ABSTRACT
Inter-civilizational contact invariably creates a sense of the otherness or alterity of different societies and cultures. Any society with a more or less coherent cultural boundary and identity, acting as an inclusionary social force, tends to have an exclusionary notion of membership and hence otherness; the more inclusive the feeling of ethnicity and national membership, the more intense the notion of an outside. With globalization involving the compression of spatial relations between societies, the problem of alterity has been magnified. Thus a paradoxical relationship exists between the growing cultural hybridity, interconnectedness, and interdependency of the world-indeed, the modernization of societies-and the notion of alterity in politics, philosophy, and culture. The emergence of alterity as a theme of inter-civilizational and transnational contact should not, however, be seen as an evolutionary progression, marching in tandem with modernization. The divisive question of alterity has been closely associated with the rise of world religions, the creation of imperial powers, and the history of colonialism and post-colonialism. The question of the other is not easily separated from the “fear of diversity,” which can be seen as in fact the foundation of ancient Greek thought (Saxonhouse 1992). We should be careful to distinguish between a number of separate meanings of the
other, otherness, and alterity. The concept of the other has been important in phenomenology and psychoanalysis, where the self as a subject presupposes the existence of a non-self or other. And in existentialism the other often assumes an antagonistic relationship with the self. Because the individual resides in a world of other subjectivities, there exists a mode of existence that is properly referred to as “being-for-others.” In the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1998), the other can play a positive role in questioning the confidence and assurance of the subject. The face of the other challenges us to take responsibility for the other, and hence otherness creates the conditions that make ethics possible. Jacques Derrida (2000), playing on the etymological connections between “stranger” and “host” (hostis and hospes), neatly summarized the issue by saying simply that ethics is hospitality.
