The Intersubjectivity Series

The problem of the Other in Continental European Philosophy as backdrop for understanding US-American individualism.

1. The Subject and its Other in Continental Philosophy

In my exploration of US-American individualism, one of my early realizations was that my own sense of individualism is permeated with post-World War II existentialist ideas of the invention of the self through creative and intellectual work. The historical record shows that Existentialism is first adopted in the American context by the Beatniks, and later by the non-conformist hippies. I wrote all about this in The Production of American Individualism. But they left something out when they adopted existentialist themes, namely the constitution of the self (the subject, as we call it in Philosophy) in and through an encounter with alterity, with the Other.

Existentialism, you may know, is a French offshoot of the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. With its mantra of “to the things themselves!,” Phenomenology taught that everything we know we know through our experience as subjects, and thereafter phenomenologists where tasked with theorizing the structure of subjectivity. Phenomenology rejected both extremes of scientism (objective knowledge, and “the God trick”) and psychologism (egoism and psychoanalytic accounts), and gave us back the power to know based on our own stinkin’ experience. The individual subject is the seat of knowledge, and therefore also of desire, the will to power, and morality. But that subject always has a context or situation out of which it does it’s work of making sense of the world, and that situation frames what we can come to know — up to, and including, ourselves.

In the US-American context, you are free to invent yourself from scratch, no matter your background. This self-invention is imagined to be frictionless, the only limit to your possibilities being your imagination and will to power. Becoming more authentically yourself, concentrating your traits and quirks and distilling the truth of your experience through creative or intellectual work, well that was the whole point of existence. For existentialist like Sartre, you are what you do, the choices you make. The person who thinks they are a writer, but never actually writes anything, never shows up to the practice of writing, holds this belief about themselves in bad faith.

But this existentialist subject, the one that is a descendant of phenomenology, is not imaginable without his encounter with the Other, an encounter that is described as the problem of the Other in Continental European Philosophy. Below, I outline the history of the problem of the Other, beginning with Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic. I do this not because there is some inherent value in the maintenance of the academic philosophical cannon — I got out of that business long ago when I left academia. No, I want to put it out there because I want to examine and critique it, because it has shaped me (and others) so deeply. So many of these theories of intersubjectivity posit our relationship to the Other, the stranger, as agonistic and antagonistic. Since my overarching goal is to see if individualism can be rehabilitated and made compatible with a kind of communitarianism, this will not do. Still, there is something there of value. Let’s see if I can tease it out below.

G. W. Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831): The Master/Slave Dialectic

According to Hegel’s story about the evolution of spirit in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), an abstract, universal consciousness becomes self-consciousness through the opposition between two forms that consciousness takes. Both consciousnesses seek to be recognized as the one true, original, and authentic consciousness, and a struggle over recognition ensues. In the struggle, a choice must be made between life and freedom. One consciousness values their freedom over their life, judging that their life would be meaningless without freedom. This consciousness becomes the Master consciousness. The other consciousness chooses life over freedom, judging that freedom is meaningless without life. This is the Slave consciousness because the slave choses to subjugate their freedom to the master in exchange for safeguarding their life.

Subjectivity emerges in and through this struggle: it is co-constituted as the relation between master and slave — an asymmetrical relation of difference. In this relation, the slave is turned into the master’s Other, serving and reflecting the master’s needs and desires. The master, whose needs are anticipated and served by the slave, simply lays back and consumes what he needs and desires.

But the story doesn’t end there. The revelation of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic is that the dialectic is carried forward not by the Master consciousness, as one might expect, but by the Slave who comes to self-consciousness as independent being through the fruits of his labor. (Yes, these subjects are always imagined as masculine.) When the Slave comes to understand that the Master is dependent on the Slave’s labor for the satisfaction of their needs and desires, the Slave lays claim to his independence and is released from subjugation. The conflict is resolved on both sides, and the dialectic carries on to the next stage.

