Alterity — From Latin alteritas (the condition of being other), a philosophical concept designating the irreducible difference of the other qua other, not assimilable to the identity of the same. To think alterity is to think the other without reducing it to a variation of oneself, in contrast to sameness (the identity of the I with itself). Although the articulation of same and other already appears in Plato (Sophist, 254b–259d), where the other (tò héteron) figures among the supreme kinds of being, alterity becomes a central problem only in the twentieth century. In I and Thou (1923), Martin Buber distinguishes the I-Thou relation, in which the other is encountered as presence, from the I-It relation, which treats it as an available object. Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (1943), analyses the look (le regard): under another’s gaze I discover myself as an object for an alien consciousness, which constitutes my being-for-others. But it is Emmanuel Levinas who elevates alterity to a fundamental principle. In Totality and Infinity (1961), he argues that the Western tradition — from Parmenides to Hegel — has systematically subordinated the Other to the Same, reducing difference to identity (ontology as “philosophy of totality”). Against this, he proposes ethics as first philosophy: the face (visage) of the Other addresses me with an infinite demand prior to any thematisation, in an asymmetrical relation in which I am responsible for the Other before any reciprocity. The concept reverberates in Derrida, who radicalises it through the logic of différance, and in Ricoeur, who seeks a dialectic between ipse (selfhood) and alterity (Oneself as Another, 1990).
← Glossary