⁂ Concepts · Ethics · No. 131
The Other

Chronological, not alphabetical: a visitor must pass every name to reach one.

The Other

Another person encountered as making a claim on you before any theory about them - the ethical relation taken as prior to knowledge.

Theme
Ethics and character
Tradition
Continental
Term
autrui
Term fixed
1961

In plain terms

Most philosophy approaches other people as a problem of knowledge: how do I know there is anyone there, and what are they like?

Levinas's proposal is that this gets the order wrong. Before you have any theory about someone, their presence already makes a demand - the face of another person is not a surface to be interpreted but something that addresses you and to which you are already answerable, whether or not you respond.

The part that resists summary is that the Other is precisely what cannot be summarised. Any account you form is your account, and to the extent that you have grasped someone, you have converted them into a category of your own. What the concept insists on is a singularity that no description reaches - which is a hard claim to state without contradicting it.

As a philosopher would put it

Levinas's argument is that Western philosophy has been an ontology which reduces the other to the same - understanding proceeds by bringing what is encountered under concepts already held, and this is a form of possession. Ethics, by contrast, is the relation in which the other remains other, and it is first philosophy rather than a branch of it.

The face is the technical term. It is not a physical surface but the way another person presents as irreducible, resisting the totalising grasp of comprehension, and it commands - the primary content Levinas gives it is thou shalt not kill.

The relation is asymmetrical by design: responsibility is infinite and precedes any choice or contract, and reciprocity is the other person's business rather than mine. Derrida's early essay presses the difficulty that Levinas must use the language of ontology to say all this, and Levinas's later work responds by pushing the language further. Beauvoir's earlier use of the term is different and equally influential: woman constituted as the Other against a masculine standard treated as neutral.

Where you meet it

Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, chosen from more than fourteen hundred entries in a blind competition in 1981, lists 58,000 names on polished black granite.

The decisive choice was the ordering. Names appear in chronological order of death, not alphabetically and not by rank - so a visitor looking for one person must use a directory, walk to a panel, and pass every other name on the way. Lin's stated intention was that the memorial should be about individuals rather than about a war, and the polished surface reflects the visitor among the names.

The design was attacked before it was built as a black gash of shame, and a conventional statue was added nearby as a compromise. What changed opinion was the behaviour of visitors: people touch the names, leave objects, and take rubbings. A structure that refuses to summarise, and requires an encounter with individuals one did not come for, turned out to do something no summary could.

What is actually disputed

Whether an ethics without reciprocity is workable.

Levinas's asymmetry is deliberate: my responsibility is infinite and not conditional on anything the other does. Critics argue this is either impossible to act on or produces a moral position in which justice - which requires comparing claims - has no foundation. Levinas's own answer, that the third party introduces the demand for justice and thereby for comparison, is regarded by many as an addition rather than a solution.

A second and sharper objection concerns whose otherness is being described. Beauvoir's use of the term identifies the Other as a position of subordination, produced by a standard that treats itself as neutral, and from that angle celebrating the other's irreducible difference can look like aestheticising a hierarchy. The two uses of the same term are close enough to be constantly confused and different enough to point in opposite political directions.

Commonly confused with

  • other people generally The term marks a specific structure - the encounter with someone irreducible to my categories - not simply anyone who is not me.
  • Other minds 1865 That is an epistemological problem about whether anyone else has experience. This claims the ethical relation comes first and does not wait for an answer.

Defined against

  • Objectivity The claim is that comprehension itself is a form of appropriation, which puts the concept directly against the ideal of grasping something fully

Philosophers

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Alterity 1961 · Intersubjectivity 1913 · Other minds 1865 · Relationality c. 150 · Care 1982

Hegel's recognition and Husserl's problem of the other are the background; Levinas's 1961 argument that ethics precedes ontology is the position the term now names.