Conflict between freedoms is overcome only through mutual reciprocal recognition.
Evidence
But this foreign freedom, which confirms my freedom, also enters into conflict with it: this is the tragedy of the unhappy consciousness; each consciousness seeks to posit itself alone as sovereign subject. Each one tries to accomplish itself by reducing the other to slavery. But in work and fear the slave experiences himself as essential, and by a dialectical reversal the master appears the inessential one. The conflict can be overcome by the free recognition of each individual in the other, each one positing both itself and the other as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 317
Categorization
- DEFINE: Compact restatement of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic (Kojève-inflected) as the model for intersubjective recognition.
- XREF: Is the existentialist basis for the reciprocity later in the book that woman, as Other, is denied. — connects to: One can act on the Other only once their freedom has collapsed. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 966; Minorities accept majority rule only under a shared constitutional consensus. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 20; The Other’s freedom becomes a limit only through one’s own free choice. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1240 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Individual freedom is achieved only through the freedom of others
#corroborates(0.88) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 144 - The Other’s freedom becomes a limit only through one’s own free choice.
#expands(0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1240 - Others constitute the situation that gives individual freedom its concrete content
#corroborates(0.78) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 453 - Freedom and facticity are mutually condition each other’s existence.
#corroborates(0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1176 - The obstacles that limit freedom are constituted only by freedom’s own posited ends
#expands(0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1152