“All true life is encounter.” — Martin Buber

There is a moment that no one remembers, yet upon which everything we are depends. Before speaking, a child already fixes their gaze on a face. Before knowing their name, someone already pronounces it. Before knowing they exist, they are already loved. No one begins by contemplating themselves: we all begin by contemplating a face. The first smile is not merely a biological reflex, but the birth of a relationship: the self awakens because it has first discovered a you.

That small event already contains a complete anthropological thesis, the same one that underpinned much of Western philosophical and theological reflection: humanity does not find fulfillment in isolation, but rather in responding to what is different from itself. Our era, however, seems to have reversed this order. Never before have we lived surrounded by so many mirrors—screens, networks, algorithms that incessantly reflect our own image—and yet, rarely has it been so difficult to find a face capable of contradicting, complementing, or transforming us. This is not merely a crisis of customs, but an anthropological crisis: the abandonment of otherness as a constitutive structure of the self.

The temptation of self-sufficiency: Is hell other people, or the disappearance of the other?

Sartre bequeathed one of the most quoted and least understood phrases of the 20th century: “Hell is other people.” It’s not a condemnation of coexistence, but rather the realization that the gaze of others limits our freedom: it judges us, defines us, reminds us that we are not absolute masters of ourselves. We have all felt it in the shame of a discovered transgression or in the weight of unsolicited judgment.

But we can reverse Sartre’s question: what happens when the other disappears completely? Imagine someone whom no one contradicts, no one waits for, no one remembers. Would they be free, or would they be locked in the most perfect prison: a self incapable of escaping itself? Perhaps true hell is not the presence of the other, but their definitive absence. Chosen temporary solitude can be contemplation or rest; absolute solitude is despair. Sartre was right in his diagnosis—the other makes us uncomfortable—but he stopped short of the crucial question: whether that discomfort isn’t precisely the price, and the condition, of becoming someone.

“It is not good for man to be alone”

It is no coincidence that the Bible’s first negative statement is not about sin, but about loneliness: this observation appears before disobedience, before death. It doesn’t speak only of marriage: it affirms that human beings were not created to be self-sufficient. They need a “you” to discover their “self,” a nature that awakens their wonder, a history that reminds them that the world did not begin with them.

Saint Augustine translated that same intuition into the language of desire: the heart remains restless until it finds a truth greater than itself. It rests only when it ceases to enclose itself within its own horizon. Therein lies the temptation that runs through all of human history: the serpent offers not knowledge, but absolute autonomy—”you will be like gods”—the suggestion that fulfillment consists of depending on no one, of deciding for oneself what is good, evil, and even one’s own identity. This seduction changes its language in every era but retains its core: don’t listen, decide. Make yourself: pure self-absorption. And, ultimately, the confinement within that virtual reality that awaits us, according to the ominous predictions of Yuval Noah Harari.

However, all existence rests on a web of unchosen gifts: one’s mother tongue, family, teachers who shape one’s intelligence. When gratitude fades, so does wonder; and when wonder disappears, our neighbor ceases to be a gift and becomes an instrument, competitor, or spectator in our own lives. Thus begins, silently, the disappearance of the other.

The face that challenges

The answer to the temptation of self-sufficiency is not to diminish freedom, but to understand it better: man does not reach his full potential by isolating himself, but by opening himself to what is not himself. Otherness does not limit existence; it makes it possible. A son makes a man a father; a disciple gives birth to a master; a friend awakens an unknown fidelity. Each encounter reveals a dimension of ourselves that solitude would have kept hidden. The more we step outside ourselves, the more we become who we are—the paradox that Buber formulated by placing the true beginning of the person not in the Ich, but in the Ich-Du relationship: the self does not pre-exist the encounter, but is born from it.

Emmanuel Levinas took this intuition to its most radical formulation. The face of the other is not an object of contemplation, but a presence that challenges and precedes any contract or reasoning: before any law, the face silently asks, “What are you going to do with me?” In this ethical priority over the ontological—responsibility precedes freedom, it does not follow it—Levinas reverses much of the tradition that, since Descartes, had made the thinking self the undisputed starting point. For him, the subject is not constituted by thinking, but by being called.

Christianity further radicalizes this intuition: our neighbor is not only an object of compassion, but also a place of encounter with mystery. The final judgment described by Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew does not revolve around success or knowledge, but around a fundamental question: what did you do for the other person? The hungry, the sick, the helpless cease to be on the periphery and occupy the center. Even those who do not share this faith can recognize the humanizing power of this idea: a society begins to degrade when the weakest cease to have faces and become mere statistics or files. All dehumanization begins with an abstraction. The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century did not begin by killing people: they began by reducing them to categories—a race, a class, an obstacle. When the face disappears, conscience becomes accustomed to any violence. Few phrases summarize this logic with such chilling precision as the one often attributed to Stalin: one death is a tragedy; a million, a statistic. Where the face becomes a number, compassion loses its purpose.

If this is forgotten again, the dystopian risk faced by these self-absorbed beings, already made redundant by AI and other technological advances that Harari talks about, is enormous.

