Other (philosophy)

"Otherness" describes the qualities and characteristics attributed to individuals or groups perceived as outside the dominant social norm.

[6] This can include differences based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or any other marker of social identity.

This act of Othering can effectively place those deemed "different" at the margins of society, denying them full participation and access to resources.

Accordingly, 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),[11] which complemented the propositions about self-awareness (capacity for introspection) proffered by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814).

[19] Egocentric presentism and perspectival realism are ideas posed by Caspar Hare that posit that first-person perspectives imply a weak form of solipsism.

[22] 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.

[23] 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.

[14] 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?"

[26] 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.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.

"[29] The racialist perspective of the Western world during the 18th and 19th centuries was invented with the Othering of non-white peoples, which also was supported with the fabrications of scientific racism, such as the pseudo-science of phrenology, which claimed that, in relation to a white-man's head, the head-size of the non-European Other indicated inferior intelligence; e.g. the apartheid-era cultural representations of coloured people in South Africa (1948–94).

[32][33] Colonial stability requires the cultural subordination of the non-white Other for transformation into the subaltern native; a colonised people who facilitate the exploitation of their labour, of their lands, and of the natural resources of their country.

[39] That dehumanisation maintains the false binary-relations of social class, caste, and race, of sex and gender, and of nation and religion.

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.

[40] In practise, sexual Othering is realised by applying the negative denotations and connotations of the terms that describe lesbian, 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.

That the female Other is a self-aware Woman who is autonomous and independent of the patriarchy's formal subordination of the female sex with the institutional limitations of social convention, tradition, and customary law; the social subordination of women is communicated (denoted and connoted) in the sexist usages of the word Woman.

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.

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.

[51] 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 homogeneous place—did not exist as a counterpart to Orientalism.

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 .

Public knowledge of the social identity of peoples classified as "Outsiders" is de facto acknowledgement of their being real, 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.