The Other

Shore suspects that without her American trips, Chicago above all, Beauvoir would not have had the three-case comparison of Jews, Black Americans and women in quite the same way.

Put simply Shore suspects that without her trips to America, especially Chicago, Beauvoir might not have compared Jews, Black Americans and women as three cases of "the Other" in quite the same way.

Beauvoir's diagnosis: man is treated as the default human, woman as the derivative; a man need never introduce himself as belonging to a sex, while she is "defined and differentiated with reference to man."

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".

Sartre quickly spotted what was at stake, morally and existentially, in a thin conception of other people as mere objects of awareness; the other needed to be more than that.

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.

Once I register another subject, Sartre says, the whole universe shifts: the world loses its center in me even as I go on trying to center it there.

Put simply Sartre: once I notice that someone else is a subject too, I stop being the center of the world, though I keep trying to put myself back there.

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.

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.