Self-reflection by the other

If you had to nominate a profound value that has been produced and cherished by Western civilization, would that not be the capacity for self-reflection?

This proposition is sometimes suggested during the workshop Thinking for someone else, and I think it is true. The Greek motto ‘Know thyself’, combined with the relentless search for truth by Socrates, has triggered a millennia long tradition of critical research. This has not only produced science and critical philosophy, but as its most praiseworthy result – in this view – also a tradition of self-scrutiny.

For examples of the latter, one can think of the Confessions of St. Augustine, the Essays of Montaigne or the Confessions of Rousseau. Typical of this tradition of self-scrutiny is that the self appears twice. The self is doing the action of the investigation, and thus appears as actor. But the self is also the object of the research performed by itself. Quite an achievement indeed.

Undeniably this capacity for self-reflection is something to be proud of. But is it the best thing a man or a culture can achieve? Will you, as a culture, manage in the end, working with the ability to self-reflect as your highest value? The proposition does not pretend that, but I add the question because I think it is an important question to which the answer is no. And because our culture is troubled by that negative answer.

That trouble, in my opinion, consists in the circumstance that, through the emphasis on the self in a double sense, the horizon of thought will also coincide with the horizon of self. The universe of the self-critical self is that of the self. Self-reflection remains reflection of the self on the self. Autonomy is the norm, the self remains its own initiator and author. Many beautiful things can spring therefrom, but the repetition of all those words ‘self’ also emphasizes the solipsistic character of autonomy thinking. How restrictive that is, is shown if you put another – self-invented – word next to it: other-reflection.

By which I mean: reflection – on yourself – that is not triggered by yourself but by someone else. Because, whatever you come up with in your attempts at self-criticism or whatever discipline you display in that, the world turns out to be just thát bit greater than you could imagine, and the other precisely different from what you could imagine. There are other universes indeed, which I can not get at by myself. There self-reflection – triggered by the self – stops, and other-reflection – triggered by something surprising from the other – starts.

This is difficult for Socrates and his followers. They indeed keep asking questions, but they mostly invent them themselves.

Also see Immune and Levinas and Rousseau

Measurability

The time that students rode through town in carriages is over, fortunately. True, in those days there always were a few of them that used the very same pool of money and time for thorough study of their subjects, in breadth and depth. Then quality could just spontaneously emerge: Bildung we can only dream of.

Because of the affluence on which that Bildung mostly rested, the latter had a decidedly elitist and exclusive character. I’m not sorry to see it gone, and I welcome the fact that large groups of other people now share in academic education.

So I also understand that a lot of public money goes to the universities. And that one wants to have some control over it. And that directors and managers should monitor that. And that inevitably some form of counting and measuring is always involved.

In the debate about the return on investment at the universities, I therefore disagree with the proposition that there is nothing to measure. Because immeasurability would make large-scale universities unmanageable. Then intellectual and cultural formation would again be accessible only to those of whom also the means are immeasurable.

In addition, there is another, more fundamental reason why I do not agree with the inmeasurability thesis. I think that measurability dóes exist in this field. However: not in the form of the brute performance indicators that managers and financials invent and apply nowadays. As if it were thém who provide the added value of education and research.

As to measurability in a realistic form, I rather think of the kind Ben Tiggelaar recently referred to in his NRC-column. People with serious ambitions, he wrote, also on the field of arts and sciences, often put themselves all sorts of standards – as countable and even rigid as imaginable. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright for example got up every day at four o’clock to work three hours in quiet. “Like the bureaucratic habit of many writers to count the number of words they daily produce and to impose themselves quotas. Hemingway: 500 words per day, Stephen King: 2000”.

The difference: these professionals know exactly what is needed for fruitful results. Tiggelaar’s advice to managers and financials would therefore be: go talk to the professionals and do not decide for thém what standards they must meet, but let them decide themselves. Let a professor describe his personal ideals and benchmark her own performance.

Because professors (and students) are no less keen on return than managers. But they have more sense of it.

Also see Grief

Defining the world

Define the world, we múst do so, because otherwise it will be chaos in our heads. So that’s why do we all do it. It is a matter of evolutionary survival, and it becomes manifest as our tendency to categorize and stereotype.

It is very well possible to speak dispassionately about it. That’s what, for example, Daniel Kahneman does in his book Thinking, fast and slow. “Stereotyping in our culture is a loaded term, but as I use it here, the meaning is neutral. One of the main features of our intuitive system is that it interprets categories as standards or prototypes. This is how we understand horses, refrigerators and police officers.”

But that it múst be done – because in order to survive in emergencies we have to be able to act immediately  and cannot allow any doubt – does not mean that our definitions are correct and our judgments founded.

So there is a fair chance that you put animals, people, things in the wrong box. And that is less innocent than it seems. Especially when you do that with people, because people in the last resort want themselves to have control over their own lives. If another puts them prematurely or wrongly in a certain box (that’s to say: defines them), it can feel like a border crossing: you don’t have anything to say about me! That feels like violence.

But at the same time, as I said, our lives are made up of definitions and labels that we impose on the world and others. And their obviousness sometimes is so big that it seems far-fetched to problematize them.

