Abstract

The article primarily addresses different philosophical views of otherness and tries to question them from a hermeneutic perspective. Above all, the conceptual radicalism of the asymmetrical relationships is criticized through the hermeneutic approach, understood not as mere strategy of appropriating the other or the stranger, but as an open process of understanding, in which the heterogeneity of those involved is subject to constant change, but is nevertheless always maintained. On this basis, the cultural-philosophical, but also social and political relevance of the opposition between cultural pessimism and cultural optimism is called into question.