Other (philosophy)
In philosophy, the Other is a fundamental concept referring to anyone or anything perceived as distinct or different from oneself. This distinction is crucial for understanding how individuals construct their own identities, as the encounter with "otherness" helps define the boundaries of the self. In phenomenology, the Other plays an important role in this self-formation, acting as a kind of mirror against which the self is reflected and understood.
The Other is not simply a neutral observer but an active participant in shaping the individual's self-image. This includes the idea of the "constitutive Other," which refers to the internal relationship between a person's essential nature and their physical embodiment, reflecting the interplay of internal differences within the self.
Beyond this individual level, the concept extends to broader social and political contexts. "Otherness" describes the qualities and characteristics attributed to individuals or groups perceived as outside the dominant social norm. This can include differences based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, neurodivergence, disability or any other marker of social identity. The process of Othering or Otherizing involves labeling and defining individuals or groups as the Other, often in ways that reinforce power imbalances and lead to marginalization, exclusion, and even discrimination. This act of Othering can effectively place those deemed "different" at the margins of society, denying them full participation and access to resources. Therefore, the concept of the Other is not just a philosophical abstraction but a powerful force shaping social relations and individual experiences.
Background
Philosophy
The concept of the Self requires the existence of the constitutive Other as the counterpart entity required for defining the Self. Accordingly, in the late 18th century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel introduced the concept of the Other as a constituent part of self-consciousness, which complemented the propositions about self-awareness proffered by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.John Stuart Mill introduced the idea of the other mind in 1865 in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, the first formulation of the other after René Descartes.
Edmund Husserl applied the concept of the Other as the basis for intersubjectivity, the psychological relations among people. In Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, Husserl said that the Other is constituted as an alter ego, as an other self. As such, the Other person posed and was an epistemological problem—of being only a perception of the consciousness of the Self.
In Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Jean-Paul Sartre applied the dialectic of intersubjectivity to describe how the world is altered by the appearance of the Other, of how the world then appears to be oriented to the Other person, and not to the Self. The Other appears as a psychological phenomenon in the course of a person's life, and not as a radical threat to the existence of the Self. In that mode, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir applied the concept of Otherness to Hegel's dialectic of the "Lord and Bondsman" and found it to be like the dialectic of the Man–Woman relationship, thus a true explanation for society's treatment and mistreatment of women.
The question of why one exists as themselves and not as someone else has been called the vertiginous question by Benj Hellie, and the "even harder problem of consciousness" by Tim S. Roberts. Various philosophers have argued that the existence of first-person perspectives has a number of philosophical implications. Christian List argues that first-person perspectives are evidence against physicalism, and evidence against reality being metaphysically united. Vincent Conitzer argues for a connection between the existence of the self and A series and B series theories of time. Egocentric presentism and perspectival realism are ideas posed by Caspar Hare that posit that first-person perspectives imply a weak form of solipsism. Japanese philosopher Hitoshi Nagai has used the concept of first person perspectives as a way of defining the self, defining the self as the "one who directly experiences the consciousness of oneself".
Daniel Kolak argues that the entire concept of the "self" being distinct from the "other" is incoherent. In his book I am You, Kolak uses the terms "closed individualism", "empty individualism", and "open individualism" to describe three contrasting philosophical views of the self. Kolak argues that closed individualism, the idea that one's personal identity consist of a line persisting from moment to moment, is incoherent, and there is no basis for the belief in a future self and that one is the "same" person from moment to moment. Empty individualism is the idea that personal identity exists, but one's identity only exists as a "time slice" existing for an infinitesimally small amount of time. Open individualism is the view advocated by Kolak, in which the self in reality does not actually exist at all, similar to anattā in Buddhist philosophy. Derek Parfit makes similar arguments in his book Reasons and Persons, in which he argues that the teletransportation paradox challenges the notion of a continuous personal identity.
Psychology
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Levinas established the contemporary definitions, usages, and applications of the constitutive Other, as the radical counterpart of the Self. Lacan associated the Other with language and with the symbolic order of things. Levinas associated the Other with the ethical metaphysics of scripture and tradition; the ethical proposition is that the Other is superior and prior to the Self.In a seminar on psychoanalysis, Lacan introduced the concept of mother being the absolute Other of an individual. Levinas re-formulated the face-to-face encounter to include the propositions of Jacques Derrida about the impossibility of the Other being an entirely metaphysical pure-presence. That the Other could be an entity of pure Otherness personified in a representation created and depicted with language that identifies, describes, and classifies. The conceptual re-formulation of the nature of the Other also included Levinas's analysis of the distinction between "the saying and the said"; nonetheless, the nature of the Other retained the priority of ethics over metaphysics.
In the psychology of the mind, the Other identifies and refers to the unconscious mind, to silence, to insanity, and to language. Nonetheless, in such psychologic and analytic usages, there might arise a tendency to relativism if the Other person leads to ignoring the commonality of truth. Likewise, problems arise from unethical usages of the terms The Other, Otherness, and Othering to reinforce ontological divisions of reality: of being, of becoming, and of existence.
Ethics
In Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Emmanuel Lévinas said that previous philosophy had reduced the constitutive Other to an object of consciousness, by not preserving its absolute alterity—the innate condition of otherness, by which the Other radically transcends the Self and the totality of the human network, into which the Other is being placed. As a challenge to self-assurance, the existence of the Other is a matter of ethics, because the ethical priority of the Other equals the primacy of ethics over ontology in real life.From that perspective, Lévinas described the nature of the Other as "insomnia and wakefulness"; an ecstasy towards the Other that forever remains beyond any attempt at fully capturing the Other, whose Otherness is infinite; even in the murder of an Other, the Otherness of the person remains uncontrolled and not negated. The infinity of the Other allowed Lévinas to derive other aspects of philosophy and science as secondary to that ethic; thus:
Critical theory
Jacques Derrida said that the absolute alterity of the Other is compromised, because the Other person is other than the Self and the group. The logic of alterity is especially negative in the realm of human geography, wherein the native Other is denied ethical priority as a person with the right to participate in the geopolitical discourse with an empire who decides the colonial fate of the homeland of the Other. In that vein, the language of Otherness used in Oriental Studies perpetuates the cultural perspective of the dominator–dominated relation, which is characteristic of hegemony; likewise, the sociologic misrepresentation of the feminine as the sexual Other to man reasserts male privilege as the primary voice in social discourse between women and men.In The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, the geographer Derek Gregory said that the US government's ideologic answers to questions about reasons for the terrorist attacks against the U.S. reinforced the imperial purpose of the negative representations of the Middle-Eastern Other; especially when President G. W. Bush rhetorically asked: "Why do they hate us?" as political prelude to the war on terror. Bush's rhetorical interrogation of armed resistance to empire, by the non–Western Other, produced an Us-and-Them mentality in American relations with the non-white peoples of the Middle East; hence, as foreign policy, the war on terror is fought for control of imaginary geographies, which originated from the fetishised cultural representations of the Other invented by Orientalists; the cultural critic Edward Saïd said that: