Stichweh Page 1 10/19/2014 Rudolf Stichweh Strangers in World Society – Indifference and Minimal Sympathy (published in: Between Nanoworlds and Global Culture. Science + Fiction, Berlin: Jovis 2004, pp. 111 – 123) Otherness and Strangeness The social experience of strangeness must be distinguished from that of otherness. The otherness of another human being is an incontrovertible and hence a universal social experience. It is the absolute precondition for my experiencing myself as my Self in contradistinction to the otherness of another human being. It is only possible to speak of strangeness, in contrast, when the otherness of another human being is experienced as irritating or disturbing. Ambivalence (in the sense of the existence of contradictory judgments made about one and the same object) and uncertainty characteristically accompany the experience of strangeness. This experience frequently triggers a need to act. We simply cannot let the disturbance we have experienced be, and we feel an urge to act and somehow deal with or even eliminate it. Two distinct conditions - social differences and factual differences – may underlie the experience of social or existential strangeness. In the first place, this experience may be associated with a social counterpart perceived as a stranger over and above the diversity in his ways of expressing himself and who is therefore regarded as a compact social object (compactness means here a legitimate overlooking of differences). Alternatively, the experience of existential strangeness may arise simply from factual differences and unfamiliarities associated with an object. We might find a certain area of knowledge (mathematics, information technology, the culture of the Hittites) strange or foreign. The moment of spatial and temporal distance plays a role in both forms of strangeness: distance can produce a sense of strangeness when thousands of years separate us from a foreign culture. However, this distance can also make that very same culture more acceptable because the spatial and temporal separation obviates any pressure to act. Here we shall concentrate on the social aspect of strangeness, i.e. on the fact that someone living in a society, or on the margins of that society, may be perceived and