In phenomenology, the terms the Other and
the Constitutive Other identify the other
human being, in their differences from the
Self, as being a cumulative, constituting
factor in the self-image of a person; as their
acknowledgement of being real; hence, the
Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of
the Self, of Us, and of the Same. The Constitutive
Other is the relation between the personality
(essential nature) and the person (body) of
a human being; it is the relation of essential
and superficial characteristics of personal
identity that corresponds to the relationship
between opposite but correlative characteristics
of the Self, because the difference is inner-difference,
within the Self.The condition and quality
of Otherness, the characteristics of the Other,
is the state of being different from and alien
to the social identity of a person and to
the identity of the Self. In the discourse
of philosophy, the term Otherness identifies
and refers to the characteristics of Who?
and What? of the Other, which are distinct
and separate from the Symbolic order of things;
from the Real (the authentic and unchangeable);
from the æsthetic (art, beauty, taste); from
political philosophy; from social norms and
social identity; and from the Self. Therefore,
the condition of Otherness is a person's non-conformity
to and with the social norms of society; and
Otherness is the condition of disenfranchisement
(political exclusion), effected either by
the State or by the social institutions (e.g.
the professions) invested with the corresponding
socio-political power. Therefore, the imposition
of Otherness alienates the labelled person
from the centre of society, and places him
or her at the margins of society, for being
the Other.The term Othering describes the
reductive action of labeling a person as someone
who belongs to a subordinate social category
defined as the Other. The practice of Othering
is the exclusion of persons who do not fit
the norm of the social group, which is a version
of the Self. Likewise, in human geography,
to other an individual identifies and excludes
them from the social group, placing them at
the margins of society where social norms
do not apply.
== History ==
=== European philosophy ===
The concept of the Self requires the existence
of the Other as the counterpart entity required
for defining the Self; in the late 18th century,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
introduced the concept of the Other as a constituent
part of self-consciousness (preoccupation
with the Self), which complements the propositions
about self-awareness (capacity for introspection)
proffered by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814).
See: The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) applied the concept
of the Other as a basis for intersubjectivity,
the psychological relations among people.
In Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction
to Phenomenology (1931), 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 (1943), Jean-Paul
Sartre (1905–1980) 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 (1949),
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) applied the
concept of Otherness to Hegel's dialectic
of the "Lord and Bondsman" (Herrschaft und
Knechtschaft) 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.
=== European psychology ===
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)
and the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
(1906–1995) established the contemporary
definitions, usages, and applications of the
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 the event, Levinas re-formulated the face-to-face
encounter (wherein a person is responsible
to the Other person) to include the propositions
of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) about the
impossibility of the Other (person) being
an entirely metaphysical pure-presence. That
the Other could be an entity of pure Otherness
(of alterity) 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 (e.g. R. D.
Laing), the Other identifies and refers to
the unconscious mind, to silence, to insanity,
and to language ("to what is referred and
to what is unsaid"). Nonetheless, in such
psychologic and analytic usages, there might
arise a tendency to relativism if the Other
person (as a being of pure, abstract alterity)
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.
=== Levinas on ethics ===
In Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority
(1961), Emmanuel Levinas said that previous
philosophy had reduced the Other person 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, Levinas
described the nature of the Other as "insomnia
and wakefulness"; an ecstasy (an exteriority)
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, their Otherness remains uncontrolled
and not negated. The infinity of the Other
allowed Levinas to derive other aspects of
philosophy and science as secondary to that
ethic; thus:
The others that obsess me in the Other do
not affect me as examples of the same genus
united with my neighbor, by resemblance or
common nature, individuations of the human
race, or chips off the old block ... The others
concern me from the first. Here, fraternity
precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship
with the Other as neighbor gives meaning to
my relations with all the others.
=== More recent critical theory ===
Derrida proposed that the absolute alterity
of the Other is compromised because the Other
is other than the Self and the group. That
logical problem has especially negative consequences
in the realm of human geography when the Other
person is denied ethical priority in geopolitical
discourse. Hence, the use of the language
of Otherness in the anthropological discourse
(Oriental Studies) about Western encounters
with non–Western cultures preserves the
dominantor–dominated discourse of hegemony,
just as misrepresenting the feminine as Other
reasserts male privilege as primary in social
discourse.In The Colonial Present: Afghanistan,
Palestine and Iraq (2004), the geographer
Derek Gregory said that the responses of U.S.
