Ping Pong 57: Other Eyes?
Levinas’ late great genius might be said to come down to the realization that there was a real problem in understanding exactly who the Other was, if they cannot be understood simply as an adjunct of me. How after all, can one allow another to be different, to be other, without assuming something about that otherhood? Where in me does that capacity for difference exist? His suggestion is very simple. There is only one real place where I am regularly differed, and that is perception. To understand another is somehow to be caught up in perceiving them. But here of course one needs to clarify the position somewhat. I perceive many things, from toothbrushes to the planet Mars without them feeling ‘other’ to me. On the contrary I am only what I am, because I perceive these things. To simply perceive is therefore not enough to be ‘othered’; Rather it is a certain perception, in particular the perception of a face. As I look at your face, Levinas suggests, I see a spirit utterly different to me. This difference is complex and multilayered. On the one hand I actually see you as another element or aspect and something totally different, something I merely look at. On the other, this differing, Levinas argues, ought to be understood as also inspiring me to act in a certain way towards you. It should inspire me, he thinks, to be moral, for it is through morality that I approach the other. Both these subtle aspects of ‘the other’ need to be examined in turn.
What is it to see another? In a sense this is a question which has been rendered increasingly problematic over the years. ‘The other’ will be seen in a me coming up short. I look to another therefore and suddenly feel that my version, my account of my world is not enough. To see a face other than mine, with all its hard lines of sorrow and fear, is to be drawn up against something and drawn into something. This much is clear. ‘The other’ is therefore traditionally the focus of both travel but also photographs and paintings. And modernity progressively erodes the encounter with ‘the other’ in both of these moves. On the one hand therefore we all now travel, we all now go on nice little gap years (doing worthy things) and trot the globe, or look it up on ‘Google Earth’. And the world has become very used to us doing so. More than that, it has been long ago discovered that our habit, our desire to go out and see the world, can be turned into a lucrative enterprise. The result is of course that the world has shifted around a gear. It is now geared not to imperialism, but rather to travel. Many a country’s main import is tourists and their main export is therefore a cod history of themselves. That is, the export is that version of themselves which they show to others or that all others like to see. In the hustle and bustle of it all, any actual risk that one’s mind be challenged or changed will of course be utterly lost. On the other hand, in the case of photos, the old value of the image to communicate has become problematic. There are simply too many photos around for the individual otherness of one or other of them to stand out and stand clear. Photos are a common currency and we are rather obliged to move quickly between them. They are therefore not so much the gateway into other’s minds or the reflection of another’s life, as yet another aspect in the bubble in which we all live.
The actual position or perception of ‘the other’ is therefore at risk. This risk is of course amplified as the entire tenet of Levinas’ argument is that the perception of another face as some reflection of another reality, another world, is something that is rather unsettling to every individual who looks upon such an ‘other’. It is after all the point, that their world is no longer the only world. It is the point at which we must allow for and welcome others and other voices. A point therefore maybe of growth but certainly of humbleness and a willingness to look beyond a self.
The temptation is always in every and any community to stifle out such profundities of difference ‘The other’ is after all always vulnerable, they can always be suppressed, and communities including and perhaps most truly ‘the global community’ do not like this ‘other’.
They do not, when all is said and done, fit in with the image we have of a single world which develops in a certain fixed way (i.e. the less- and over-developed worlds), and uses a single economic system, and a single system of knowledge (science but also capitalism). ‘The other’ is annoying sounds in the margins, sounds that do not demand to be heard, and which can be very easily suppressed. Even worse than that, these other voices can be articulated in such a way as to annihilate their otherness. This challenge is a double-edged one. On the one hand ‘the other’ will almost certainly change its nature under the light of the modern gaze. Why should it not? Why should the poor stay poor when there is ironically money to be made out of their iconic poverty? Why indeed? On the other hand, our entire response to ‘the other’, and our glorification of it, in a sense always loses sight of what ‘the others’ are in themselves. We take another philosophy, say an Eastern one, and turn it into a happy hunting ground for personal development and a faculty for generating Gurus. Any actual otherness, any of the rich complexities that might genuinely challenge and bewilder individuality, are therefore lost within a maze of personal development and the desire to use another system for one’s own inner growth and inner power.
‘The other’ has slipped therefore - it has become an all too convenient challenge to our mind. It has become the point at which we once again delight ourselves in another, and revel in their difference. How could it be otherwise though? Levinas has an answer to this problem. What could be genuinely ‘other’ is the fact that another and the sight of their face and all that is written upon it, is the point that I am inspired to be different. It is therefore truly speaking from an unsettling place. It is the place, Levinas argues, from which morality actually arises. I allow another their otherhood by challenging myself - not so much to simply grow in terms of personal development, but rather to become worthy of allowing for something other than me. It is the point therefore, at which I need to break my nature and make myself accountable to something else, to another being or essence. It is therefore the point pitched beyond any one being or any one lived essence, but which, when given, forces each being to account for itself in the light of another and through their ethical responses to that other’s life and world. But then what does this mean in practice? This question is one that might be practically developed in three main ways: on the level of the modes of everyday life; the level of global initiatives; and finally on the level of how we understand our position in the world.
