We take it for granted that through language and communication we can learn about the experience of others. But it remains unknown whether we can fully know what it is like to be another human being.
James Baldwin and Jean Pual Sartre take radically different approaches. For Sartre, the experience of others is unknown to us. Fundamentally, we are alone with our own subjectivity. While for Baldwin, 'to encounter oneself is to encounter the other; and this is love.' Summing up his disagreement with Sartre he remarked: "it has always seemed to me that ideas were somewhat more real to him than people.”
Was Baldwin right that to be alive is to be socially connected to others? Or is Sartre's insight that the only thing we can know is our own experience more telling? Should we conclude that we cannot understand the experience of another unless we have had the same experience? Or is language capable of bridging the seemingly impossible gap between us?