President George W. Bush (2001–2009) to
the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001
reinforced philosophic divisions of connotation
and denotation that perpetuated the negative
representation of the non-Western Other, when
he rhetorically asked the U.S. populace Why
do they hate us? as political prelude to the
War on Terror.President Bush's rhetorical
question led the U.S. populace to make an
artificial, Us-and-Them division in the relations
between the U.S. and the countries and cultures
of the Middle East, which artifice is a basic
factor of the perpetual war on terrorism,
and is a step away from eradicating the imaginary
representations of the Self and the Other
created with the Orientalist geographies produced
by Oriental Studies; about which the cultural
critic Edward Saïd said that:
To build a conceptual framework around a notion
of Us-versus-Them is, in effect, to pretend
that the principal consideration is epistemological
and natural—our civilization is known and
accepted, theirs is different and strange—whereas,
in fact, the framework separating us from
them is belligerent, constructed, and situational.
== Imperialism and colonialism ==
The contemporary, world system of post-colonial,
nation-states (with interdependent politics
and economies) was preceded by the European
imperial system of colonies (settler and economic)
in which "the creation and maintenance of
an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial
relationship, usually between states, and
often in the form of an empire, [was] based
on domination and subordination." In the imperialist
world system, political and economic affairs
were fragmented, and the discrete empires
"provided for most of their own needs ... [and
disseminated] their influence solely through
conquest [empire] or the threat of conquest
[hegemony]."
=== Orientalism ===
The imperial conquest of "non-white" countries
was intellectually justified with the fetishization
of the Eastern world, which was effected with
cultural generalizations that divided the
peoples of the world into the artificial,
binary relationship of "The Eastern World
and The Western World", the dichotomy which
identified, designated, and subordinated the
peoples of the Orient as the Other—as the
non–European Self. The process of fetishization
of people and things is a function of Orientalism,
which the colonialist ideologue realises with
three actions: (i) Homogenization (all Oriental
peoples are the same folk); (ii) Feminization
(Oriental people are the lessers in the East–West
binary relationship); and (iii) Essentialization
(a people reduced to the artificial essence
of universal, innate characteristics); thus,
the praxis of Othering reduced to cultural
inferiority the people, places, and things
of the Eastern world, which then justified
colonialism by establishing the West as the
superior standard of culture.
=== Race ===
The practice of Othering was the prevalent
cultural perspective of the European imperial
powers, which was supported by the fabrications
of scientific racism, such as the pseudo-intellectual
belief that the size of the cranium of the
non–European Other was indicative of the
inferior intelligence of the coloured peoples
designated as the non-white Other.In 1951,
the United Nations officially declared that
the differences among the races were insignificant
in relation to the anthropological sameness
among the peoples who are the human race.
Despite the facts, in the U.S., the artificial
distinctions against the Other remain, especially
in government forms that ask a U.S. citizen
to identify and place him or herself into
a racial category, as in the questionnaires
of the census bureau. In practice of Othering,
immigrants and refugees are seen as "illegal
immigrants" (from overseas) and "illegal aliens"
(from Mexico).
=== The subaltern native ===
Maintaining an empire requires the cultural
subordination of the Other into the subaltern
native (the colonized people), which facilitates
the exploitation of their labour, of their
lands, and of the natural resources of their
country as a colony of the motherland. To
realise those ends, the process of Othering
culturally justifies the domination and subordination
of the native people, by placing them (as
the Other) at the social periphery of the
geopolitical enterprise that is colonial imperialism.
