The role of the Other in getting to know the self

Abstract

The paper investigates the role of the other in the emergence and understanding of the self both in Descartes’ philosophy and in phenomenological theories based on Descartes. For Descartes, the thinking entity is almost closed into itself, but upon close inquiry it turns out that ideas of other entities filter into its thinking and eventually influence it. Therefore, the ego’s experience of itself depends of its experience of other ideas, while the ego active in practical life is constituted through its relation to things encountered in the world. In some twentieth-century approaches the ego can only understand itself through another ego. For Husserl, the self comprehends itself as the not-Other, while for Levinas the face of the Other constitutes the self of the Ego receiving it, through their radical difference.