Understanding Each Other: A Beauvoirian Second Person Approach

Abstract How can we understand people—ourselves and others? Does this require a special form of understanding, different from how we understand non‐human phenomena? In this paper, I develop a Beauvoirian‐inspired proposal for answering these questions. This proposed account of understanding people lends some support to a long tradition, according to which, we don't understand people in the same way that we understand non‐human natural phenomena insofar as understanding people (like literary works) requires an empathic, imaginative, simulationist, or interpretive form. Yet, the Beauvoirian view complicates and challenges this tradition by bringing out the irreducibly second‐personal structure of understanding people. It also highlights its embodied and ethical character. In emphasizing these, the Beauvoirian account offers a welcome alternative to empathic views of understanding people (and of relating to literature) and contributes to our understanding of the second‐person nexus. It also proposes a refreshing way of thinking about the ethical dimensions of epistemology.