The colonizer creates the Other with a false
dichotomy of "native weakness" (social and
political, cultural and economic) against
the "colonial strength" of imperial power,
which can be resolved only with the noblesse
oblige of racialism—the "moral responsibility"
that psychologically authorizes the colonialist
Self to unilaterally assume a civilizing mission
to educate, convert, and culturally assimilate
the Other into the empire.In the praxis of
colonialism, the native populace constitute
the Other whom the colonizers mean to dominate
in order to civilise and save them in the
course of exploiting the natural and human
resources of the natives' homeland. As such,
a colony is a way to dominate and dispose
of two groups of people (colonists and colonised)
who can be used to define the Other. The practice
of Othering establishes the unequal relationship
between the native people and the colonizers,
who believe themselves essentially superior
to the natives whom they reduced to inhuman
inferiority, as "the Other". The dehumanisation
of colonialism—the colonist "Self" against
the colonised "Other"—is maintained with
the false binary-relations of social class
and race, of sex and gender, and of nation
and religion. The proper, profitable functioning
of a colony features continual protection
of such cultural demarcations, which establish
and enforce the socio-economic binary relation
between "civilized man" (the colonist) and
"savage man" (the colonial subaltern).
== Sex and gender ==
The existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir
applied Hegel's conception of "the Other"
(as a constituent part of self-consciousness)
to describe a male-dominated culture that
represents Woman as the sexual Other in relation
to Man. In the cultural context of the Man–Woman
binary relation, the sexual Other is a minority,
the least-favoured social group, usually the
women of the community, because "a man represents
both the positive and the neutral, as indicated
by the common use of [the word] Man to designate
human beings in general; whereas [the word]
Woman represents only the negative, defined
by limiting criteria, without reciprocity"
from the first sex, from Man. See: The Second
Sex (1949)
In 1957, Betty Friedan substantiated the ordinate–subordinate
nature of the Man–Woman sexual relation
as social identity. When queried about their
post-graduate lives, the majority of women
interviewed, at a university-class reunion,
used binary gender language, and referred
to and identified themselves as their roles
(wife, mother, manager) in the private sphere.
They did not identify their own achievements
(career, job, business) in the public sphere
of life. Unawares, the women had conventionally
automatically identified themselves as the
social Other. Although the nature of the social
Other is influenced by the society's social
constructs (social class, sex, gender), as
a human organisation, society holds the power
(social and political) to formally change
the social relation between the male-defined
Self and Woman, the non-male Other. See: The
Feminine Mystique (1963)
The feminist philosopher Cheshire Calhoun
deconstructed the concept of "the Other" as
the female-half of the binary-gender relation
of the "Man and Woman" concept. Deconstruction
of the word Woman—from subordinate in the
"Man and Woman" relation—conceptually reconstructed
the female Other as the Woman who exists independently
of male definition (rationalisation); independent
of the patriarchy who formally realise female
subordination with binary-gender usages of
the word Woman.
In the essay "Feminism is Humanism. So Why
the Debate?" (2012), the academic Sarojini
Sahoo, agrees with De Beauvoir's proposition
that women can be free of social subordination
by "thinking, taking action, working, creating,
on the same terms as men; instead of seeking
to disparage them, she declares herself their
equal." Yet counters De Beauvoir that despite
having the same human-being status as men,
women have a unique sexual identity different
from men. In feminist definition, Women are
the Other (but not the Hegelian Other) and
are not existentially defined by the demands
of Man. Women are the social Other who unknowingly
accept subjugation as part of subjectivity.
Whilst the identity of woman is constitutionally
different from the identity of man, as human
beings, men and women are equal. Hence, the
harm of Othering arises from the asymmetric
nature of sex and gender roles, which arises
accidentally and "passively" from natural
and unavoidable intersubjectivity.The social-exclusion
function of Othering a person or a social
group from society, for being different from
the norm (of the Self), is understood in the
socio-economic functions of gender (a social
construct) and sex (biological reality). In
a society where heterosexuality is the social
norm, "the Other" refers to and identifies
the same-sex orientation, lesbians (women
who love women) and gays (men who love men),
people identified as "deviant" from the binary
socio-sexual norm. Negative usages of "the
Other" are applied to the lesbian and gay,
bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities
to diminish their social status and political
power by social Othering to the margins of
society. To neutralise Othering, LGBT communities
queer a city, create social spaces, that use
the city's spatial and temporal plans to allow
the LGBT community free expression of social
identity (i.e. a gay-pride parade); as such,
queering is a political means for the sexual
Other to establish their reality as part of
the urban body politic.
