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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. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) p. 673.The Other, The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, Third Edition, (1999) p. 620. 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 (personality) and their physical embodiment (body), reflecting the interplay of internal differences within the self.
Beyond this individual level, the concept extends to broader social and political contexts. "Other ness" describes the qualities and characteristics attributed to individuals or groups perceived as outside the dominant social norm."Otherness", The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, Third Edition (1999), p. 620. This can include differences based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or any other marker of social identity. The process of "Other ing" or "Other izing" 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."Othering", The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, Third Edition (1999), p. 620.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) 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 (1596–1650). (2025). 9780199264797, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199264797
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) applied the concept of the Other as the basis for intersubjectivity, the psychological relations among people. In (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. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) p. 637.
In (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, 1807) 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".* Why Isn’t Consciousness Real? (1) Philosophia Osaka No. 6, 2011:41-61 PDF
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.
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 (wherein a person is morally 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, to silence, to insanity, and to language ("to what is referred and to what is unsaid"). The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1999 )p. 620. 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 Ontology of reality: of being, of becoming, and of existence.
From that perspective, Lévinas 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, 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:
In The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq (2004), the geographer Derek Gregory said that the US government's ideologic answers to questions about reasons for the terrorist attacks against the U.S. (i.e. 11 September 2001) reinforced the imperial purpose of the negative representations of the Middle-Eastern Other; especially when President G. W. Bush (2001–2009) rhetorically asked: "Why do they hate us?" as political prelude to the War on Terror (2001). The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq (2004), p. 21. 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 Fetishism cultural representations of the Other invented by Orientalism; the cultural critic Edward Saïd said that:
Consequent to the Holocaust (1941–1945), with documents such as The Race Question (1950) and the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1963), the United Nations officially declared that racial differences are insignificant to anthropological likeness among human beings. Despite the United Nations' factual dismissal of racialism, institutional Othering in the United States produces the cultural misrepresentation of political refugees as illegal immigrants (from overseas) and of immigrants as illegal aliens (usually from México).
Using the false dichotomy of "colonial strength" (imperial power) against "native weakness" (military, social, and economic), the coloniser invents the non-white Other in an artificial dominator-dominated relationship that can be resolved only through racialist noblesse oblige, the "moral responsibility" that psychologically allows the colonialist Self to believe that imperialism is a civilising mission to educate, convert, and then culturally assimilate the Other into the empire—thus transforming the "civilised" Other into the Self.Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) pp. 76–77.
In establishing a colony, Othering a non-white people allowed the colonisers to physically subdue and "civilise" the natives to establish the hierarchies of domination (political and social) required for exploiting the subordinated natives and their country.Mountz, A. (n.d.). The Other. Key Concepts in Political Geography, pp. 328–338. Retrieved 2 February 2016. As a function of empire, a settler colony is an economic means for profitably disposing of two demographic groups: (i) the colonists (surplus population of the motherland) and (ii) the colonised (the subaltern native to be exploited) who antagonistically define and represent the Other as separate and apart from the colonial Self.
Othering establishes unequal relationships of power between the colonised natives and the colonisers, who believe themselves Essence to the natives whom they othered into racial inferiority, as the non-white Other."Colonialism", Dictionary of Human Geography, pp. 94–98. Retrieved 2 February 2016. That dehumanisation maintains the false binary-relations of social class, caste, and race, of sex and gender, and of nation and religion. The profitable functioning of a colony (economic or settler) requires continual protection of the cultural demarcations that are basic to the unequal socio-economic relation between the "civilised man" (the colonist) and the "savage man", thus the transformation of the Other into the colonial subaltern.
In 1949, the philosopher of existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir applied Hegel's conception of "the Other" (as a constituent part of self-awareness) to describe a male-dominated culture that represents Woman as the sexual Other to Man. In a patriarchal culture, the Man–Woman relation is society's normative binary-gender relation, wherein the sexual Other is a social minority with the least socio-political agency, usually the women of the community, because patriarchal semantics established that "a man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of the Man to designate human beings in general; whereas the Woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity" from the first sex, from Man.McCann, p. 33.
