying problems intact.

Presence cuts through that. It dissolves the dualism of “me” and “the Other.” It allows care without burnout, freedom without defiance—and with it comes the quiet assurance of the no-harm principle, not imposed from above but arising of itself.

That’s what’s missing in post-war existentialism. That’s what Eastern thought—Shankara’s “I alone am”—brings to the table.

Do I still catch myself pleasing? Absolutely. Old habits don’t die easily. But I see them now as echoes, not destiny.

When my inner pleaser whispers, “Careful, what do they want? What if you disappoint?” I can smile. The pleaser wanted safety. He did his best. But he doesn’t run the show anymore. Presence does.

And presence doesn’t rehearse. It doesn’t bargain. It just shows up in the present as it is.

That’s what the radical middle way does for me: not exhausting myself with Levinas’s infinite demand, not posturing with Sartre’s radical freedom, but trusting the present to carry me.

Levinas gave us the gravity of the face. Sartre gave us the sharpness of the gaze. Shankara gave us the key: I alone am.

And somewhere between them, in the radical middle way, we can find a freedom that is neither crushing nor heroic. Not freedom against others. Not freedom for others. But freedom with others, in the seamless present that was never divided to begin with. Presence keeps us open and reason keeps us honest. Together they offer a language where cultures can meet.

What I had to learn as a pleaser is what could also guide the West’s good intentions: freedom is not rehearsed for or against the Other, but found by meeting in presence.

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