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 ontological progress for Man and Society. . 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. "Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality". He is extremely radical. [37], In the Eastern world, the field of Occidentalism, the investigation programme and academic curriculum of and about the essence of The West — Europe as a culturally homogenous place — did not exist as a counterpart to Orientalism. In The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq (2004), the geographer Derek Gregory said that the U.S. government's ideologic answers to questions about reasons for the terrorist attacks against the U.S. (i.e. Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "'Etymythological Othering' and the Power of 'Lexical Engineering' in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Face of the Other is how the Other reveals itself. ; as such, queering urban spaces is a political means for the non-binary sexual Other to establish themselves as citizens integral to the reality (cultural and socio-economic) of their city's body politic. 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. [3][4], 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. Face to face is an ethical relationship, and calls the freedom of self responsibility. The others concern me from the first. Here, fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. As such, the Other person posed and was an epistemological problem—of being only a perception of the consciousness of the Self.[1]. In addition to sharing a basic understanding of the I-it relationship, Levinas and Buber share a concern that philosophy mimics the I-it by thematizing and totalizing the Other: “The I-Thou relation consists in confronting a being external to oneself, i.e., one that is radically other, and to recognize it … Consequent to the Nazi 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. on the all-encompassing power of ego and consciousness, Levinas locates the origin of the subject in the pre-ego, pre-conscious connection with the Other and the world. The concept of the Self requires the existence of the constitutive 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). Originally from Lithuania, he is one of the most famous representatives of continental philosophy. Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism Emmanuel Levinas Translated by Sean Hand Prefatory Note The following article appeared in Esprit, a ... beholds him in the face of the other man, his neighbor, the original "site" of the Revelation. Lewis, in fact, took a degree in philosophy as well as in classics and English and began his teaching career at Oxford as a tutor in philosophy for most of a year before obtaining a position in English literature. Purdue University Series in the History of Philosophy. Levinas wrote several pieces on Buber, and his discussions, while appreciative, are critical. Jemmer, Patrick. This first philosophy is neither traditional logic nor metaphysics, however. 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?" Please, subscribe or login to access full text content. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Instead of surrendering to the other he wants to fight free from its imposition, and to grasp freedom outside the strictures imposed by … cations of setting the priority of ethics over other spheres (such as ontology), believes that the sense Levinas attributes to the word ethics implies an over-and the Possibility of Ethics, in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. 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 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. In the event, 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. For Buber (2006) the relation with the other is a matter of dialogue in reciprocity and symmetry, in give and take and in a convergence of self and other. To neutralise such cultural Othering, LGBT communities queer a city, by creating social spaces that use the spatial and temporal plans of the city to allow the LGBT communities free expression of their social identities, e.g. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. [27] In practise, sexual Othering is realised by applying the negative denotations and connotations of the terms that describe lesbian and gay, bisexual and transgender people, in order to diminish their personal social status and political power, and so displace their LGBT communities to the legal margin of society. Orientalism is a school of interpretation whose material happens to be the Orient, its civilisations, peoples, and localities. In contemporary cartography, the polar-perspective maps of the northern hemisphere, drawn by U.S. cartographers, feature distorted spatial relations (distance, size, mass) of and between the U.S. and Russia that emphasise the perceived inferiority (military, cultural, geopolitical) of the Russian Other.[40]:10. [6], The term Othering describes the reductive action of labelling and defining a person as a subaltern native, as someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other. If ethics means rationalist self-legislation and freedom (deontology), the calculation of happiness (utilitarianism), or the cultivation of virtues (virtue ethics), then Levinas's philosophy is not an ethics. [1], In Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), Emmanuel Lévinas said that previous philosophy had reduced the constitutive Other 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. In my view, one has to understand his philosophy and Jewish thought together, as mutually supportive, since Levinas himself perceives Jewish life itself as a correction of Western thought, as a reminder to philosophy that the frequently forgotten or suppressed—the being-for-the-Other—is the non-forgettable. The infinity of the Other allowed Lévinas 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. [14] 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 fetishised cultural representations of the Other invented by Orientalists; 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. [26] See Culture and Imperialism (1994), by Edward Saïd, The social exclusion function of Othering a person or a social group from mainstream society to the social margins — for being essentially different from the societal norm (the plural Self) — is a socio-economic function of gender. Emmanuel Levinas was among the most prominent European Jewish intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century. On the one hand, he is a philosopher of ethics, and on the other, a Talmudic commentator, and this division appears to pull his work in two opposite directions . Levinas is important for the recovery of humanism as a cultural ethos because he argues for a redefinition of reason and philosophy in ethical terms, but without the incarnation as the basis for mediating the transcendent through the material, he ends up with a rather legalistic demand for which ontological structures such as language, literature, and art become possible idols that distort the ethical. In it Levinas argues that Western philosophy has been captured by a notion of totality from which nothing is distant, exterior, or other and that, thus, when persons who are different confront such totalistic ways of living and thinking, they go to war. From within the phenomenological tradition, Levinas grounds the phenomenon of the human (subjectivity, dignity, language, desire etc.) For one thing, both of them knew the philosophical tradition thoroughly. 