The human being is the other of the human being

We are all the other to one another, to each other and to ourselves and for ourselves.

"Othering" is one of the concepts never absent from the lips of studies that take as their subject the segments in Turkey who suffer from exclusion by certain segments of society or by the state. When we take the concept as given in this way, we can say that there is hardly anyone in Turkey who has not, in one way or another, been subjected to this treatment by one group or another. The Kurds, whose identities were ignored, whose languages were ignored and whose speaking was banned..

While we keep looking for Islamophobic obsessions elsewhere, opposition to the headscarf, the most typical manifestation of Islamophobic behavior, institutionalized in Turkey and steered the state's official practices; in political discourse, headscarved women were not only demeaned, but treating headscarved students as second-class citizens, excluding them, demeaning them and discriminating against them became an official norm.

We can say the same for the Alevis. A condition of exclusion inherited from the Ottomans continued in the Republican period with a new definition located in the Dersim incident. In later periods, the exclusion and discrimination that required Alevis to hide themselves as an identity made the Alevis too feel like strangers in their own homeland.

The number of those who see themselves excluded by being systematically subjected to discrimination is not limited to these. Next in line are the Armenians, the Roma, the Greeks and other non-Muslims. Who does all these exclusions, or "othering" in the common expression? Apparently, these exclusions are the work of the identity politics of the authoritarian and totalitarian regime formed in the single-party period. While the Kemalist identity politics, by establishing an identity of its own, tried to fit everyone into this identity, it naturally also identified the loyal and the disloyal links in adherence to this identity. It said "Happy is the one who says I am a Turk," but even so it created a sphere of intimacy of its own, in which saying "I am a Turk" is not a sufficient measure of loyalty. This sphere of intimacy is in fact a sphere in which the republic does not belong to all citizens, or in which some citizens of the republic are regarded as "more equal" than others.

Just let everyone try to hold the Kemalists responsible in this way for all this othering. About five years ago, were there not news reports and studies published in Turkey declaring that Kemalist secular segments felt themselves othered? In my view, this feeling of "otherness" marked a real break in the history of the use of the discourse of the other. It also showed that the time had come for a deeper ethical and philosophical reflection on what the other is.

What we call society is generally a structure in which different classes, status groups, strata, ethnicities or professions, whose interests and perceptions at times conflict, exist together. The relations of so many different groups with one another are not uniform. Each has a different perception of selfhood. This perception inevitably produces a perception of the "other" too.

Often a person's perception of himself carries within it a reaction to the attitudes he thinks the segments he labels "other" hold about him. That a human being is the mirror of a human being is a possibility for the human being, but it is not true that this possibility is open to everyone to the same degree. Not every person succeeds in seeing himself in the other. Perhaps this can be described as a separate level of maturity. But without entering into that description, if we are to depict what normally goes on, it is a very ordinary situation that in society people have experiences of holding up a mirror to themselves in another as much as they see in another a drive of hostility that alienates them from themselves. This situation is in any case a fundamental problem that deeply occupied the first-period sociologists on how society can be possible at all. The relative pessimism that led Hobbes to the idea that man is a wolf to man came from this point.

We could have settled the matter by saying "Man is the other of man." Yet at this point, adding that otherness need not be perceived as something like "wolfishness." While not neglecting that although there is some wolfishness in this otherness, it is rather mirror-likeness. Indeed, in the introduction of this study we pointed to how the discussion of "otherness" actually emerged as the foundation of an ethical discussion. In this discussion, which came to light in the work of the Jewish philosopher Levinas, the "other" is in fact not the name of the excluded, discriminated-against person or group. On the contrary, it is the place where our ethical responsibility toward it begins.

The other is the person or being whose rights we must protect without causing the slightest violation. A being we must not disturb with our existence, a being-in-itself we must not interfere with by attributing definitions and knowledge from our own horizon even while knowing and learning.

The other is the boundary where our ethical responsibility begins. We will not kill the other, we will not lie to them, we will not covet their property, their body, their honor. We will not meddle with their mind, religion, identity. We will not try to make them like ourselves, we will accept them as they are in any case.

To say all this is, in a way, easy. But what we are truly tested on while saying these things is this. This "other," whom we will not kill, will not lie to, whose religion, honor, property, life and mind we will respect, "even if not one of us," we will follow the same ethical maxim. That came out as a somewhat confusing sentence, of course. But believe me, this is where many people truly lose. How valid can these ethical rules be when the "other" is concerned? As Levinas did, when the one killed is Palestinian and the one killing is Israeli, how can these deep philosophical-ethical considerations be so stylishly suspended?

A study of ours, titled "We Are All the Other: Identities and Perceptions in Turkey," based on the data of a sociological field study and prepared together with Ahmet Kızılkaya, has been published as a book by Tezkire Publications. It is full of data with which we can trace these questions and many more.