Thinking of Difference and Otherness from a Husserlian Perspective

Nowadays one tends to approach the issue of “pluralism” almost exclusively as a phenomenon that affects human beings’ social dimension and the multifarious ethical, political, and cultural challenges that the era of globalization lays at the door of human communities all over the world. Nevertheless, the deep structural problems that are here at play are rational dilemmas upon which humanity has reflected since the dawn of Greek philosophy. We refer to two of them: on the one side, the relationship between unity and multiplicity; and, on the other, between “sameness” and “otherness,” namely, between “identity” and “difference.” These conceptual problems are so crucial that without their recognition, the possibility itself of theoretical thought, practical rules, and ethical or esthetical valuation would collapse. Yet without multiplicity unity is in need of an explicandum, and without unity multiplicity lacks determination. Ontological, theological, epistemological, axiological, and practical interrogations have kept themselves in suspense for more than twenty-two centuries at the brink of these problems.