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Other

The Other or constitutive other 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. Often it means a person other than oneself. It is often capitalised. more...

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The Other in Philosophy

The Lithuanian philosopher, Levinas, 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.

Ethically, for Levinas, the Other is superior or prior to the self, the mere presence of the Other makes demands before one can respond by helping them or ignoring them. This idea and that of the face-to-face encounter were re-written later, taking on Derrida's points made about the impossibility of a pure presence of the Other (the Other could be other than this pure alterity first encountered), and so issues of language and representation arose. This "re-write" was accomplished in part with Levinas' analysis of the distinction between "the saying and the said" but still maintaining a priority of ethics over metaphysics.

Levinas talks of the Other in terms of insomnia and wakefulness. It is an ecstasy, or exteriority toward the Other that forever remains beyond any attempt at full capture, this otherness is interminable (or infinite); even in murdering an other, the otherness remains, it has not been negated or controlled. This "infiniteness" of the Other will allow Levinas to derive other aspects of philosophy and science as secondary to this ethic. Levinas writes:

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, indivudations 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.

The "Other," as a general term in philosophy, can also be used to mean, the unconscious, silence, madness, the other of language (ie, what it refers to and what is unsaid), etc.

There may also arise the problem of relativism if the Other, as pure alterity, leads to a notion that ignores the commonality of truth. Issues may also arise around non-ethical uses of the term, and related terms, that reinforce divisions.

The Other in the Social Sciences

As such, 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. Lacan also presented the complexity involved in coming to sentience in his description of the Mirror stage.