Note the starting assumption here: the desire for recognition from an Other immediately leads to conflict, and ends in the subjugation of one by the Other. We can all relate to this desire for recognition from others, it is a primordial human need. But why not cooperation and mutual recognition? Or, at the very least, communication and negotiation? Even though the end of this process is the mutual recognition of two independent self-consciousnesses, the story’s agonism remains troubling.1

It is not insignificant that this first and agonistic account of intersubjectivity is written at the turn of the 19th Century, the height of, and a turning point for, European colonialism in Africa and the Americas. Hegel’s writings on race in his lectures on History give us some further insight into his mindset. In these works, he categorizes human societies in a hierarchical manner, with European (especially German) civilization at the apex. Further, he promotes views of non-European societies as lesser than, or at earlier stages of development. More specifically, as he is putting the final touches on the manuscript in 1806 and getting ready to publish it in 1807, the French, Spaniards, and Portuguese are fighting over control of their colonies in Latin America, leading to the beginning of independence movements across the region in the early 19th century.

Perhaps most important, the Haitian revolution (1791–1804) resulted in the successful overthrow of a colonial power by former slaves, and the establishment of the first independent black republic and the second independent country in the Americas after the United States. This event was a significant blow to European colonialism and the institution of slavery. To paint with broad strokes, Europe’s encounter with the colonized Other was taking some twisty turns, and Hegel’s writings can be seen as a justification for European dominance. For Hegel, these conflicts are imagined as an inevitable part of world historical progress, and in his imagination these conflicts brought about by European imperialism would resolve themselves neatly in the end.

Edmond Husserl (1859–1938): The Other Whom We Come To Know

For Husserl, just about 50 years later, the problem of the Other is an epistemological problem having to do with how we can come to know the Other as a given part of the world around us. His account in Cartesian Meditations (1931) is meant as an answer to the problematic solipsism of the Cartesian subject inherited from Descartes. The Cartesian subject, stripped of any knowledge beyond knowledge of its own thoughts — cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am — cannot establish the existence of anything beyond its own consciousness. The external world seems unreachable, raising skepticism about the reality of an external world, and brain in vat scenarios. Given this conundrum, Husserl posits a new starting point: a shared lifeworld in which we come to recognize the Other as another Self who we can see, like us, exerts their will upon objects in our shared world. In other words, let’s assume the world out there is real, and then let’s account for what we can know.

However, Husserl does not succeed in overcoming the solipsism of the Cartesian subject because, according to his theory, we can only come to know others in so far as their are like us — in other words, not in terms of their difference or otherness, but only as self-same others. If we can only recognize other subjects in so far as they are like us, then that doesn’t get us very far at all. Husserl’s subject cannot come to know anything that is alien to it’s own experience.

It is easiest to see the problem with this, I think, if we take non-human others as our example. Let’s take our dearest companions, dogs. Imagine if our relationship to dogs was based solely on how they are like us, and we cannot comprehend that they have their own needs and desires proper to their species, as well as individuality. Imagine that we can only recognize them in so far as they serve our purposes, needs, and desires. We are in a relation of mastery, lording over them an illegitimate power to define them through our terms. That our relation to many non-human animals is like this is sad, and we have to recognize that this is harmful to all involved. We miss out all the things that makes dogs wonderful since they are not human, and even the things they could teach us about who we are.

Unfortunately, in this account, the Other is reduced to digestible parts, which is very much how a denial of difference attack is deployed: “You are no one and nothing to me unless you meet me in my world and on my terms.” It places beyond recognition anything that falls outside of norms that serve the powerful. Although not as conflictual as Hegel’s theory of the Other, this does not get us closer to a positive or productive encounter with difference.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976): Mitsein and “the They”

Martin Heidegger was Husserl’s student and successor in the German academy. In Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Dasein’s original state is being-with (Mitsein) others. These anonymous others are referred to collectively as “the They” (das-man), a mass of humanity with whom we are thrown into the world. Dasein is a part of the being-with amongst “the They,” from whom Dasein does not distinguish itself for the most part. But even when Dasein does try to break away from “the They,” Dasein realizes that the desire to set itself apart from the others is an all too common desire. We all long to be recognized for being special and unique in our being. We are all the same in our desire to be unique. But most of us also long to be a part of a group, and spend most of our time wrapped up in these group identities. This is the normal state of things.

