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Carolina Civic Voice Fall 2005 Vol. 5, No 3 |
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On the Other Hand Face to Face With The Other
There is nothing more characteristic of our time than the frequency of the experience of “otherness.” As the world has grown smaller in so many ways, due to advances in communications and transportation, an inevitable corollary has been our ever-increasing encounters with individuals and situations that we would never have run into in earlier times. These encounters guarantee that we are constantly being exposed to new ideas, new cultures, new outlooks, and new philosophical and religious perspectives of new people as a matter of course. The social turmoil which all this inevitably entails accounts for some of the malaise marking modern life. Letters to the editors of local newspapers put on sharp display how ‘others’ are perceived adversely in a given time and place. The ugly scenes of rage that all too often serve as sound-bites for the media when ethnic or religious clashes occur are especially sad. Common sense cries out for a bit of basic mediation to reduce such unhealthy venom. Much of today’s ‘pop spirituality’ does not provide significant help, strangely enough, because its focus is so often totally on the self. Its goal is couched in terms of finding deeper meaning so as to integrate a fragmented life and work toward a desirable wholeness. But an obvious danger in this is the narcissism which results from a single-minded focus on the needs of the self. The greater wisdom which the major religious traditions have realized at their best is the paradox that the good of the self cannot be attained except by reaching well beyond the self. In other words, the welfare of the self depends upon the presence and relationships of others. No one has written more forcefully on this crucial point than philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). He lost many family members in the Nazi holocaust and suffered his own ordeal as a prisoner of war while in the French army. His extraordinary sensitivity in thinking about the importance of others was deeply rooted in the horrors of World War II. One of his most unusual reflections came in insisting on the uniqueness of the human face. Every face one sees, he reminds us, is a face of otherness. Every face says “I am not you.” Every face says “Don’t kill me, don’t absorb me into your world, don’t obliterate me by making me the same as you. I am other. I am different. I am not you.” The face of the other breaks into my world, confronts me, challenges me to recognize it as other, and in doing so to respect that other and learn to respond seriously and appropriately. Levinas thus shifted the emphasis away from any kind of navel-gazing on the question of the meaning of life. He pointed rather to the primacy of ethical conduct, to relationships with others. Self as self is only one dimension of existence. Working out the relationship of self and others he saw as the real stuff of life. He unabashedly drew not only on the philosophical insights of his mentors, Husserl and Heidegger, but in doing so interwove them with his own rich knowledge of the Talmud. It was especially from the latter that he derived his insistence on the priority of ethics. The call for conversion, i.e., turning the self around, was the pivotal image. This turn brought one face to face with the other, thereby opening the way to authentic being. He had no use for ‘cheap theologies’ that domesticate the divine. Rather, he reminded both Jews and Christians that the road to the Absolute Other can be found only through interrelationships with the human other. Real religion, he knew, is not about my identification with God but about God’s identification with the other: with the widow, the orphan, the outcast, the stranger. In making his ethical case Levinas called on such passages as Deuteronomy 15:11—“There will never cease to be poor in the land; I command you, therefore: Always be open-handed with your neighbor, and with anyone in your country who is in need and poor.” He took this as so deeply rooted a necessity that he could speak of our “being held hostage to the other.” There is no way to transcendence except through the other. “I am bound and tied to you—to every you—and that is so from my first breath till my last. I am invested with responsibility even when I do not want to be.” In this Levinas put a sharper edge on the very notion of being chosen. “I am always and already obligated to you—chosen—even before I choose… Being-for-the-other is written into the very fabric of life; it is the way life is fundamentally structured.” As a result, he dealt first with responsibilities before any talking of rights and freedoms. In this sense he represented a counter-current bringing an uncommon biblical personalism to post-World-War-II European thought, just as his good friend Martin Buber also had done with his classic “I and Thou.” In the ten years since his death the thought of Levinas has been recognized by many as having special contemporary relevance. Ethical standards are always the earliest casualties in time of war, but in the past decade we have seen bewildering breakdowns on a massive scale. The vicious cycle of violence has escalated beyond control, wiping out all concern for the other. The nineteen ‘terrorists’ who carried out the mass murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people in Manhattan on 9/11/01 were driven by a withering rage. They could not see their victims as anything but faceless others to be destroyed indiscriminately in the most horrendous fashion. No wonder that for the next month the world held its collective breath, offering the U.S. unprecedented sympathy, while waiting, wondering and worrying about what our response would be. The wait was not long, and when the decision came, it was to respond in kind with the greatest possible violence. The vicious attackers had broken all the rules. The reaction was to deny them any benefit of conventional international rules of restraint. They were a unique new breed, vaguely described as ‘terrorists,’ and defined as global enemies against whom unlimited rage was warranted. Every conceivable means of wholesale destruction was justifiable. Once this plunge into fury was chosen, there was obviously no thought of turning back. No matter how many faceless Afghanis and Iraqis who would be slaughtered in the spectacular U.S. bombardment meant to ‘shock and awe’ the world. No matter the resulting breakdown of the infrastructure, devastating thousands of others who don’t make the news, who suffer and die from contaminated water, inadequate nutrition, unsanitary conditions, and hopelessly understaffed and ill-equipped health care facilities The ironic flip side of this gross obliteration was the surprising emergence of a totally unexpected quagmire in which thousands of U.S. military have already been sacrificed, victims of a reverse shock and awe movement that day after day brought ever more sophisticated explosives, detonated at will around and beneath them by virtually invisible attackers. It would be difficult to imagine a situation more completely devoid of the prophetic vision of Levinas. He tried to find the images and expressions to convey the unrelieved evil of purposely dehumanizing the other. He showed why consciously choosing to engage in the endless cycle of violence and counter-violence is the height of stupidity. He knew from his own bitter experience of war that the first thing it does is to turn the other into a faceless target, leaving nothing to restrain any of the manifold devices of hatred. Pre-emptive strikes, obliteration bombings, endless supplies of rockets, grenades, and machine guns; land-mines, poison gas, torture, rape, prison abuse, murder—all anti-human instruments and activities automatically gain blanket approval. In its recent open letter on the war, Pax Christi USA pointed out that “our best efforts to assist the Iraqi people will come not through military occupation, but through determined humanitarian and political support as they chart their new course through history.” The only problem is that this calls for a monumental change of mind and heart, especially among ‘leaders,’ a basic turnaround to face the other and take seriously the root principle of any real ethic, modern or ancient: “Every human being must be treated humanely.” Levinas did his best to sound the alarm, and all are miserably diminished as long as it is not heard.
Jim Megivern is Professor Emeritus of Religion and Philosophy at UNC Wilmington, and a regular columnist for CCV. |