In 1957, Betty Friedan reported that a woman's social identity is formally established by the sexual politics of the Ordinate–Subordinate nature of the Man–Woman sexual relation, the social norm in the patriarchal West. 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 by their social roles (wife, mother, lover) in the private sphere of life; and did not identify themselves by their own achievements (job, career, business) in the public sphere of life. Unawares, the women had acted conventionally, and automatically identified and referred to themselves as the social Other to men.
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 socio-political power to formally change the social relation between the male-defined Self and Woman, the sexual Other, who is not male.Haslanger
In feminist definition, women are the Other to men (but not the Other proposed by Hegel) and are not existentially defined by masculine demands; and also are the social Other who unknowingly accepts social subjugation as part of subjectivity, because the gender identity of woman is constitutionally different from the gender identity of man. The harm of Othering is in the asymmetric nature of unequal roles in sexual and gender relations; the inequality arises from the social mechanics of intersubjectivity.Jemmer, Patrick. "The O(the)r (O)the(r)", Engage Newcastle, Vol. 1, August 2010 (; ), Newcastle UK: NewPhilSoc Publishing, p. 7.
In the 19th-century Historiography of the Orient as a cultural region, the Orientalists studied only what they said was the high culture (languages and literatures, arts and philologies) of the Middle East, but did not study that geographic space as a place inhabited by different nations and societies.Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) p. 71. About that Western version of the Orient, Edward Saïd said that:
In so far as the Orient occurred in the Existentialism awareness of the Western world, as a term, The Orient later accrued many meanings and associations, denotations, and connotations that did not refer to the real peoples, cultures, and geography of the Eastern world, but to Oriental studies, the academic field about the Orient as a word.Saïd, Edward W. Orientalism (1978) pp. 202–203.
The Othering of a person or of a social group—by means of an ideal ethnocentricity (the ethnic group of the Self) that evaluates and assigns negative, cultural meaning to the ethnic Other—is realised through cartography;Fellmann, Jerome D., et al. Human Geography: Landscapes of Human Activities, 10th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. hence, the maps of Western cartographers emphasised and bolstered artificial representations of the national-identities, the natural resources, and the cultures of the native inhabitants, as culturally inferior to the West.
Historically, Western cartography often featured distortions (proportionate, proximate, and commercial) of places and true distances by placing the cartographer's Mother country in the centre of the mapamundi; these ideas were often utilized to support imperialistic expansion. In contemporary cartography, the polar-perspective maps of the northern hemisphere, drawn by U.S. cartographers, also frequently feature distorted spatial relations (distance, size, mass) of and between the U.S. and Russia which according to historian Jerome D. Fellman emphasise the perceived inferiority (military, cultural, geopolitical) of the Russian Other.
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 extract resources through colonization" of the country whose people the colonial power designated as the Other.Gallagher, Carolyn, Dahlman, Carl T., Gilmartin, Mary, Mountz, Alison, Shirlow, Peter. Key Concepts in Political Geography. SAGE Publications Ltd, 2009. As facilitated by Orientalism of the non–Western Other, Colonialism—the economic exploitation of a people and their land—is misrepresented as a civilizing mission launched for the material, cultural, and spiritual benefit of the colonized peoples.
Counter to the post-colonial perspective of the Other as part of a Dominator–Dominated binary relationship, postmodern philosophy presents the Other and Otherness as phenomenological and Ontology progress for Man and Society. Public knowledge of the social identity of peoples Social class as "Outsiders" is de facto acknowledgement of their being reality, thus 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.
Practical perspectives
In Key Concepts in Political Geography (2009), Alison Mountz proposed concrete definitions of the Other as a philosophic concept and as a term within phenomenology; as a noun, the Other identifies and refers to a person and to a group of persons; as a verb, the Other identifies and refers to a category and a label for persons and things.
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