Seeing Ourselves Through Others: A Feminized and Uncultivated Form of Self-Consciousness?

A major achievement of feminist, antiracist, and other critical philosophies has been to disclose that seemingly neutral philosophical concepts are in fact (at least in part) reconstructions of specifically able-bodied, bourgeois, cis, masculine, White, or otherwise privileged perspectives on the world. Concepts that have undergone such scrutiny are, for example, freedom, individuality, reason, or contract. Here, I focus on self-consciousness, a central philosophical concept especially in German Idealism. For many years, I have been interested in one specific figure of this tradition, namely Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Recently, Lucy O’Brien and Talia Bettcher have contributed to revealing the limited perspective on the world articulated in common concepts of self-consciousness. To my knowledge, they have not read each other’s works. Both, however, express similar thoughts which deserve further attention and might enrich each other.

Self-consciousness is consciousness of the self. The self, however, has different parts or dimensions, so one may distinguish different kinds of self-consciousness. In Fichte (and others), typically, the distinction between theoretical and practical self-consciousness is essential. In practical self-consciousness, I am conscious of myself as an agent in the world. In this moment, I am aware of myself as typing. In theoretical self-consciousness, I am aware of myself as a knower, as someone who perceives and makes epistemic judgments about the world: for example, my original white keyboard has become quite stained over the years. O’Brien has emphasized a different form of self-consciousness, namely, “ordinary self-consciousness,” and Bettcher underlines “the awareness of oneself as an object for others.” In this third form of self-consciousness, I am conscious of myself not as an agent or knower but as an entity in the world perceived by others. As O’Brien and Bettcher both note, this kind of self-consciousness is not the one most present to privileged men, which could explain why it hasn’t been the most prominent topic of philosophical investigation (there are exceptions; both point to Sartre, for example).

In the following, I first reconstruct Bettcher’s and O’Brien’s accounts and then discuss what their insights mean, on the one hand, for the study of the history of the philosophical concept of self-consciousness as well as related concepts and, on the other, for the analysis of current forms of masculinist trends, in particular looksmaxxing.

In her 2025 book Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, Talia Bettcher suggests a new way of conceptualizing trans oppression and what she calls gender phoria (a value-neutral form of gender dys- or euphoria). An important claim of the book is that common ways of conceptualizing trans oppression (namely, as an enforcement of the gender binary) and gender dysphoria (namely, the incongruence or wrong-body account) use conceptual tools from a philosophical tradition that is itself part of a cultural worldview that makes trans oppression so prevalent. These “master’s tools,” as one might say with Audre Lorde, won’t solve the problem, according to Bettcher. Her critical analysis focuses on the concept of the person, especially in the third part of the book. The person, in her view, is defined in contrast to the human and in virtue of being a self. Being a self, in turn, means being a “self-consciousness.” Bettcher criticizes this self-consciousness as limited to one’s self-consciousness as a subject. Bettcher calls this truncated view of self-consciousness the “table-gazing model.”

In this model, the paradigm case of self-consciousness is the situation in which a self is alone and confronted with an object (here, the table). Funny enough, according to one listener, Fichte introduced his concept of the self in his lectures like this: “‘Gentlemen [!], think about the wall.’ […] ‘Have you thought about the wall?’ Fichte would ask. ‘Now, gentlemen [!], think about whoever it was that thought about the wall.’” The self perceives the table or wall and then becomes conscious of themselves as seeing the table or wall. This is theoretical self-consciousness as explained above.

It is surprising to me that practical self-consciousness does not make an appearance in Bettcher’s book. Fichte, for example, fiercely defended the view that practical self-consciousness is ultimately prior to theoretical self-consciousness. But that to the side, what is the kind of “third” self-consciousness that Bettcher underlines? It is the “awareness of oneself as an object for others” or “to be aware of one’s own appearance as one’s own appearance.” It is crucial that this is an “essentially reflexive” mode of awareness and not a mediated one, where I, for example, conclude from the fact that I put on a certain sweater in the morning that the mirror-image of someone in the window with that sweater on must be me; in contrast, I am immediately aware that this is me.

