Heaven Is Other People

Did Sartre Have It All Wrong? Did We Get Him Wrong?

When I was in my 20s I first saw the play No Exit, performed at Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco where I was living. The play, if you don’t already know, is about three people who find themselves trapped in a room that they can’t leave and have no idea how they got there. They bicker. It has some funny moments. Eventually, they figure out that they’re in hell, together forever, and conclude that hell is other people.

This line, “Hell is other people” is a fun one. It speaks to my inner misanthrope and the part of me that simply wants to feel better than everyone else. But that part is dumb and easily pleased. My experience, however, is the exact opposite. Years of painful lessons have taught me that I am my own prison, and the only way out is through other people. Sadly, when I’m alone, I’m not always in good company. It’s good for me to be around others and it’s even better for me to care about them.

I also believe that God speaks to me through other people. The wisest words come from the most wonderful people. I’ll never forget the toothless old man in Michigan who said, as I was grappling with some sad fact of existence, “Reality is an acquired taste.” Or the woman who looked me in my eyes when I was a troubled teenager and at my most confused and I said that I didn’t even know who I was, she said, “I know. It’s OK.” The whole world went from feeling wrong to feeling right.

The solution to most of my problems does not lie in my mind. That’s where the problems are. Asking for help has brought me much more success than figuring things out. I wish it weren’t so! I wish I were a self-powered genius who always knew what to do. Those people exist. I envy them. But, as Dirty Harry said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Me, I don’t do so great under my own steam. I need other people. I need to help them and I need to let them help me. And when I am helping someone, that’s the closest I feel to heaven. And there it is, the bad news about the failure of my self-reliance becomes the good news of being able to live in better relations with others.

So, I suggest that hell is not other people. Heaven is other people. And, if this old blog post is true, Satre didn’t even mean that other people are hell. In a talk he gave before a performance of the play, he tried to clear up that misconception.

…hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because. . . when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, . . . we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. . . . But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.

The more I keep reading about the collapse of third spaces, the rise of loneliness and isolation, and the deaths of despair that result, the more I think that my early misunderstanding of No Exit couldn’t have been more wrong. Hell is not other people. Other people are the way out. Love. Service. Friendship. Community. For me, these are my ticket out of the room with no exit.