IB Philosophy 10.11.2 Volume I, Part I: Destiny - Woman as Other Notes

The Concept of the Other in de Beauvoir's Philosophy

1. As demonstrated in 10.11.1, de Beauvoir showed that biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism all fail to explain women's oppression because they treat it as inevitable; the concept of the Other provides the missing explanatory framework by revealing that women's subordination is not a natural fact but a product of human consciousness and the social structures it creates.
2. De Beauvoir's concept of the Other draws on Hegel's master-slave dialectic (the argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit that self-consciousness requires confronting another person). According to Hegel, each consciousness seeks recognition from another, but the encounter is unstable: one side dominates, defining itself as subject (the master, the one who acts), while the other is reduced to a dependent object (the slave, the one who exists for the master's sake).
3. De Beauvoir's crucial claim is that Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought: every consciousness defines itself by positing something it is not. The problem is not that Otherness exists but that in patriarchal societies the relationship between men and women has been frozen into a permanent hierarchy in which woman is always the Other and never the subject.
4. De Beauvoir distinguishes between reciprocal Otherness (a mutual relationship in which each person can be both subject and Other, as Hegel imagined) and the absolute Otherness imposed on women: a one-way relationship in which men define themselves as the essential, the subject, the norm, while women are defined as the inessential, the object, the deviation.
5. The concept also draws on Sartre's phenomenology of the Look from Being and Nothingness: Sartre argues that when another person looks at me, I experience myself as an object for their consciousness (I become self-conscious, awkward, defined by their judgement). De Beauvoir extends this analysis to show that women live permanently under the male gaze, experiencing themselves as objects defined by masculine desire rather than as free subjects.
   1. The phenomenological extension of the Look, how it shapes embodied consciousness and bodily comportment, is developed in 10.11.4 through Merleau-Ponty and Iris Marion Young.

Why Women Accept the Position of Other

1. De Beauvoir asks why women have accepted their position as Other rather than asserting their own subjectivity. Unlike other oppressed groups (the proletariat, colonised peoples) who share a common history and class consciousness (a shared awareness of their situation as a group), women are dispersed among men, bound to their oppressors through residence, economics, intimacy, and reproduction.
   1. If women cannot form class-consciousness in the way the proletariat can, if they are always already dispersed among men rather than united by a shared material condition, then feminist solidarity must take a different form.
2. De Beauvoir argues that women's liberation requires solidarity based on shared recognition of the structural conditions that constitute them as Other, not on shared economic position. This question of what form feminist solidarity can take connects directly to 10.11.6's discussion of collective action.
3. The answer lies in what de Beauvoir calls women's complicity in their own oppression: because the Other gains certain protections and securities by accepting subordination (economic support, social approval, freedom from the anxiety of transcendence), many women have chosen the safety of immanence (the comfort of staying within a defined, enclosed existence, fulfilling assigned roles rather than freely projecting oneself outward) over the risk and responsibility of asserting their own freedom.