Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 27

Avatars
Of The Third Other
The Copemican and Darwinian revolutions in science sent seismic
shocks along two vulnerable cultural faults in the West: one secular,
the other religious. The consequences for organized religion and for
society at large have been so thoroughly documented that sometimes
we have to remind ourselves that for Copernicus and Darwin—and for
Galileo—the issue was nature, not religion. I submit this warmedover historical truism, because in my view it is not Western man's
contemporary attitudes toward God, but his attitudes toward nature,
which threaten to alter or even overturn long-cherished notions of
what constitutes "self” and what constitutes the metaphysical
"Other." Today, metaphysical or mythopoetic "Otherness" exists as
part of a cultural discourse which is rooted in technology; in
attempting to register its current status on a scale of technological
values, I will focus here on some reconceptualizings of what nature is,
or what it means, in the institutions of post-industrial American
society.
"Other" is so broad a concept that a fundamental difference exists
in philosophers’ attempts to pin it down. The difference springs from
essential conceptions of the ontological distance between self and
Other. In "transcendental philosophy"—i.e., the philosophies of
Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre—the Other functions as an "Alien I,"
quite apart from the individual self. In "philosophies of dialogue,"
on the other hand—in Martin Buber’s ontology, for instance—the
Other is more nearly a "Thou"—a partner in dialogue or dialectics.
The existential thought of Karl Jaspers comes somewhere in between
these two extremes. (Theunissen 1-2).
Postmodernist critic Ihab Hassan points to a myriad of
transcendental Others, including nature, the numinous, and "all
things counter":
(for Freud the Other i s ) . . . a mother’s breast; Sartre,
the gaze of another; Lacan, the no/name of the
father; a physicist, nature; a tribesman. M anna; a
theologian, the numinous; a romantic, ’all things
counter, original, spare, strange’ (Hopkins). . . (430).