The self without another to contradict it

Today, the danger takes on more subtle forms. We possess prodigious technology, and yet all progress is insufficient without a lofty vision of humanity. Every historical crisis typically begins as an anthropological crisis: before losing a civilization, humanity loses the answer to the question of itself, and with it, the question of the other.

We constantly talk about identity, but we barely consider the miracle of otherness. Charles Taylor has described this drift as the dark side of the modern ideal of authenticity: a culture that encourages “being true to oneself” risks forgetting that the self is only discovered in dialogue with something—or someone—that transcends it. Identity, in fact, never matures in isolation: it needs a gaze that confirms it, a word that names it, a face that loves it. A mirror only reflects what we already are; it never reveals what we can still become. For that, we need others.

The great spiritual traditions of humanity intuited, each in its own way, that humankind only achieves fulfillment by transcending the narrow horizon of the self. But it is important to distinguish between two paths that are easily confused today. Certain ancient Eastern spiritualities—and with them, much of the contemporary New Age sensibility, which has popularized them in the West, often reducing them to mere wellness techniques—tend to concentrate almost the entire search within consciousness: the dissolution of the individual self into an impersonal whole, or its fusion with a diffuse energy that, ultimately, has no face, does not challenge, and does not demand a response. Silence, contemplation, and self-knowledge have undeniable value; but when transcendence is conceived as a journey exclusively inward, the self risks finding there no other being, but rather a more refined echo of itself.

The contemplative recollection of the Christian tradition—from Augustine to the great mystics—points in another direction: it does not seek the self as a final refuge, but as a threshold to that which transcends it. One descends to the center of the soul to find there, precisely, the great Other who is not to be confused with one’s own self and who, like the face of Levinas, challenges and refuses to dissolve. The current risk, then, is not interiority as such, but its reduction to self-referential comfort: a descent that no longer seeks to emerge, but to settle in.

Conjugal love as a necessary difference and welcome

Few experiences manifest this truth as clearly as the love between a man and a woman: not the only form of love, but certainly the one in which difference is presented as a promise, not a threat. No one falls in love with their duplicate; we love what, being different, awakens possibilities we didn’t know we possessed. Pope John Paul II, in his reflection on the reciprocal gift of persons, described love precisely as this mutual self-giving that doesn’t erase difference, but rather transforms it into fruitfulness—familial, artistic, intellectual, spiritual.

Today, however, we often no longer seek someone to complete us, but rather someone to confirm who we already are; not someone to transform us, but someone to reinforce our self-image. The other ceases to be a mystery and becomes a mere extension of the self, which is why so many relationships become interchangeable and fleeting: if the other is valuable only as long as they satisfy my expectations and projections, they can also be replaced as soon as they no longer seem to fulfill that role or someone else can do so more easily. The ephemeral ceases to be accidental and becomes the logic of the bond. This is not about idealizing the past or ignoring the failures that have always accompanied the human condition, but about recognizing that a culture that ceases to value difference impoverishes all its relationships. When otherness weakens, love weakens; when love weakens, the family loses stability; and when the family stops transmitting a shared history, society as a whole begins to forget who it is.

It’s worth stating this plainly: the couple formed by a man and a woman is not just another formula among others for organizing affection, but the biological and symbolic matrix upon which the very continuity of a society depends. No civilization can be sustained without successive generations, and no generation comes into the world without that original encounter between two differences which, in uniting, give rise to a third: the child, who, like the child in the first paragraph of this essay, will learn to recognize a face before anything else. Therein lies the circle: the crisis of otherness is not merely an abstract philosophical crisis, but has a concrete place where it manifests itself first and most severely—the growing fragility of the stable bond between man and woman—and an equally concrete consequence: a society that ceases to trust in this form of union ends, sooner or later, without the next generation to inherit it. The demographic crisis, the fragility of relationships, and the widespread feeling of contemporary loneliness may not be independent phenomena, but symptoms of the same difficulty: recognizing that the other was not placed in our path to reflect us, but to broaden the horizon of our existence.

Epilogue: the gaze of the other returns us to ourselves.

An elderly woman I knew entered a nursing home after losing her spouse. She retained her memory and intelligence, but spoke less and less, for no apparent medical reason. A nurse noticed an almost imperceptible detail: everyone cared for her properly, but few stopped to look her in the eyes. She began sitting beside her for a few minutes each day. Nothing changed in the treatment; what changed was the way she looked at her. Little by little, conversation and the will to live returned. The illness hadn’t disappeared; something more dangerous had: the feeling of being invisible.

Perhaps a civilization can also fall ill in this way. When we stop seeing people and only perceive functions, categories, or interests, something profoundly human is extinguished. A society begins to heal when it understands that no one should be invisible: not the unborn, not the newborn, not the elderly discarded because of their frailty, not even those who have already died, as long as their face lives on in the memory and gratitude of those who continue their story. A civilization is not measured solely by the wealth it produces or the power it accumulates, but by the faces it is capable of recognizing, protecting, and remembering.

The mirror only reflects one image.

The face of the other brings us back to ourselves.