True alterity requires a conscious peer, not a passive object to consume.

Evidence

Once the subject attempts to assert himself, the Other, who limits and denies him, is nonetheless necessary for him: he attains himself only through the reality that he is not. That is why man’s life is never plenitude and rest, it is lack and movement, it is combat. Facing himself, man encounters Nature; he has a hold on it, he tries to appropriate it for himself. But it cannot satisfy him. Either it realizes itself as a purely abstract opposition—it is an obstacle and remains foreign—or it passively submits to man’s desire and allows itself to be assimilated by him; he possesses it only in consuming it, that is, in destroying it. In both cases, he remains alone; he is alone when touching a stone, alone when digesting a piece of fruit. The other is present only if the other is himself present to himself: that is, true alterity is a consciousness separated from my own and identical to it. It is the existence of other men that wrests each man from his immanence and enables him to accomplish the truth of his being, to accomplish himself as transcendence, as flight toward the object, as a project. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 317

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘true alterity’ as a separate consciousness identical to one’s own, and ties immanence/transcendence to the presence of other men.
• XREF: Directly channels Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (for-itself/in-itself, the look) and Hegel’s master-slave dialectic; foundational for the whole Continental tradition. — connects to: Man’s privilege now rests on monopolizing the unconscious, not consciousness. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 450; True love requires conscious opposition, not spontaneity.; Being-for-others requires an internal negation, not an external or in-itself one. (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Genuine alterity is reciprocal, whereas mythic Otherness denies reciprocity #corroborates (0.92) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 652
• Being-for-others requires an internal negation, not an external or in-itself one. #expands (0.80)
• Desire is a chosen mode of consciousness, not a passive impingement #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 979