Recognition and the Other: can I become myself without you?

On one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction.

Put simply One reading of Hegel's master and slave: a master is a master only if a slave acknowledges him. But only a person can truly acknowledge anyone, and he has made the slave a thing. So he is never satisfied.

Nobody in the Phenomenology gets to be simply identical with themselves: identity is always mediated, handed to you through another's gaze, so no self stands on its own.

Put simply Hegel's Phenomenology: nobody can be who they are all by themselves. Your identity always reaches you through someone else, through how another person sees you, so no self stands on its own.

Husserl's first route to other minds is epistemological: I grasp another ego by analogy with mine, and the result is a community of monads, each still self-contained.

Put simply Husserl's first answer to "how do I know other minds?": by analogy with my own. Each mind still stays sealed in itself, a separate unit (a "monad") among others.

I have no direct line into anyone else's primordial experience. So for Husserl, another person counts as an existing other only insofar as my consciousness constitutes them as such.

Put simply Husserl: I can never live through another person's experience from the inside. So, for me, someone else is another person only because my own consciousness makes sense of them as one.

Empathy does more than reveal others, Stein argues: it hands me my own self, teaching me that other subjects take me as their object, in body and psyche alike.

Put simply Stein: empathy doesn't only show me other people. It shows me myself too, because through it I learn that I am someone others look at, body and mind.

Kojève, reading Hegel, holds that a person counts as genuinely human, to himself as much as to others, only through recognition by others, ultimately by all of them.

Put simply Kojève, reading Hegel: you count as fully human, even in your own eyes, only when others acknowledge you, ultimately all of them. Hegel's word for this is "recognition."

Being looked at makes me someone's object, and that very fact brings home that the looker is a subject. In Sartre's words, "I cannot be an object for an object."

Put simply Sartre: when someone looks at me, I become an object for them. Only a subject can make me an object, so that is how I discover the looker is a person, not a thing.

Sartre holds that genuine self-knowledge depends on being recognized by another subject; absent that acknowledgment, I cannot really know who I am.

Otherness, for Beauvoir, is built into thought, "as primordial as consciousness itself": no subject simply is who it is; each finds itself only against an Other.

Put simply Beauvoir: the idea of an "Other" is as basic as consciousness itself. Nobody simply is who they are on their own; each of us finds ourselves only by setting ourselves against someone else.

The root of oppression, for Beauvoir, is the urge to escape oneself: we flee our own subjectivity by alienating ourselves in an Other.

Put simply Beauvoir: oppression comes, at root, from the urge to escape ourselves. We run from being a free self by losing ourselves in someone or something else, an "Other".

Men dread the very liberation that women's freedom would bring them, on Beauvoir's account, because people shrink from seizing their own subjectivity.

Conflict between the sexes can be overcome, Beauvoir thinks, if people take hold of their subjectivity: free, autonomous subjects could then recognize one another reciprocally, and with desire.

Put simply Beauvoir thinks conflict between the sexes can be overcome if people take charge of their own selves. Then free, independent people could acknowledge each other as equals, and with desire.

What stops me from absorbing another person into my totality is not some weakness in me, Levinas argues, but the other's infinity: they are radically other and cannot be possessed.

Put simply Levinas: I can never fully take in or own another person, and that is not a failing on my part. They are simply, endlessly other than me.

In Levinas's Philosophy and Awakening, the other tears me loose from the central place where I posit myself; I must then see myself from their side and answer for myself.

Put simply Levinas: meeting another person knocks me out of the center of my own world. I have to see myself as they see me, and answer for myself.

Girard calls it the scandal: the mediator whose desire one copies also blocks access to the object, so the same person is admired and hated at once.

Put simply Girard's "scandal": the person whose wanting I copy also stands between me and what I want. So I admire and hate the same person at once.

Shore sees parallels between reason's dependence on madness, Beauvoir's self-definition through an other and Wolff's Eastern Europe, invented as the West's Enlightenment contrast.

Put simply Shore sees parallels between reason defined against madness (Foucault), the self defined against an "other" (Beauvoir), and Eastern Europe, which the historian Wolff says the Enlightenment West invented as its contrast.

Eagleton's hostile illustration of deconstruction: man becomes himself only by endlessly shutting woman out as his opposite, so his identity hangs on, and is endangered by, what he excludes.

Put simply Eagleton, a hostile critic of deconstruction, illustrates how it unravels opposites: man defines himself by constantly shutting woman out as his opposite, so his identity depends on, and is endangered by, what he excludes.