Plato

Plato is invoked as a precursor whose account of the Other helps illuminate the book’s central claim that consciousness is not a self-contained substance but a relation that reaches beyond itself. The discussion draws on the Stranger in the Sophist, then carries the description further: otherness can appear only through consciousness, which continually makes itself other while remaining related to being.

The Stranger’s Account of the Other

The book recalls the Stranger’s description of the Other as something apprehended “as in a dream.” Considered by itself, this Other disappears; it has no being apart from being other. Its existence is therefore marginal and borrowed, emerging only when attention is fixed on being. The account also recognizes a dynamic dimension: in certain passages, Plato associates otherness with the origin of motion.

Consciousness as the Condition of Otherness

The argument takes the Stranger’s description beyond its initial formulation. Otherness, it proposes, has a semblance of existence only by virtue of consciousness. To be other than being is to be self-consciousness within the unity of temporalizing movements; the reflecting and reflected play against one another rather than settling into a self-identical thing. Otherness is an internal negation, and only consciousness can be constituted in that way. If otherness were instead treated as an in-itself, its difference from being would become merely external and would require a witness to establish it.

The Reach and Limit of the Comparison

This account makes the Other dependent on being without reducing it to a fixed property of being. It must emanate from being, yet it must also make itself other; otherwise, its difference would be given once and for all and become another in-itself. The resulting structure joins facticity with self-making: the for-itself is not the foundation of its being as nothingness, but continually founds that nothingness. Its being remains interrogative and in suspense, because a complete coincidence with itself would erase otherness along with possibility, knowledge, and the world. Plato’s account thus serves as a point of departure for an argument that locates the reality of otherness in consciousness’s ongoing, unstable relation to being.