is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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"Nothing is more comical than the concern that a being destined to destruction takes for itself."
"Nothing is more comical than the concern that a being destined to destruction takes for itself."
Levinas wants us to think about our Western heritage that has based its political theory all or mostly on a presumption that self-preservation is the main human truth, or, at least, its main motivator. He points out that self-preservation is made tragic, or perhaps comic, by death, that is, by mortality, by the limited effects perservering in one's own being can have. "Nothing is more comical than the concern that a being destined to destruction takes for itself." Levinas' contention that prior to individuation and concern for one's own freedom there is a responsibility for other human beings that weighs on us--before we have the chance to say yes or no to it--this is something that is not rendered absurd by death. So death, which stands as the contradiction or ultimate threat to any philosophy that concentrates on self-preservation or weighs its effects according to pleasure or happiness, is no contradiction for an unchosen responsibility.
What does that mean? How about: having responded to others and worked to help them, or having stood up for what justice demands for others and not just yourself, that has meaning whether or not you are alive to see it. A life lived solely for the sake of your own pleasure or your own self-preservation, advancing only your own interests, that life leaves nothing behind when it is gone. Hence the tragedy or comedy of a life consumed by self-interest. All that fretting and hoarding and competing, and for what?! This is not all that could be meant by the statement: "Nothing is more comical than the concern that a being destined to destruction takes for itself." But it is something.
Self-preservation is measured by "being," or preceded by a decision on something that human beings have the capability to decide for or against. My responsibility for other human beings (which means a responsibility for justice, and not just locally) is not anything I could have consented to. It is a fact of the human condition that we are all born into a world full of practices, conventions, realities and deep-rooted injustices, none of which are our "fault" and many of which we would not have chosen, had we been given a choice. So if there is to be justice, it is my job to do something about it, even if the harms in question have nothing to do with me, and were never done or intended by me. It is not idealistic to think this, it is realistic.
But you might wonder: how could anyone argue against the importance of self-preservation, or of happiness? Well, no one does, really. Levinas is not giving us an ethic for saints who think nothing of their own lives. One of his points is that the response we have to other human beings is inescapable, despite all the denials of it we encounter or undergo daily. So Levinas might state something like, this responsibility for others is The Good, and it seizes all of us prior to free will or any decision we make to be Good. But Goodness doesn't have to "be." It is there, in the form of the response to the other that can be ignored or taken up as a call to responsibility. It can be ignored (and therefore never come to be). It is very easy to choose self-interest over solidarity with others. So it isn't possible to argue against the importance of self-preservation� as Levinas points out, the face of the other signifies, at the same time, the possibility AND the impossibility of murder. Thou shalt not� and yet sometimes thou does it anyway. BUT. Nor is it possible to argue against the way in which we are affected by others whether or not we choose to be. To do so would be to misunderstand the human condition.
Case in point: concentration on pleasure or happiness usually brings us back to our bodies at some point. But the body also reminds us that there is no escaping the self. This body is where the self is. The self is affected by what is outside of it, but there is no leaving the body behind. We don�t leave ourselves so that we can come back and find ourselves. No, we are always trapped "right here" (as any night of insomnia, experience of increasing body weight, or ungraceful moment in front of someone you wanted to impress demonstrates). So as pleasure-seekers we try to escape thinking about others but are brought back to ourselves, our "being stuck" in our bodies.
So, being only ourselves (nothing more, nothing less), we are affected by others, and that demonstrates the impossibility of evading the call to responsibility. The call comes to me as me, and not me as one unit of a universalizable humanity. It is not possible for me to wait for someone else to act and still consider myself an individual who has been "called" by responsibility. In this way the freedom of the individual is intimately tied to the individual's unchosen responsibility for others. There are thousands of theories and conventions and human practices that claim otherwise: they want to posit the individual as always already free, with a freedom limited only by what it would have chosen to take on as an obligation. But Levinas argues that, phenomenologically speaking, if we think about the preconditions that make such a belief possible (the human condition, for instance), we can't really find that belief in an unproblematic autonomy for the individual holds up. We have to admit that prior to being individuals capable of making free choices we are already affected by others.
Of course, theorizing the autonomy of the human individual has done a lot of good in the world. One could say it caused two revolutions (French, American) that did issue in all the kinds of justice and belief in rights we now take to be "self-evident." (Before the shift in thinking that "caused" the revolutions, human beings were largely thought to be born into castes or classes or social positions in which they had been placed in by god or history, and therefore those positions were thought to be inescapable.) So why bother challenging a theory that gives us our belief in rights? Well, for one thing, there's The Terror that followed the French Revolution. But that may not be the fault of IDEAS. But here's a problem that does belong to the ideas:
We live in a (largely westernized even if globalizing) world that bases its ideas about justice, and many of its systems of justice, on a belief that human rights ought to belong to every human being. Everyone ought to have rights because human beings are individuals who deserve equal treatment. But the same philosophy or system that asserts the inalienability of individual rights also makes the possibility of awarding human rights to all individuals equally impossible. It makes this impossible by tying those rights to the individual's status as citizen of a state capable of awarding and protecting rights.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of the French revolution linked rights to citizenship. You can hear it doing so in its title. The first principle of that declaration reads �Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.� Sounds pretty good (despite the fact that it really does mean "men" and not "human beings"). Better than monarchy and historically imposed class distinction. But the third principle reads �The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. Nobody nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.� The designers of the declaration did not imagine a moment at which there would be people to whom the category of citizen or nation did not apply or did not help.
But there are refugees and stateless persons. And there are citizens of countries whose rights-granting and �protecting powers are compromised by globalized entities like the WTO and the IMF. There are millions of people in this world who do not have meaningful rights, and so rights turn into privileges for those who actually have them, and that is an affront to the philosophy of rights and of justice that would declare that rights are the property of every human being equally.
Perhaps it is understandable that the thinkers of the revolutions of the 18th century would make such an error, since the men who wrote the documents were trying to create a whole new political order, and couldn�t foresee every possible problem. However, this next quotation is harder to explain: it was written in 1948, in the midst of one of the hugest refugee crises ever known (WWII!). It comes from Article Two of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It states that "no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdiction, or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs." But what if there is no country or territory where one belongs, or if there is no country or territory willing to claim you? Hannah Arendt pointed out in 1948 that it was easy to believe in the universality of human rights until the world was faced with populations whose meaningful rights had been lost and who found themselves without any sturdy tie to the human community in general, simply because they had been shoved outside the system of nation-states. She observed the terrible truth that this was not a product of a lack of civilization, but that only in a world fully "civilized" and divided up into states--where states were also assumed to take care of all beings' needs for rights--could create a class of persons who were, basically, forced into the conditions of savages. This is what our rights-based civilization has created. We can't fix it by spreading the same old conception of rights because that conception has made the problem what it is. We can only fix it by thinking differently. That's right, we need a new paradigm of subjectivity that slowly changes what people think it means to be an individual of equal worth and deserving of justice. That is what Levinas gives us.
A question to end with today: Does the world change its power structures without violent revolution? I'm not sure I want to live long enough to see the probable answer to that question. But nor do I necessarily want to die thinking that it's impossible. ("Nothing is more comical than the concern that a being destined to destruction takes for itself.")
I do wonder, however, what a revolution based on a philosophy that recognizes the limitations of self-preservation as a principle would look like. Would it be peaceful? Perhaps it would, if we came to realize that peace isn't calmness and lack of disturbance; it is willingness to let your assumptions be interrupted by other's ideas, and it is hard work and new ways of thinking and compromise and, well, pretty much the opposite of everything the president of the USA believes it is.
8:11 p.m. - January 03, 2005
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