In order to become authentic being in itself, Dasein needs to transcend “the They.” Only by taking on its own being-toward-death does Dasein catch a glimpse of its possibility for transcendence, lifting itself out of “the They.” This only happens for a short time, and then Dasein falls back into “the They” again. Beyond this, Heidegger has little more to say about mitsein, but his account of authenticity is what Sartre picks-up and carries forward in his account of intersubjectivity. Lets continue in summary form to look at Sartre’s take on the problem of intersubjectivity and the Other.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1956): “Hell Is Other People”

In Part III of Being and Nothingness that is entitled “The Look,” Sartre denies Hegel’s basic assumption that I can immediately apprehend and absorb how the Other sees me.2 This is because the Other sees me initially as an object amongst objects in the world, and a subject cannot accept or internalize the objectification. As Sartre writes:

“I am incapable of apprehending for myself the self which I am for the other, just as I am incapable of apprehending on the basis of the other-as-object which appears to me, what the Other is for himself” (Being and Nothingness, 327).

The Self here cannot fully comprehend the Other, and the mirror that the Other provides is neither passive nor transparent. The Other distorts my own self-understanding — i.e., the image of me that is reflected in and through the Other is, by necessity, a distorted version. In this way, the Other modifies my own sense of self, against me and in spite of my desires, denying me control of my own self-understanding.

In this way, the Other undercuts the subject’s freedom and self-determination. To recognize the Other as such is to see oneself through an alien and alienating mirror, and we immediately want to counter and negate this alien view in order to preserve our own sense of ourselves. Thus, the essence of the subject’s relation to the Other is conflict, and any encounter with alterity is, by necessity, alienating.

As Sartre famously puts it in his play No Exit, “Hell is other people.” Sartre meant that the most profound form of hell is the way we are perpetually judged and defined by others. This constant scrutiny and the inability to escape the gaze and judgment of others lead to a sense of entrapment and existential anguish, highlighting the conflict and tension inherent in human relationships. The desire to dominate the Other, a desire that will be frustrated by necessity, causes our subject anguish. Again, on this view, our subject’s vulnerability is nearly intolerable, and interdependence is a threat. But what if our strength lies in our interdependence and care for the Other, whom nonetheless we can’t comprehend? Instead of domination, what about wonder and curiosity in the face of alterity?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961): The Other As Foundation For Our Own Subjectivity

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is another French philosopher, a contemporary and friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Merleau-Ponty takes Husserl’s account and elaborates upon it as follows:

Prior to conscious thought, prior to an exchange with a particular Other, the human world is there for us. There is no human world that does not always already include others, and it would be very difficult to imagine a meaningful world devoid of others. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty points out that we are not, from the start, distinct from this world and others in it, but form a unity with them from which we later come to separate out our own individual subjective sense of self. In this way, our encounter with otherness is a condition for the possibility of our own subjectivity.

The mere existence of an Other takes us outside of our bodies and ourselves. As we are drawn into their world of concern, we forget ourselves and our concerns. We come to be out there in the world, and as Merleau-Ponty suggests, the world comes to inhabit us. In other words, the other doesn’t just present us with the data of other consciousnesses, but the other affects us and acts upon us in way that are similar to being love stricken.

Of all of the accounts, this is the one that I like best because it returns us to a sense of wonder, curiosity and joy in existing in a world with others. But this is getting so very long that I’m going to cut it off here and return with a next instalment, all about Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied and situated subjects.

1 For one thorough re-working of recognition, see Kelly Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001), which advocates for a re-interpretation of recognition that emphasizes mutual vulnerability and interdependence. I will have to return to Kelly Oliver’s work in a future post.

2 I wrote about this in Seeing and Being Seen Seeing: Sartre’s Voyeuristic Reimagining of Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic.

2. Merleau-Ponty On Our Primordial Encounter With Otherness

“In the cultural object, I feel the close presence of others beneath a veil of anonymity. Someone uses the pipe for smoking, the spoon for eating, the bell for summon-ing, and it is through the perception of a human act and another person that the perception of a cultural world could be verified.” (Phenomenology of Perception, 405)

For Merleau-Ponty, any encounter with an Other is preceded by a pre-cognitive, pre-linguistic encounter with otherness in the form of anonymous others whom we encounter as a part of an objectively shared world. No longer there simply for me, the world and the things found therein immediately point us to others. When these others appear, our world gets sucked into their sphere of influence, and we loose our position at the center of the world. As Merleau-Ponty describes:

