The Subject and its Other in Continental Philosophy
We need others in order to become ourselves, and Continental European Philosophy gives us the theory to underpin this intuition. But also, as Sartre wrote, hell is other people. What gives?
In my exploration of US-American individualism, one of my early realizations was that my own sense of my own 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 our 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 knowledge production (i.e., 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 Philosophy 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. I wrote more about this in Why Study Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit? — check it out.
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. In these works, he categorizes human societies in a hierarchical manner, with European (especially German) civilization at the apex. Further, he promulgates 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 Latin America 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 his lived experience. 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 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 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 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 pickup 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 not 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.
Footnotes
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.
