| Summary: | This article applies one aspect of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist approach as found in his philosophic masterpiece Being and Nothingness to a particularly prevelant pair of characters in classical Near Eastern poetry. The aspect in question is the Self and the Other as modified in the case of a lover, and the characters are the Nightingale and the Rose, known by their original names as Bulbul and Gul respectively. To understand Sartre’s perspective on the lover, it will first be shown that Sartre regards all human relationships are reducible to the Self and the Other. In general, this inexorably leads to conflict in the systematic way put forward by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his Phenomonology of Spirit, as the dialectic of the Master and the Slave. For Sartre though, as will be looked at, there is a single possible way of escape from this seemingly inevitable conflict. This is when the Self is a lover, who, in a desire for sincerely granted love, offers the Other – as a beloved – freedom rather than trying to enslave him or her. Finally, it shall be shown that both the dialectic of the Master and the Slave and the exceptional case of the lover is evidenced in the aforementioned poetic characters.
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