“Round about the [Other’s] perceived body a vortex forms, towards which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in: to this extent, it is no longer merely mine, and no longer merely present, it is present to x, to that other manifestation of behaviour which begins to take shape in it. Already the other body has ceased to be a mere fragment of the world, and become the theatre of a certain process of elaboration, and, as it were, a certain ‘view’ of the world. There is taking place over there a certain manipulation of things hitherto my property. Someone is making use of my familiar objects. But who can it be? (Phenomenology of Perception, 411–12)

The mere existence of an Other takes us outside of our bodies and ourselves. The Other is a theater for the elaboration of a drama not of our own making. As we are drawn into their world of concern, we forget ourselves and our concerns. We come to be out there in the world, and as Merleau-Ponty suggests, the world comes to inhabit us. The other doesn’t just present us with the data of other consciousnesses, but the other affects us and acts upon us, as if we were love-stricken.

The Lived Body and the Other

The Other is first of all perceived as a body, but this body is no mere object. The lived body of subjects is characterized by the reversibility of being both object and subject simultaneously. (For example, think of how you can simultaneously grasp your own hand, and be both grasping and grasped.) A special kind of object, the lived body of the other exhibits behaviors much like our own. More specifically, it can leave marks and traces as vestiges, and produces the space in which it moves by shaping its environment. In a somewhat cryptic but very suggestive passage, Merleau-Ponty writes:

“The very first of all cultural objects, and the one by which all the rest exist, is the body of the other person as the vehicle of a form of behaviour. Whether it be a question of vestiges or the body of another person, we need to know how an object in space can become the eloquent relic of an existence; how, conversely, an intention, a thought or a project can detach themselves from the personal subject and become visible out-side him in the shape of his body, and in the environment which he builds for himself.” (Phenomenology of Perception, 406)

As a cultural artifact, the body of the Other can be interpreted or read for its significance. The simplest way to understand this is to take the example of the athlete or the dancer, off of whose bodies we can read the athleticism and poise produced through the way they use their bodies. Their bodies are an expression of their life’s work. Or we may read the calloused worker’s hands to mean that they work with their hands. Even the lack of marks and traces says something about the other.

Bodily attitudes communicate something about our psychological state as well — for example, if we are feeling defeated, we slump in our frames. When we are excited, our bodies exude with energy. If we are pricked, our facial expression and bodily wincing can communicate that sharp, sudden experience of pain. So bodies, like inert objects, can be “read” for the significance that they communicate against a cultural backdrop. In fact, our bodies may communicate and know what we have not (or cannot) consciously register.

Finally, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the environment in which we find ourselves and others is produced, in part, through the Other’s activities in and through that space. We are not just sucked into a psychological vortex when we encounter others, but the vortex may well be physical, around a whirl of activity not our own. It is as if our bodies are pencils that leave marks and traces, shaping and creating the spaces we inhabit. The production of space by bodies in motion is a fascinating idea, one that can be traced to French sociologist Henri Lefebvre, about whom I hope to write more later.

How Our Encounter With Primordial Otherness Structures Our Subjectivities

Prior to conscious thought, prior to an exchange with a particular Other, the human world is there for us. Recall that there is no human world that does not always already include others, and it would be very difficult to imagine a meaningful world devoid of others. This is where Merleau-ponty makes his biggest move: primordial otherness structures my subjectivity because the Other comes across as completing a system. Merleau-Ponty re-narrates the encounter above as follows:

“I say [of the Other] that it is another, a second self, and this I know in the first place because this living body has the same structure as mine. I experience my own body as the power of adopting certain forms of behaviour and a certain world, and I am given to myself merely as a certain hold upon the world; now, it is precisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of deal- ing with the world. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together compromise a system, so my body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.” (Phenomenology of Perception, 411–12)

Much like I recognize that all the parts of my body arranged in working order make up the unity I call my body, the Other forms a part of the unity of the world in which I find myself, and is in fact a necessary condition for my coming to consciousness, for being able to reflect myself back to myself, to know myself as a subject in the world.

In this way, Merleau-Ponty gets back behind Husserl’s lifeworld to suggest a prior encounter with otherness as a condition for the possibility for subjectivity. We are not first of all distinct from this world and others, but form a unity with them from which we later come to separate out our own individual subjective sense of self. Any encounter with a specific other has as its backdrop a primordial encounter with, or connection to otherness.

