Otherness, History of

The 19th-Century Origins

Conceptualizations dealing with Otherness have, from their origins, been in some way intimately related to definitions of modern and modernity —of humankind's existence and knowledge of self in the modern world. At issue are not only self-identity and identification, but also how to define the identity of the modern world and how to understand the process of identification within it. The Ur-use of the concept of the “Other” is believed to be Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Within Hegel's schema, one can see the basis for the idea of the Other as an issue of selfhood and as an issue of difference. To account for the development of “self-consciousness,” as opposed to “consciousness,” Hegel describes a mythical encounter between two primordial (or “half”) people. Upon becoming [Page 527]aware of an other, a “consciousness” has two choices: it can choose to ignore the like-form in front of it, or it can recognize the Other as a “mirror” of itself and start to assert an identity in contradistinction to that which it confronts—it can put forth its identity as subject “I” against the object with which it is faced. The encounter results in a loss of and slippage within identity: In the recognition of another, a self loses itself, as it recognizes the existence of the other consciousness. At the same time, a self cannot truly see the other self but, rather, sees its own self when looking at the other. For Hegel, this encounter causes alienation, so that a consciousness attempts to resynthesize the self into a whole; it seeks resolution, the domination of its subject—I—over the object, “the Other.”

An obverse thought process can be seen in the work of the French modernist poet Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud. In a letter of May 15, 1871, to Paul Demeny, one of two now known as the “Letters of the Seer,” Rimbaud includes a phrase that has come to be his signature utterance: je est un autre. It can be translated in many ways, including I is someone else, I is an other, and I is other. The phrase has seen myriad interpretations, including the argument that Rimbaud sought to know himself by looking inward at his soul, distancing himself from himself to be able to look at himself. In so doing, he questioned every element of his psyche, believing that the “I” that is left would be the essence of his self. In this way, for Rimbaud, a poet becomes a seer. Rimbaud's formulation has kinship with Hegel's, except that the encounter is interior rather than exterior. Additionally, his fertile phrasing allows for two definitions of the Other, both of which can exist simultaneously—the Other that must be encountered and conquered is within one's self, or the Other and Otherness is a state that one wants to achieve.

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