== Knowledge ==
=== Representations ===
Regarding the production of knowledge about
the Other, Michel Foucault and the Frankfurt
School identified the process of Othering
as everything to do with the creation and
maintenance of imaginary representations—"knowledge
of the Other"—in service to geopolitical
power and domination. The representations
of the Other (metaphoric, metonymic, anthropomorphic)
are manifestations of the Western cultural
attitudes inherent to the European historiographies
of the non–European peoples labelled as
"the Other". Using analytical discourses (academic
and commercial, geopolitical and military)
the dominant ideology of the colonialist culture
explains the Eastern world to the Western
world, using the binary relationship of the
European Self confronting the non–European
Other from overseas.In the 19th-century historiographies
of the Orient as a place, European Orientalists
studied only what they argued was the high
culture—the languages and literatures, the
arts and philologies—of the Middle East
as a cultural region, rather than as a geopolitical
place inhabited by different peoples and societies.
About such cultural misrepresentation, Saïd
said that "the Orient that appears in Orientalism,
then, is a system of representations framed
by a whole set of forces that brought the
Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness,
and later, Western empire. If this definition
of Orientalism seems more political than not,
that is simply because I think Orientalism
was, itself, a product of certain political
forces and activities. Orientalism is a school
of interpretation whose material happens to
be the Orient, its civilisations, peoples,
and localities. Its objective discoveries—the
work of innumerable devoted scholars who edited
texts and translated them, codified grammars,
wrote dictionaries, reconstructed dead epochs,
produced positivistically verifiable learning—are
and always have been conditioned by the fact
that its truths, like any truths delivered
by language, are embodied in language, and,
what is the truth of language?, Nietzsche
once said, but":
A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human
relations, which have been enhanced, transposed,
and embellished poetically and rhetorically,
and which, after long use, seem firm, canonical,
and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions
about which one has forgotten that this is
what they are.
Saïd concludes that Nietzsche's perspective
might be too nihilistic, but that it draws
attention to the fact that, in so far as "the
Orient" occurred in the existential awareness
of the Western world, the Orient was a word
that later accrued to it a wide field of meanings,
associations, and connotations, which did
not refer to the real Eastern world, but to
the field of study surrounding "the Orient"
as a word.
=== The Academy ===
In the Eastern world, the field of Occidentalism,
the investigation programme and academic curriculum
of and about the essence of The West—i.e.
geographic Europe as a culturally homogenous
place—did not exist as a counterpart to
Orientalism. Moreover, in the Orientalist
practices of historical negationism, the writing
of distorted history about the places and
peoples of "The East" continue in the postmodern
era, especially in contemporary journalism;
e.g. in the Third World, political parties
practice intra-national Othering with fabricated
"facts", such as threat-reports about non-existent
threats (political, social, military) that
are meant to aggravate the character faults
of the opponent political parties, which usually
are composed of people from the social and
ethnic groups identified and designated as
the Other in that society.The process of Othering
a person or a social group, by means of an
ideal ethnocentricity (belief that one's ethnic
group is the superior group), and the cultural
tendency to evaluate and assign meaning to
Other ethnicities, which are negatively measured
against the ideal standard of the Self—is
realised through mundane methods of investigation,
such as cartography.Historically, the drawing
of maps emphasised and bolstered specific
lands and the associated national-identities,
the natural resources and cultures of the
native inhabitants. In early cartography,
the distortion (proportionate, proximate,
and commercial) of actual places and true
distances established the Western cartographer's
homeland as the centre of the mapamundi; thus
British cartographers centred Britain in their
maps, and drew the British islands proportionally
larger than the true geography might allow.
In contemporary cartography, polar-perspective
maps of the northern hemisphere, drawn by
American cartographers, distort real geographic
spatial relations (distance, size, mass) of
and between the U.S. and Russia, to emphasise
American superiority (military, cultural,
geopolitical) and the inferiority of the Russian
Other.
