IPSEITET I DRUGOST
IPSEITY AND ALTERITY

Summary/Abstract: Paul Ricoeur addresses the two meanings of the meta-category of alterity: our own body, or the flesh, and the otherness of the other self. He accords great credit to Husserl for his analysis of the first face of passivity-alterity, despite the a priori constraints on his achievement set by transcendental phenomenology. With this thinker, we find the outline of a highly promising ontology of the flesh, and which explicitly incorporates hermeneutic phenomenology into the ontology of alterity. However, an ontology of this kind – which would equally take account of the inner connectedness of the self with embodiment and its openness to the world – can no longer be constituted as a phenomenology, as a philosophy of consciousness or representation, as shown by the great heritage of reflections dedicated to the body, from Maine de Biran to Heidegger. Just as the first dimension of alterity is opened by Husserl’s differentiation between Leib and Körper, so this second dimension is based on the difference between the ego, which poses itself, and the self, which knows and recognizes itself only through the affections with which it is struck by the Other. This specific passivity of the self is most consistently and radically expressed by E. Lavinas. However, his work contests the identity of the Same, making it the polar opposite of the otherness of the Other. The ineradicable distance from the Other is the expression of the acceptance of a certain philosophy of totality that cannot accept the new dialectic of the Same and the Other in which the Other would not merely be the opposing side of the Same but would belong to the inner constitution of its meaning. The postulate for this dialectic or dialogic is the internalization of the difference between two kinds of identity, identity ipse and identity idem, which Levinas’ thought is unable to do.

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