Challenges for conceptualising otherness

Otherness is a deceptively simple concept. Ostensibly it refers to someone else, who is, in an ultimate sense, unknowable. But, there are many ways in which the self-other boundary is blurred. First, self is already other from the standpoint of the other. Second, in so far as perspective taking is possible, there is some otherness within the self, and some self within the other. Third, when people talk and think they routinely move between the perspectives of self and other, changing and shifting perspectives, and leveraging one perspective against the other. Overall, the core challenge for conceptualising otherness is that it does not exist without the self. Otherness is not ‘in’ the perspective of the other rather it is a two-sided relational quality that arises between the shifting perspectives of self and other.