Simone De Beauvoir was, much like Sartre, at the heart of the French existentialist movement. Theories of the self, the other, and intersubjectivity were central to her writings, especially her most famous work, The Second Sex. For De Beauvoir, the crux of human reality lay in the split between freedom and situation. As described in the previous post, these are transcendence and facticity, respectively.
The goal within this split is self-identity, yet it is our freedom, inextricably tied to our facticity, that gives us our sense of self. It forms how we view our past and does not ever provide closure. Our sense of self is always changing and evolving into the future, and there is never a point at which we can be in possession of a fully formed self-identity. Problems arise when we think that we are able to do just that, have freedom without facticity or vice versa.
Our facticity and the issue of the subject bring about the problem of the existence of the other. De Beauvoir solves this problem by asking what universal experience leads us to believe that other human beings are conscious as well. The answer that she posits is the phenomenological event of experiencing oneself as the object of another’s look. The experience of being looked at and judged by another has an altering effect on our consciousness, as we realize that we have an unlimited number of selves, as represented by the numerous objective selves that exist for all others about us. It is only consciousness that could cause such a reevaluation of self.
The shift from experiencing oneself as subject to oneself as the object of the other is at the center of De Beauvoir’s theory of intersubjectivity. No self, neither as subject nor as object, can ever be an object of consciousness, which means that they are all in a sense equal to one another. This is an idea far removed from the privileged idea of the subject posited by Descartes and other philosophers in the past, as De Beauvoir places her conception fully within the existential framework in which she wrote.
This subject/object relationship and the problems that can arise from it are at the center of bad relationships between people. If one is to assume the role of the object in a relation with the other, then the freedom of the other is denied. This is the base of De Beauvoir’s feminist theory, as laid out in her work The Second Sex. She is able to take the subject/object relationship and apply it to a group dynamic in which two people objectify a third. The more people that are added to the group dynamic, the more possibilities there are for intersubjective relations.
This is a template for the intersubjective analysis that De Beauvoir creates in The Second Sex. She treats gender as a societal and cultural construction and not as an essential category, while using the template of her subject/object dichotomy to show how women have been treated as the “eternal other” by men. Treating the problem from the point of view of the self—as outlined at the start of this post—De Beauvoir is able to show how this intersubjectivity can be subverted and our consciousnesses shifted. What is needed is for women to reassert their subjectivity in order to reverse the situation of repression.
