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Who is my "other"?
People’s perceptions of the world are received as a gift through relationships, language, culture and experience. The world is also perceived and intended to be a certain way by each person. Our perceived world is at once intended, yet beyond our intentions, as it is also intended to be a certain way by others. (Husserl) The centrality of the human subject to a perceived world remains firmly intact as humans compete for the pre-eminence of their intended worlds. Contemporary talk about “the other” does not allay the problem of humans assuming that they are the centre of their existence. While people accept otherness that can be assimilated, this hardly remains what is called “otherness.” We need to be circumspect then, when speaking about “the other.” v The phrase, “the other,” is an abstraction that has become a rhetorical weapon. “The other” is frequently uttered, not in a spirit of appropriate disquiet but aggressively, as an expression of reproof. Here, “the other” is cited as an imperative to accept difference, yet the rhetoric is used imperiously, to shame those who assumedly do not display the same unqualified acceptance. In talk of “the other,” the specificity of this other is seldom offered—only an abstraction, without names, and a poisoned chalice of posturing in which avowal of “the other” is a way of closing dialogue rather than opening it. Some people are assumedly put in their place through the use of a cliché that remains unspecified. Yet, a crucial aspect is missing. The great thinker of “the other,” Levinas, frequently said of himself in relation to a tangible other: “We are all guilty, every one of us, and I more than all the rest.” “The other” was a source of deep personal anguish. Instead of “the other” referring to those I can accept but some others presumably do not, the specific reality of “the other” is a disquieting recognition of my capacity for ambivalence before the humanity of a specific person or a particular community to whom I fail to be truly neighbour, unequivocally, with singular intention. We are never in a position of being absolved of responsibility for another, much less, any claim that we have fulfilled our existing responsibilities without reserve. In realistic terms, “the other” is other in referring to someone who is a potential or actual challenge to my values and before whom I experience profound disquiet. For this reason, I cannot determine who “the other” is for another person. One person’s other may be another’s genuine sibling. My reticence toward an “other” requires my repentance and not my calling for another’s repentance. v “The other” may represent values and behaviour that are detrimental to others. This is where Levinas made reference to “the third” as an important aspect of thinking about “the other.” In “the other,” I am called to respond in fidelity to a unique person. This is also a summons to responsibility for “the other.” Yet in the proximity of one person to another there is always a “third” who adjudicates between the specific demands of tangible others. Before “the other,” we are called to responsibility. Before the demands of another on others, “the third” ensures that there is discretionary wisdom and adjudication of demands. In this way, the potentially infinite demand of “the other” may be restrained by “the third” when it assumes detrimental expressions. In the legacy of Christian wisdom, the attitude of hating the sin but loving the sinner has held together both responsibility for “the other” and discretionary wisdom among many others. Yet this wisdom has been eclipsed, even ridiculed by a pervasive assumption that “the other” must always be right, merely through the clichéd status of being “the other.” This is a failure to recognise that the capacity to distinguish between actions and identity is a necessary prerequisite for personal change and growth. When a person’s actions and identity are wholly conflated, it is possible for states or communities to readjust undesirable behaviour by readjusting identity, even forcibly through institutions. Yet the Christian imperative for changed behaviour occurs within personal, freely embraced possibilities for transformation, in which actions can be reviewed and modified within the formation of character. “The other” may be a cliché that is repeated within an assumption that the other is always right, yet this assumption fails to recognise the genuine human experience of hard, even violent edges of intractable and irreconcilable otherness. Examples abound. v We all sustain distance from some “other,” which is the reality of being human. It is also the challenge of a specifically Christian imperative to genuine love for someone who is tangibly other—an antagonist no less. Jesus knew that we all experience some such “other,” so the imperative to “love your enemy” is necessary. The imperative is personal as tangible. “The other” is specific—this person or this community at this time and in this context, not an abstraction detached from the context of tangible and vocative encounter with a specific person. The Christian imperative to “love your enemy” is encompassed with affirmations of grace within a new trajectory of being human in Jesus Christ. Humans need transformation beyond the scope of their resources in order to respond adequately to another who takes up the position of antagonist or enemy. Love for enemy requires nothing less than a movement toward self-relinquishment. Such love is demonstrated supremely in the redemptive initiative of God in Christ toward humanity in its perennial state of hubristic enmity. Christian faith is unique in speaking of God’s response to human enmity, while also giving the possibility of life in the Spirit lived in positive response to another, even if he or she is perceived as a potential source of enmity. Instead of engaging specific human beings in difficult and costly expressions of love, unquestioning elevation of “the other” merely becomes a flight into ideology, away from any tangible expressions of engagement. Yet in reality, the so-called “other” has a name and is both known as human—like us, while unknown as human—also like us. We do not have to resort to another culture to encounter “the other,” for many people consistently experience or sustain some form of irreconcilable other within their own homes. If we must persist with the phrase, “the other,” without it lapsing into vacuity, why not speak of that which is experienced as truly other to our sense of identity and dignity—death. Death is so other that in the violence of its mortal mauling, whether quick or torturously slow, it will inevitably strip each of us of everything. Do we really know then, what we are talking about when we speak of “the other”? God alone knows who the other is of each, along with the faltering intent of the heart in all. Ultimately, there is no other so other as to be outside or beyond a triune perspective of God’s love for all creation, including humanity in its sin. In this love, the story of Jesus Christ discloses the kenotic or self-giving reality of God’s unreserved exposure to otherness, even of death and nothingness, in order to vanquish every real threat of otherness to human dignity. Beyond any specific and relative other among people, the creature’s ultimate other is God the Creator, who remains otherwise to all human conjectures and speculation about otherness—after the Pauline and Johannine inscrutability of God. Precisely here, Christian faith gives testimony to the otherness of God meeting us intimately in triune love as the possibility of transformed humanity in sustained and tangible community. In this, there is no “other,” only a challenge to our faith in the reality of such love. Method
sources: Husserl The Essential Husserl:
Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology; Levinas Discovering Existence with Husserl; Otherwise than Being or Beyond
Essence; Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other;
Ricoeur Oneself as Another. |