Acknowledging this third type of self-consciousness is important for Bettcher’s purposes in the book because it underlies her conception of gender phoria. Roughly, a gender dysphoric moment in Bettcher’s account is one in which someone has an immediate awareness of their (gendered) appearance, and the fact that this is how one appears induces despair. In contrast to the wrong-body account, Bettcher underlines that there is no mismatch between an inner gender and an outer body, but rather, there are negative feelings about one’s appearance. This is why Bettcher sees her account of gender phoria as a species of an “affective account.”

According to Bettcher, the privilege afforded to the theoretical or table (or wall)-gazing dimension of self-consciousness is rooted in a sexist and colonialist cultural setting: “[…] this table-gazing mode of awareness is simply a philosophical refinement of the typical mode of interpersonal awareness to be expected from men on the light side of gender. The presumed self-awareness from which theorizing proceeds is one in which there are very few experiences of self as object, no vulnerability. […] Robust forms of awareness of oneself as an object are formally excluded from the model altogether or else disregarded as marginal.”

Lucy O’Brien has suggested the philosophical concept of “ordinary self-consciousness” (OSC) to track what people mean when they say (in English) that they felt “very self-conscious” in a certain moment, such as when walking “into a room of strangers.” This differs from what is usually discussed in philosophy when the term self-consciousness is used; the phenomenon of ordinary self-consciousness has been “rather overlooked in philosophy.” The definition is very similar to Bettcher’s: OSC “is to be conscious of oneself as an object represented by others.” Also, similar to Bettcher, OSC is closely related to emotions such as “guilt, shame, pride, and embarrassment”; in Bettcher’s terminology, these are “interpersonal sentiments.”

I have focused the discussion on Bettcher because O’Brien’s monograph on the topic is still forthcoming. I was lucky to participate in a workshop on the fascinating manuscript last summer in Leipzig. Having read and discussed it, I know that O’Brien recognizes the gendered character of OSC: Women are more often scrutinized by others from the outside (in particular regarding their sexual attractiveness), which is why OSC is more familiar to them than to men.

I take it that both authors are interested in fully understanding the phenomenon of being self-conscious of oneself as an object to others because they believe it to be pervasive, essential, and “quite universal,” as O’Brien puts it. Given the universality of this “third” kind of self-consciousness, let me first offer some methodological reflections on how best to engage this concept and, second, what it means for the contemporary phenomenon of looksmaxxing.

Bettcher’s innovative book can be read as aiming to leave behind a whole tradition of thinking about personhood (with a focus on Locke)—including related concepts such as self, subjectivity, individuality, and, indeed, self-consciousness. The discussion of the third form of self-consciousness is part of the constructive work Bettcher does in the book. In the last chapter, “Return of the Object,” I understand her to claim that, in philosophy and in everyday life, we must embrace the fact that a human life essentially involves being an object for others. Bettcher already does a lot of work in this direction, but she also sees her work as part of a collective process.

So, how should we best proceed with this project? As someone who has worked on Fichte, the question of how much of where Bettcher wants to go is already present in his work is hard to resist (this also extends to other authors, such as Beauvoir, DuBois, or Fanon). Of course, Bettcher anticipates some of her readers will react defensively on behalf of the canon of Western philosophy. She imagines potential critics saying things like: “‘Well, the philosopher so-and-so didn’t commit to this or that assumption. They broke free of it altogether.’” I don’t want to respond in this way on behalf of Fichte specifically.

My contention is rather that a certain direction that Bettcher proposes might have been explored already, albeit in distorted ways. And understanding how these were distorted might help us avoid future mistakes. In particular, Bettcher highlights the “second-person perspective” that she sees as inherent to the awareness of oneself as an object to others, and which stands in contrast to an emphasis on first and third-personal perspectives. When O’Brien’s book is published, it will be interesting to see how exactly she sees the relation between OSC and first, second, and third-personal perspectives.

Now, Fichte already had a better theory of the person than Locke, having established the second-person perspective, which has been recognized by Stephen Darwall. In a footnote, Bettcher distances herself from Darwall’s understanding of the second-person standpoint, but neither have I fully understood this demarcation, nor is Darwall’s interpretation of Fichte accurate. So, while for me the question is still open, how Bettcher’s understanding of a second-person perspective relates to Fichte’s, I am sure that Fichte went wrong in certain ways, as is clear from the obvious sexism of his philosophy. To be clear, I also don’t think that Fichte satisfactorily grasped the third form of self-consciousness, emphasized by O’Brien and Bettcher. Nevertheless, pinpointing the exact faults of thinkers who did a lot right already (highlighting the second-person perspective, in this case) might indeed have constructive value for today. It is so easy to repeat mistakes already made in the history of philosophy!

