"The totality in which a thinking being is situated is not a pure and simple addition of beings, but the addition of beings who do not make up one number with one another. This is the whole originality of society. The simultaneity of participation and non-participation is precisely an existence that moves between guilt and innocence, between ascendancy over others, betrayal of the self and return to the self. The relationship of the individual to the totality, which thought is, in which the / takes into account what is not itself and yet is not dissolved in it, assumes that the totality is manifested not as a milieu brushing against the skin, so to speak, of living being as an element in which it is immersed, but as a face in which being faces me… Things as things derive their original independence from the fact that they do not belong to me—and they do not belong to me because I am in relation to the men they come from. Hence, the relationship of the / with the totality is a relationship with human beings whose face I recognize. Before them, I am guilty or innocent. The condition of thought is a moral consciousness."