=== Practical perspectives ===
In Key Concepts in Political Geography (2009),
Alison Mountz proposed concrete definitions
of the Other as a philosophic concept and
term within the field of phenomenology; when
used as a noun, the Other identifies and refers
to a person and to a group of persons; when
used as a verb, the Other identifies and refers
to a category and a label for persons and
things.
Post-colonial scholarship demonstrated that,
in pursuit of empire, "the colonizing powers
narrated an 'Other' whom they set out to save,
dominate, control, [and] civilize ... [in
order to] extract resources through colonization"
of the homeland of the people labelled as
the Other. As facilitated by Orientalist representations
of the non–Western Other, colonisation—the
economic exploitation of a people and their
land—is misrepresented as being for the
material, spiritual, and cultural benefit
of the colonised peoples.
Counter to the post-colonial perspective of
the Other as part of a Dominator–Dominated
binary relationship, post-modern philosophy
presents the Other and Otherness as phenomenological
and ontological progress for Man and society.
Public knowledge of the social identity of
peoples classified as "Outsiders" is de facto
acknowledgement of their being real, and so
they are part of the body politic, especially
in the cities. As such, "the post-modern city
is a geographical celebration of difference
that moves sites once conceived of as 'marginal'
to the [social] centre of discussion and analysis"
of the human relations between the Outsiders
and the Establishment.
== See also ==
Allosemitism
Allophilia
Alterity
Anatta, Buddhist concept
Caste system in India
Exoticism
Markedness
Neo-Confucianism
Otherness of childhood
Social alienation
Taoism
XenocentrismBooksOrientalism (1978), by Edward
Saïd
Wretched of the Earth, (1961), by Frantz FanonSexual
differenceJudith Butler
Luce Irigaray
Julia Kristeva
Sarojini Sahoo
== References ==
== Sources ==
Thomas, Calvin, ed. (2000). "Introduction:
Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation",
Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the
Subject of Heterosexuality. University of
Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06813-0.
Cahoone, Lawrence (1996). From Modernism to
Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell.
Colwill, Elizabeth. (2005). Reader—Wmnst
590: Feminist Thought. KB Books.
Haslanger, Sally. Feminism and Metaphysics:
Unmasking Hidden Ontologies. 28 November 2005.
McCann, Carole. Kim, Seung-Kyung. (2003).
Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives.
Routledge. New York, NY.
Rimbaud, Arthur (1966). "Letter to Georges
Izambard", Complete Works and Selected Letters.
Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974). The Gay Science.
Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1986). Course in General
Linguistics. Eds. Charles Bally and Albert
Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Ill.:
Open Court.
Lacan, Jacques (1977). Écrits: A Selection.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.
Althusser, Louis (1973). Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Warner, Michael (1990). "Homo-Narcissism;
or, Heterosexuality", Engendering Men, p.
191. Eds. Boone and Cadden, London UK: Routledge.
Tuttle, Howard (1996). The Crowd is Untruth,
Peter Lang Publishing, ISBN 0-8204-2866-3
== Further reading ==
Levinas, Emmanuel (1974). Autrement qu'être
ou au-delà de l'essence. (Otherwise than
Being or Beyond Essence).
Levinas, Emmanuel (1972). Humanism de l'autre
homme. Fata Morgana.
Lacan, Jacques (1966). Ecrits. London: Tavistock,
1977.
Lacan, Jacques (1964). The Four Fondamental
Concepts of Psycho-analysis. London: Hogarth
Press, 1977.
Foucault, Michel (1990). The History of Sexuality
vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley.
New York: Vintage.
Derrida, Jacques (1973). Speech and Phenomena
and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs.
Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Ill.: Northwestern
University Press.
Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror:
An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies That Matter:
On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York:
Routledge.
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "'Etymythological
Othering' and the Power of 'Lexical Engineering'
in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. A Socio-Philo(sopho)logical
Perspective", Explorations in the Sociology
of Language and Religion, edited by Tope Omoniyi
and Joshua A. Fishman, Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
pp. 237–258.
== External links ==
Definitions of Other/Othering
The Centre for Studies in Otherness