Second, I have suggested that the specific form of self-consciousness, awareness of ourselves through others, has been feminized. How does this fit with current phenomena like looksmaxxing, in which masculinist men overly focus on how they look to others? Remarkably, the kinds of looks these men are after are stereotypically masculine. This means they are seeking not only handsome bodies but also bodies that look strong, muscular, and functional. The ideal of strong functionality stands in an interesting contrast to the focus on looks. In her brilliant and now classic paper “Throwing Like a Girl,” Iris Marion Young claimed that feminine embodiment (in sexist societies) fails to focus on functionality, in virtue of an overly strong concern with how one looks to others and with avoiding being hurt by them. In contrast, masculine embodiment focuses on functionality—men mainly see their bodies as media for enacting their goals of action. This maps onto practical self-consciousness as introduced above. At least a certain amount of muscular training is, of course, necessary for pursuing certain actions in the world. So, looksmaxxing, interestingly, mixes feminine and masculine embodiment, according to Young’s analysis.      

With O’Brien and Bettcher, I believe that all three forms of self-consciousness (theoretical, practical, and as an object for others) are essential parts of any human life. However, they need to be cultivated in order to be realized in an authentic, non-harmful way. This means that all these forms of self-consciousness can also be disproportionately cultivated in relation to other forms (women have been led to focus too much on the self-consciousness of being an object to others and neglected consciousness of oneself as a subject, theoretical and practical). Furthermore, the cultivation of a certain form of self-consciousness may also be alienated or distorted in itself. I interpret looksmaxxing as an unproportional and distorted cultivation of one’s consciousness of how one appears to others. Cultivating this kind of self-consciousness is important, but it may be that we have few cultural resources for doing it well, since incentives for over- and under-cultivation have been distributed across genders and races in an unbalanced way. Looksmaxxing might then be, as I have suggested, a simultaneously overly feminized and overly masculinized form of self-consciousness of oneself as an object to others: It focuses on looking strong and controlled (masculine) and overly focuses on how one appears to others (feminine). Bettcher’s and O’Brien’s works may be read as a call to exploring more authentic and less harmful cultural forms of cultivating our self-consciousness of how we are seen by others. These will include actually taking seriously how others see us, thereby being “pervious,” as O’Brien puts it, to them. This is not the same as valuing how others see an image of ourselves that we aim to fully control (looksmaxxing). With Bettcher, we might instead aim for moments when the way we appear to others feels adequate or simply good. Reaching such moments will include experimenting with different social settings; it is not something we can achieve on our own.

I have said that scrutinizing self-consciousness fits well into the feminist tradition of exposing the limited perspective inherent in allegedly universal philosophical concepts. In short, it is probably not a coincidence that white men who made up the vast majority of academic philosophers historically overlooked “ordinary self-consciousness.” It’s simply a less pervasive or more suppressed feature of their lives, as compared to members of other groups, who, in turn, weren’t typically pursuing philosophy or whose philosophy wasn’t taken up. Another central element of masculine philosophy has been the undervaluation of the body’s role for humanity. Further thinking on this “third” form of self-consciousness—of ourselves as objects for others—would, in my view, benefit from interrogating the fact that, as objects for others, we are, of course, primarily bodies visible and tangible in the outer world. With regard to Bettcher, this would include a discussion of her critique of critical phenomenology and embodiment-focused accounts of gender dysphoria. At least in theoretical self-consciousness, where I focus on my inner perceptions of the outer world, my body is not at the forefront. However, when others see us, they see our bodies or embodied minds, not our minds. So, if we see ourselves through others, our focus also shifts to our bodies. As we have seen with looksmaxxing, this focus can be disproportional and/or distorted. However, acknowledging that we are also objects for others may allow for an appropriate cultivation of this universal dimension of humanity—being embodied and thus apprehensible to others.

Thanks to Jelscha Schmid and Caleb Ward for comments!

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.