Other

The Other or constitutive other (also referred to as othering) is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the Same. It refers, or attempts to refer to, that which is 'other' than the concept being considered. more...

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The term often means a person other than oneself, and is often capitalised. The Other is singled out as different.

The idea of the Other

A person's definition of the 'Other' is part of what defines or even constitutes the self (see self (psychology), self (philosophy), and self-concept) and other phenomena and cultural units.

Lawrence Cahoone (1996) explains it thus:

"What appear to be cultural units—human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations—are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or 'other' through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is 'privileged' or favored, and the other is devalued in some way."

It has been used in social science to understand the processes by which societies and groups exclude 'Others' who they want to subordinate or who do not fit into their society. For example, Edward Said's book Orientalism demonstrates how this was done by western societies—particularly England and France—to 'other' those people in the 'Orient' who they wanted to control. The concept of 'otherness' is also integral to the understanding of identities, as people construct roles for themselves in relation to an 'other' as part of a fluid process of action-reaction that is not necessarily related with subjugation or stigmatization.

History of the idea

The concept that the self requires the Other to define itself is an old one and has been expressed by many writers:

The German philosopher Hegel was among the first to introduce the idea of the other as constituent in self-consciousness. He wrote of pre-selfconscious Man: "Each consciousness pursues the death of the other", meaning that in seeing a separateness between you and another, a feeling of alienation is created, which you try to resolve by synthesis. The resolution is depicted in Hegel's famous parable of the master slave dialectic. For a direct antecedent, see Fichte.

Sartre also made use of such a dialectic in Being and Nothingness, when describing how the world is altered at the appearance of another person, how the world now appears to orient itself around this other person. At the level Sartre presented it, however, it was without any life-threatening need for resolution, but as a feeling or phenomenon and not as a radical threat.

The Lithuanian-French philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, was instrumental in coining contemporary usage of "the Other," as radically other. He also connected it with the scriptural and traditional God, in the The Infinite Other.

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