This separation of self and other is a necessary stage in the formation of self-consciousness. However, it should be noted that depending on the positioning of the self against the other or the other against its own self, it will evolve into conflict and ultimately into the violence of sameness. It is intended in Islamic philosophy that the stage of unity can be reached by seeing and accepting differences. And one’s journey towards the other is a separation from oneself in order to understand and know oneself. Arthur Rimbaud’s “I am another” is the simplest expression of the fact that one can only reach self-consciousness by looking into the mirror of the other.
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, as an expression of man’s process of becoming human and becoming conscious of himself, describes the encounter of different selves, even ‘I’ and ‘anti-self’. In Hegel’s philosophy, this situation, expressed as the ‘alienation’ of the self from itself, is determined as a void that will negate the positive content. At this point, human beings desire to turn towards a nature and structure different from themselves. In Hegel, this desire, as a distinctive special characteristic, will lead the individual to an objectivity that is acceptable to everyone on the way to self-consciousness. The process of objectification of consciousness is the manifestation of absolute being or absolute spirit, which is the creator, God himself, corresponding to the reality of the dialectical unfolding of the individual in the universe or in history. Hegel’s attempt to integrate and unify the self and the not-self in the absolute spirit is in a sense an attempt to draw the transcendent being (God), which Kant had isolated from the world of phenomena, back into natural, social and even historical reality. In Leibniz and Spinoza, too, such a divine opening is observed.
As with existence, the folding of consciousness upon itself, its separation from itself and its return to itself, is a process of evolution. In terms of the formation of consciousness and self-consciousness, this process requires the existence of an object opposed to consciousness and the consciousness of another being opposed to its own consciousness.
Opposition is the catalyst for dialectical progress. In the development of consciousness, the “Other” is a being opposed to consciousness in the negating phase of the dialectical process. But, above all, this opposition is not, in Hegel, a simple and irreconcilable opposition that completely abolishes its opposite, but an opposition that serves to objectify thought or consciousness at a higher stage. The dialectical negation between master and slave, although one necessitates the existence of the other, will result in the negation of a value that appears as a desire in one person by the negation of the value in the other, by turning into a value that is also desired by the other, resulting in their sameness.
In Marxist Philosophy, more commonly known as a materialist interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, Marx expresses the difference of his system from Hegel’s system as follows:
“My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian method, it is the very opposite of it. For Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, that is, the process of thinking, which Hegel transforms into an independent subject under the name ‘Idea’ – is the creator and architect of the real world, and the real world is only the external and phenomenal form of the Idea. For me, on the contrary, the Idea is nothing but the reflection of the material world in the human mind and its transformation into forms of thought.”
According to Engels, another architect of the system: “Matter is not a product of spirit, that is, of essence, but spirit itself is nothing but the highest product of matter.”
Hegel’s opposition of self and other, in other words, the concept of alienation, is taken together with the concept of ‘thingification’, ‘thingization’, in other words, ‘objectification’ in Marxist theory. Human beings are alienated from the products and objects they produce with their own labor and activity; these products are alienated not only in terms of material products but also in terms of philosophy, religion, art, state and law, and human beings objectify themselves in the face of these values they create.
Marx further expanded Feuerbach’s assertion that religion is an area in which man alienates himself from himself, saying that all material and spiritual values lead to such alienation. The process of alienation of the subject points to an intersubjective power relationship in the subject’s relation to the other and to nature. In Marx, the alienation of man from man and man from nature is treated as a positive situation. Because, according to Marx, the sense of alienation will mobilize and awaken the human being to return to the classless society without private property, to the primitive communal period, which was the first form of society and therefore the golden age of humanity, this time with a conscious desire and activity, and will emerge as a transformative, revolutionary desire in the process of returning to oneself. With Marx, materialism ceased to be mechanical and became dialectical, and in this dialectical materialism there is room for spiritual values. It has an ideal that humanity as a whole can be saved.
In the difference between self and other, Nietzsche substitutes the notion of affirmation in the ethical field for the negation in Hegelian dialectics. Whereas for Hegel, with the negation of the other by the self, the self becomes conscious of itself by discovering the consciousness reflected back to itself, in Nietzsche there is no such negation. On the contrary, one asserts one’s difference with the other and affirms this difference. As Deleuze puts it, what the will wants is the affirmation of difference.
Nietzsche thinks that universal morality, master-slave morality as he calls it, has a structure that is always negative and exhausts the power of the other because it denies human existence and becoming. He emphasizes that it has a destructive aspect that tries to eliminate differences with a slavish sense of resentment, with a perception that demonizes and demonizes those who do not conform to its own table of values. While his noble morality develops by saying yes to himself, his slave morality says no to what is outside, what is different, in short, what is not his own. While the noble one, the master, does not need an evil outside of himself in forming his morality, in forming his own values of goodness, the slave, on the contrary, needs an evil outside of himself, devaluing everything the master defines as good as evil. By pitting good and evil against each other in the name of truth, by making good and evil enemies, slave morality denies human existence and becoming and thus devalues the concept of good. Thus, from the point of view of slave morality, life points to evil.
This is where Nietzsche’s attempt to build his ethics ‘beyond good and evil’ gains meaning. His ethics aims to enrich life by accepting it with its differences and thus not to develop a hostile attitude towards those who are not like him.