Merleau-Ponty puts it most clearly in the following quote:

“Between my consciousness and my body as I experience it, between this phenomenal body of mine and that of another as I see it from the outside, there exists an internal relation which causes the other to appear as the completion of the system. The other can be evident to me because I am not transparent for myself, and because my subjectivity draws its body in its wake.” (Phenomenology of Perception, 410)

And later he will add this:

“In reality, the other is not shut up inside my perspective of the world, because this perspective itself has no definite limits, because it slips spontaneously into the other’s, and because both are brought together in the one single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception.” (Phenomenology of Perception, 411)

The word “imbricated” is often used to describe this situation, and this phenomenological description is meant to give a new starting point from which to overcome the problem of solipsism — of a subject that is shut up in itself. The reality of the solipsistic subject’s world is in question precisely because it cannot be verified. But if we are always already of this world, we are inseparable from those others amongst and with whom we share overlapping lifeworlds.

Husserl preserves the subject/object inside/outside division intact in his account, a “strategic solipsism” he says that he adopts in order to overcome it, but arguably his transcendental subject is never able to fully overcome the split. Merleau-Ponty attempts to overcome the mind/body, subject/object split by denying it outright, arguing that the body/self is simultaneously subject and object, and that “the world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside of myself.” (Phenomenology of Perception, 474)

Some Closing Thoughts

Of all of the theories of intersubjectivity that we have looked at thus far, Merleau-Ponty’s assertion of our status simultaneously as subject and objects, and as an imbricated part of a whole, a whole which is perhaps never completed, is most attractive. In so far as I can show up as an individual, it is in the US-American context that raises this subject into social and political visibility. That is, my individuality only has meaning when understood against the background of the many collectives into and out of which I move. Collectives themselves produce individuals that can act, and be moral, and have principles. And it even produces those subjects — philosophers, artists, writers, activist, etc. — lots of different kinds of subjects that are distinguished as individuals, and who, by taking an adversarial position vis a vis tradition or norms, test that community’s commonly held beliefs and practices.

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All quotes are taken from: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge) 2005.

3. Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995): The Face-to-Face Encounter With The Other

Emmanuel Levinas’ thinking on intersubjectivity and the Other begins from the rejection of previous models that don’t seem to allow for an authentic encounter with the Other. Levinas’ begins Totality and Infinity (1961) by criticizing Husserl in particular for imagining that our relation to others is, first and foremost, epistemic — that it is a question of knowledge and of how we can come to know the Other. This desire to know the Other has connotations of comprehending and controlling. (If you’ve ever had that friend who tries to tell you who you are and what you like, against your own understanding of yourself, you know this controlling mindset.) For Levinas, the Other is not there to be known, and the Other resists our attempts to comprehend them in this controlling way.

Instead, Levinas insists that our relation to others is first and foremost a concern for Ethics, and Ethics is founded precisely in and through what he describes as the face-to-face encounter with the Other’s otherness — “radical alterity” is the phrase he adopts. Imagine that, faced with someone whom you’ve just met for the first time, instead of assuming that they are just like you because of an assumed underlying humanity, so that you only see in them what you recognize as a mirror of your own self, you maintain a certain curiosity and openness towards them. Not reducing the Other and their experience to what you can already understand, this seems like the right approach. But it is a difficult attitude to maintain because we do have a tendency to reduce complexity. Even at the level of perception we only see what is most relevant to us in the moment. So it requires effort to maintain an ethical attitude towards the Other.

This encounter with radical alterity calls us out, calls us to our responsibility to the Other, a responsibility that cannot be done away with. In short, our responsibility to the Other is irreducible. Our ability to respond to the need of the Other, that is how our humanity is forged. So not only do we find ourselves in a lifeworld with Others, to adopt Merleau-Ponty’s language, but who we are as humans is shaped by how we act in response to the needs of the Other whom we may not even understand.

Moreover, the face-to-face encounter with the Other inaugurates language and thought, and therefore, it is the condition for the possibility for knowledge of any kind. Levinas comes to be well known for his assertion that Ethics precedes Epistemology, a purposeful reversal of the usual hierarchy that places knowledge above all else.