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.[12]. The imprint of, and the self’s responsibility to, the Other break open the enclosed identity and entail a formation of the subject that is open, transcendental, and ethical. I'll make two clarifying points and then give some quotations from Levinas: [1][2] The Constitutive Other is the relation between the personality (essential nature) and the person (body) of a human being; 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. 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. My relationship with the Other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others. 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. If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is the result of the influence of the group of the three H (G. W. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger). 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. In Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (1931), Husserl said that the Other is constituted as an alter ego, as an other self. Language begins with the presence of … (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. In this context, Winkler also discusses Ricoeur's attempt in Oneself as Another to find a middle ground between Heidegger and Levinas. “Living presence,” for Levinas, would imply that the other person (as someone genuinely other than myself) is exposed to me and expresses him or herself simply by being there as an undeniable reality that I cannot reduce to images or ideas in my head. Lacan associated the Other with language and with the symbolic order of things. A Socio-Philo(sopho)logical Perspective", This page was last edited on 5 January 2021, at 10:11. [25] See: Burmese Days (1934), by George Orwell, Othering establishes unequal relationships of power between the colonised natives and the colonisers, who believe themselves essentially superior to the natives whom they othered into racial inferiority, as the non-white Other. [5] In the discourse of philosophy, the term Otherness identifies and refers to the characteristics of Who? Levinas’s exploration of phenomenology started between 1928 and 1929, when he studied under Husserl and Heidegger in Germany and, thus, developed his ethical philosophy based on the relationship with the Other. LEVINAS’S PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION 395 enjoyment, as having intentionality when he remarks that “sensibility is . To troubleshoot, please check our Levinas explains that the face of the Other talking to yourself. . — Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence[13]:232, Jacques Derrida said that the absolute alterity of the Other is compromised, because the Other person is other than the Self and the group. Levinas’s philosophy as a philosophy that explores ethics under extreme circumstances and the ultimate challenges to moral behavior. and What? 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. That cultural representations of the Other (as a metaphor, as a metonym, and as an anthropomorphism) are manifestations of the xenophobia inherent to the European historiographies that defined and labelled non–European peoples as the Other who is not the European Self. [27] As facilitated by Orientalist representations of the non–Western Other, colonization — 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. [31] See: The Feminine Mystique (1963), by Betty Friedan. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and the philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) established the contemporary definitions, usages, and applications of the constitutive Other, as the radical counterpart of the Self. In the psychology of the mind (e.g. Abstract. [in order to] extract resources through colonization" of the country whose people the colonial power designated as the Other. contact us as political prelude to the War on Terror (2001). The contemporary, post-colonial world system of nation-states (with interdependent politics and economies) was preceded by the European imperial system of economic and settler colonies 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. . "Manufacturing a Feminized Siege Mentality. . Levinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the "love of wisdom" (the usual translation of the Greek "φιλοσοφία"). The deconstruction of the word Woman (the subordinate party in the Man and Woman relation) produced a conceptual reconstruction of the female Other as the Woman who exists independently of male definition, as rationalised by patriarchy. See: The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) In a society wherein man–woman heterosexuality is the sexual norm, the Other refers to and identifies lesbians (women who love women) and gays (men who love men) as people of same-sex orientation whom society has othered as "sexually deviant" from the norms of binary-gender heterosexuality. 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. [10] See: The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) applied the concept of the Other as the basis for intersubjectivity, the psychological relations among people. 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;[40]:179 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. 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 acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. 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"). 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. [27], Dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. In so far as The Orient occurred in the existential 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. 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. in the Third World, political parties practice Othering with fabricated facts about threat-reports and non-existent threats (political, social, military) that are meant to politically delegitimise opponent political parties composed of people from the social and ethnic groups designated as the Other in that society.[39]. 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. beyond ontology and consciousness in the personal, transcendent ethical demand of another human being as the imperative ‘Thou shalt not kill’, which defines being human as concern for others. "The O(the)r (O)the(r)". [23] See: The Stranger (1942), by Albert Camus, In establishing a colony, Othering a non-white people allows 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. Therefore, the imposition of Otherness alienates the person labelled as "the Other" from the centre of society, and places him or her at the margins of society, for being the Other. "The face of the Other" is a phrase used by Emmanuel Levinas, an important twentieth-century philosopher who has won my deep interest and admiration. In contrast, because ontology treats the Other as an object of judgments made by theoretical reason, it deals with him as a finite being. [38] In the postmodern era, the Orientalist practices of historical negationism, the writing of distorted histories about the places and peoples of "The East", continues in contemporary journalism; e.g. [19] Orientalists rationalised the cultural artifice of a difference of essence, between white and non-white peoples, in order to fetishize (identify, classify, subordinate) the peoples and cultures of Asia into "the Oriental Other" — who exists in opposition to the Western Self.