  the "other" (or "constitutive other") is a key concept in continental philosophy and in the social sciences; as such, the other opposes the same. the terms the other and otherness refer to who is and what is alien and divergent from the norm, from identity, and from the self. the constitutive other usually denotes a different, incomprehensible self that is external to the one's own self; thus, the word other usually is capitalized, because, conceptually, the other is a mystification reduced to a fetish, by a hegemonic subject.saÃ¯d, edward w. orientalism, 25th anniversary edition. new york: pantheon books, 1978. ==history== the concept that the self requires the existence of the other, as the counterpart who defines the self; the philosophers explain: hegel was among the first to introduce the idea of the other as constituent in self-consciousness. for a direct antecedent, see fichte. husserl used the idea as a basis for intersubjectivity. 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. beauvoir made use of otherness &mdash; in similar fashion to sartre (though it is likely he took the idea from her) &mdash; in the second sex. in fact, beauvoir refers to hegel's master-slave dialectic as analogous, in many respects, to the relationship of man and woman. the french psychoanalyst jacques lacan and the lithuanian-french philosopher emmanuel lÃ©vinas were instrumental in coining contemporary usage of "the other," as radically other. lacan associated the other with the symbolic order and language. levinas connected it with the scriptural and traditional god, in 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
Continental_philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy_of_mind Political_philosophy Postmodern_terminology Self