Here it seems that we are going in the right direction, however Levinas’ language around the Other is not grounded in curiosity, joy, or building on shared experiences despite differences, but often he evokes images of hunger and pain in the encounter. Understandably, he is wanting to excise and remnant of any self-interest in the encounter, and his historical frame of reference as a Jewish philosopher and theologian in the post-World War II era is the Jewish holocaust. So for him, the Other produces a crisis in us, one that arguably is the product of the history of conflicts in Europe and it’s colonies.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986): Woman As Other

In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir appropriates Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic to argue that woman has historically been constituted as Other with respect to an assumed masculine subject. Just as the slave must lay claim to its own independent self-consciousness, woman too must come to realize man’s dependence on her, and come to make a claim to her own independent self-consciousness. That is, when women assert man’s otherness with respect to them, then an authentic woman’s standpoint will emerge to make women’s economic, political, and social projects possible.

One of the chief examples that Levinas uses to develop his idea of alterity is that of sexual different and the feminine. In a long footnote to the Introduction to The Second Sex, Beauvoir addresses Levinas’ appropriation of the feminine as a figure for alterity. She argues that Levinas, while recognizing the concept of the Other, paradoxically reinforces traditional gendered roles by associating otherness specifically with a mysterious feminine. Beauvoir contends that Levinas’ philosophy situates women as the quintessential Other in a way that perpetuates their marginalization, highlighting how this characterization solidifies women’s status as secondary to men, who are assumed to be the subjects in this equation. This, she argues, undermines women’s autonomy and perpetuates their subordinate position in society. It’s like he walked right up to the Other and still missed the point entirely.

Luce Irigaray (1930-present): The Feminine Other

Luce Irigaray, on the other hand, will find something of value in Levinas’ assertion of sexual difference as par excellence radical alterity. For her, the radical alterity of the feminine is the starting point for thinking about irreducible differences between subjects, and sexual different is the basis for all other social and political differences according to Irigaray. (She has defended this difficult assertion tooth and nail, but it remains very problematic…) Moving away from the idea of sexually indifferent subjects, subjects that end up being modelled always on masculine subjectivities, Irigaray argues strongly for sexual difference as the starting point for understanding how subjectivity emerges, and she brings a psychoanalytic perspective to the question.

In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray argues that women are conceived of in spatial terms — as wombs and containers for man’s transcendence through time. In order to truly think (sexual) difference, we need to rethink the metaphysics of time and space. In other words, the problem of the Other is, at its core, a problem for Metaphysics and Ontology (the study of Being). It is a bold claim that she bears out in the rest of her work. It gets pretty gnarly, but the Cartesian mind/body division that kicks off Husserl’s skepticism over the possibility of knowing others outside our own minds, this is based on an ontological hierarchy between time/subject/mind/masculinity as opposed to space/object/body/femininity. In this way, Irigaray tries to get back behind and under the problem of intersubjectivity, to offer an alternative framing. For her, the problem of the Other is anchored in a metaphysics that establishes a false dichotomy that has yet to be interrogated. Until we grapple with this underlying reality, we will not be able to imagine true difference, or live with radical alterity without seeking to obliterate it.

In this case, the antagonistic relation to the other is an accidental, and not a necessary condition structuring our subjectivities. The bad news is that the less than harmonious relationship amongst humans, and between humans, other animals, and their environment, is deeply embedded in how we construct reality. It is almost unimaginable how we may begin to think otherwise.

Addendum

I tend to lead with thinking, and needing to think a different way in order to act differently seems natural to me. But it really isn’t, and that is good news. We can most effectively change how we think by choosing to act differently, reworking our relation to others, and letting the best practices carry us forward.
I began by wondering why and how I came to value individualism over community, and I think I do understand this better. Individualism is a collection of ideas that have, over time, come to shape the US-American experience so as to benefit those who are in power, which are those who are economically powerful in the context of capitalism and colonialism. They sell us freedom and call it individualism, but it’s actually enslavement and alienation. I think many of us cna feel the alienation, and/or know something isn’t right. Individualism is a lie, and one that doesn’t particularly benefit us.
I thought I could find some resources in existential phenomenology, and in these theories of intersubjectivity. Despite the problems with this tradition, I think the idea that we are part of a whole lifeworld, and inseparable from Others, to whom we are indebted and responsible, these two ideas seem good. But the more interesting problem now is how we should act — how to reestablish the matrix that ties us to others on whom our existence and morality depends.

We need to change how we think by doing things together and for each other.