On the level of one’s everyday encounters with others, Levinas is very clear. It is never right to treat people as means. But more than that, it is not right to simply forget that they are utterly different from one. Therefore it is never right to forget their own individuality. One must not therefore simply treat humans as they appear within one’s own mind as a figure of love or a figure of hatred (or anything else in between). There is simply always more going on within them and through them than that. What is more, this additional element, call it their nature or spirit, needs not just to be respected. Its very presence and one’s need to respect it, ought to make one perpetually question one’s own motives in an exchange. The problem of course being that we run our society either between individual acts of selfishness or large scale organizations, or again through our own past (and our consequent assumption that is now reflecting our experience) we assassinate these others. That is we have a tendency not to allow for their difference or even to respect or understand it. We therefore are caught up in excessive acts of internalization of others (we devour them quite literally in our minds - we make them ours).
It is therefore this excessive internalization of another, which of course occludes in itself the very possibility for morality. How can I behave morally when I am not allowing for the fact that all kinds of things are bubbling away in you, all kind of things that I probably will not like and quite possibly will not really understand. Morality arises therefore when I allow you your freedom to be utterly ‘other’ than me, or anything I can fully comprehend. It is when I try to re-make myself to be worthy of this difference and forge myself in the light of it.
On the level of global politics, this otherness has a particular power. It is all too easy for the West to muscle into communities and assume we know best. We teach others therefore how to run their economy, how to generate power and how to recycle their waste. In doing so we simply suppress or ignore the myriad other voices in all these countries; voices that would not necessarily respond to our advances in the way that we think they should, if they were left to themselves. In ignoring these voices, the voices for example, of the recyclers (and re-users) of Africa we lose sight of another way that we might actually understand what waste is, and therefore other that ways we might respond to it and use it ourselves.
That is to say the ethic of globalization as we understand it, seems to be the expansion of one kind of difference, one single simple loop of being across the world. We might all be connected now, and that might make the world more complex in itself, but we are connected only at the cost of having to share the same dream, and be part of the same basic community. I.e., we globalize only in a certain way. Levinas suggests then, that this really need not be the case. Genuine ‘globalization’, that is, the genuine response to a world greater than ourselves, ought to be given in the question of other differences, other responses within that world in both the context if its day to day running but also in the context of how one responds to its very globalization. It is therefore in the voice of other peoples, and in their responses to our noisy lives, that what we are might be challenged and forced to change itself or account for itself differently.
Or to put it another way, it is not a coincidence that modern religion looks to ‘The Third World’ for answers (as well as converts). The eyes of the modern poor really do look at you as the eyes of God once did. That is, they look at us across a chasm of difference and complexity. This difference then inspires us to be ‘other’ as God once demanded us to be different, and forced us to be moral. Christianity with its messages about the value of poverty and the importance of charity, feels very at home with this part of modernity at least. But the there is (perhaps ironically) another inhabitant to this element of modernity. Science also needs to be about ‘the other’, or at least good science does.
Science in the end, is after all a system of thought that allows for and respects doubt and uncertainty. The entire point of science is to allow for doubt. One is simply never certain. It is in this uncertainty and in these unsolved problems that creativity actually lies. Hidden away in one or two problems of nineteenth century physics, lay the entire encounter of relativity and quantum mechanics, an account that would then greatly enrich the understanding of conventional nineteenth century thought. Likewise, nested away within the terrors or oddities of the lab, was the entire modern discipline of complexity theory that took those errors and those oddities and turned them into a rich complex field of study.
Science is therefore the discipline that ought to respect differences and allow for them; that is, it is the discipline that makes errors and the point at which one starts being able to produce things simply, a productive and even a creative force for change in the world. In this regard it is the other feature of modernity that ought to support a Levinian account of the world. However it does not, because it immediately implodes into technology. It is the role then of this technology to hollow out any aspect of otherness, to colonialize any species of otherness which science is exploring and to render it useful (and therefore deprive it of its mystery). The trouble is therefore then, that the scientific extension of knowledge looks to the foolish or at the first glance like the advance of certainty and not, as needs to be seen, as the endless multiplying of doubt.
In a sense these last points define a deep problem with any Levianian ‘programme’ for the world. One might agree that one needs to create a system to respect others, and a morality that allows for genuine difference. And yet it is not immediately clear what follows from that. That is, are we going to understand that otherness in its purest form as the gaze of the poor which challenges us to be different? But then, is not this rather passive and personal? Hence the mere looking at the poor and wanting to change oneself because of their gaze is hardly the stuff of global morality. It rather must surely either become very vapid new age-ism or quietist spiritualism. The alternative route, that science is active in regard to respect of ‘the other’ and yet that action hollows out the very power of ‘the other’ to be different is equally problematic. In either case, one regards ‘the other’ and allows for them only in a passive sense. One knows that they are out there, one might then challenge one’s own mind in the light of this knowledge. And yet one is unable to simply act on that knowledge and create a world that, as it is created, respects that difference. Everything that ‘matters’ is therefore rendered transcendental and passive. Thence it becomes a real challenge, how to create an active account of such a world; how, that is, to allow its activity and yet also respect difference. It is to this problem that the next Rant will turn.
