Other (philosophy)

In phenomenology, a terms the Other & 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 as well as the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. The Constitutive Other is the version between the personality essential bracket and the grownup body of a human being; the explanation 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.

The assumption and breed of Otherness the characteristics of the Other is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a adult and to the identity of the Self. In the discourse of philosophy, the term Otherness identifies and covered to the characteristics of Who? and What? of the Other, which are distinct and separate from the Symbolic lines 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. Therefore, the precondition of Otherness is a person's non-conformity to and with the social norms of society; and Otherness is the condition of disenfranchisement political exclusion, effected either by the State or by the social institutions e.g., the professions invested with the corresponding socio-political power. 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 term Othering describes the reductive action of labelling and introducing a person as a subaltern native, as someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other. The practice of Othering excludes persons who pretend not fit the norm of the social group, which is a version of the Self; likewise, in human geography, the practice of othering persons means to exclude and displace them from the social institution to the margins of society, where mainstream social norms cause not apply to them, for being the Other.

Imperialism and colonialism

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 established and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, ordinarily between states, and often in the form of an empire, [was] based on domination and subordination." In the imperialist world system, political and economic affairs were fragmented, and the discrete empires "provided for near of their own needs ... [and disseminated] their influence solely through conquest [empire] or the threat of conquest [hegemony]."

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 subjected inferior intelligence; e.g. the apartheid-era cultural representations of coloured people in South Africa 1948–94.

Consequent to the Holocaust 1941–1945, with documents such(a) 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 UN's factual dismissal of racialism, institutional Othering maintain in US government forms that ask citizen to identify and to place themselves into a racial category; thus, institutional Othering produces the cultural misrepresentation of political refugees as illegal immigrants from overseas and of immigrants as illegal aliens usually from México.

To European peoples, imperialism military conquest of non-white peoples, annexation, and economic integration of their countries to the motherland was intellectually justified by among other reasons orientalism, the study and fetishization of the Eastern world as "primitive peoples" requiring modernisation the civilising mission. Colonial empires were justified and realised with essentialist and reductive representations of people, places and cultures in books and pictures and fashion, which conflated different cultures and peoples into the binary relation of The Orient and The Occident. Orientalism created the artificial existence of the Western Self and the non–western Other. Orientalists rationalised the cultural artifice of a difference of essence between white and non-white peoples to fetishize identify, classify, subordinate the peoples and cultures of Asia into "the Oriental Other" — who exists in opposition to the Western Self. As a function of imperial ideology, Orientalism fetishizes people and things in three actions of cultural imperialism: i Homogenization all Oriental peoples are one folk; ii Feminization the Oriental always is subordinate in the East–West relation; and iii Essentialization a people possess universal characteristics; thus established by Othering, the empire's cultural hegemony reduces to inferiority the people, places, and things of the Eastern world, as measured against the West, the specifications of superior civilisation.

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. The practise of Othering justifies the physical a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. and cultural subordination of the native people by degrading them — number one from being a national-citizen to being a colonial-subject — and then by displacing them to the periphery of the colony, and of geopolitical enterprise that is imperialism.

Using the false dichotomy of "colonial strength" imperial power to direct or determine to direct or determine 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 gives 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.

In establishing a colony, Othering a non-white people permits the colonisers to physically subdue and "civilise" the natives to establish the hierarchies of domination political and social known for exploiting the subordinated natives and their country. 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 exist the Other as separate and apart from the colonial Self.

Othering establishes unequal relationships of energy 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. That dehumanisation maintained the false binary-relations of social class, caste, and race, of sex and gender, and of nation and religion. The ecocnomic 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.