The other’s love reveals the self by exposing its own otherness

Evidence

Love reveals us to ourselves by making us come out of ourselves. We affirm ourselves by contact with that which is foreign and complementary to us. Love as a form of understanding discovers new heavens and new earths even in the very landscape where we have always lived. Here is the great secret: the world is other, I myself am other. And I am no longer alone in knowing it. Even better: someone taught me this. Woman therefore plays an indispensable and capital role in the consciousness man has of himself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1884

Categorization

• DEFINE: Crystallizes the existentialist ‘otherness’ theme: the lover’s gaze reveals the self’s foreignness to itself.
• SEED: Angle: how Beauvoir—and French existentialism broadly—inverts the romantic trope so that the free woman becomes the one who refuses to be merely the mirror confirming man’s self-image.
• XREF: connects to: The Other is an invisible presence that supports shame without being an object; Intimacy strips disguises to expose the other’s flesh as pure contingency — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 897; Being loved transforms one’s facticity from contingent to justified — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 949 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Enemy-love is rooted in the irrelevance of the self-other distinction #expands (0.80)