Thus you would think that the distinction between men and women is one of the most basic and easy ones that we can make. So that we may assume that everybody can be classified in one of those two categories. That’s why it is quite natural for us to ask: is it a boy or a girl?

However, what we then actually do, says Lies Wesseling, is that the many differences between people are thrown on just two heaps. Then everything that does not fit under the headings of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is seen as deviant or as irrelevant.

But nature is not that clear cut, at least not always. And more importantly, individual human experience is not so clear. Someone in a woman’s body may feel himself a man, or vice versa, or something in between. If you pin such a person, as a matter of course, to a stereotype, you can cause serious damage.

How hurtful that obvious categorization can be may appear from the experiences of people for whom those categories were not suitable and whose stories only recently are being taken seriously: the transgenders. Those stories are pure sadness. And in the Netherlands their number easily runs into 50,000.

Now there is a new Dutch law that confirms that identity is something that only you yourself can feel and name. Transgenders can now administratively change sex, even without changing anything to the body. For example, it may happen that a man gives birth to a child, and is regarded as the mother.

The new law does not abolish the categories, so there is still spoken in terms of male and female. The dream of many transgender continues, such as Vreer puts it: “I dream of a birth certificate and an identitycard without gender designation. Even an X, as recently is allowed in Australia, can be an improvement. That means ‘not specified’, and so it is with me”.

But anyway, the new law infringes on stereotypes and definitions that until recently seemed to be cast in concrete. The law may therefore be seen as a Levinassian answer to the problem that Levinas treats with great tenacity in all his works: of the injuries that with our defining thought, seeking stable categories, we inflict to others.

Could possibly the Dutch Black Peter (Zwarte Piet) be such a dubious stable category as well?

Also see Kol Nidrei and other illusions

Immune

To remain equanimous and unperturbable, preferably under all circumstances. Thus was, traditionally, described what philosophy was about and so it still is by some.

Last week I was reminded to that view in an interview with the French philosopher and sociologist Frédéric Lenoir. He told about his admiration for the stoic Dutch Holocaust-victim Etty Hillesum because she had reached the situation that philosophers always considered to be supreme, namely the one in which nothing can hurt you deeply anymore. “Philosophers have always said, since the early Greeks: happiness does not depend on the situation you are in”. It is easy indeed to recognize in this statement Socrates’ goal of equanimity which he preached up to his poisoned cup, and which is the goal of many other philosophers to our time.

I can very well understand that man, in the midst of so many earthly turmoil and instability, looks for a kind of invulnerability. Still, I'm glad there are philosophers who questioned that desire for absolute certainty or exposed it as a pursuit of power. Nietzsche started doing so, and the twentieth-century postmodern philosophers followed in his footsteps. But these trends are far from being taken seriously on a broad scale. May that be called true philosophy, it is asked then. Because, true philosophy strives for absolute certainty, doesn’t it?

The problem is that the latter aim produces, besides certainty and safety, also a lot of nasty things, mostly of an uncanny character. I think of the deep-rooted tendency in our society  to objectification and measurement which can give our work floors and manners the sterility that many periodically suffer from. I think also of the extent to which people live alongside each other, safe but untouchable, and more chilly than they might want.
This way of communicating, which has learned not to touch core issues any longer, could very well stem from that age-old philosophical program that tries to reduce our touchability. With its help we have managed to develop to a high level the art of communicative immunity. The result is a safe and efficient society, but one that sometimes is nothing about any longer.

But how, then, is that communicative poverty to be related to Etty Hillesum, with whom I started this piece? Isn’t she an icon of openness and engagement with what was going on around her? Yes, maybe. If it is not the case – as some said of her – that she idolized her teenagegirl-like commitment; so if her engagement was sincere, then that matches obviously very well with the widely sought immunity.

You could say that the Etty Hillesum’s sacrificial heroism (as also eg Mother Theresa’s), and the communicative sterility of our behavior are two sides of the same coin. Both are strategies for achieving immunity, and the one succeeds through total surrender and the other by screening off touchability.

What falls out is the daily mix of vulnerabilities, in which injuries and excuses, dullness and success alternate. The trivial touchability gets orphaned . That is to say, to simply exchange about things that matter becomes problematic. It is true, there is no heroism involved in such exchange, but by rich and warm communication it's that which may hold off sterility.

Too few philosophers know about this. I cherish those who make it a subject of their speculations, and I continue to call them philosopher despite everything.

Also see Taylor, Levinas and Emptiness, The Trap of Universalizing Reason and Progress after all

Landmarks

All religion is all alike, so you can regularly hear and read. Traditions that once were clearly defined today are more intertwined. More and more people assemble their own philosophy of life from a range of different traditions. The reason for that, says for example the magazine Happinez, is that people are looking for guidance and ‘something’ existential that transcends us. And some of that may be found in any tradition.

But sometimes one can – I think – surely draw clear marking lines between religions. A sharp line, namely between Judaism and Christianity, I came across lately concerning the question of where to look for deeper truths.

I read about the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. From him comes the statement “Why do you seek it outside of you? Why don’t you stay in your innermost and grab what is good in yourself? After all, you carry the whole truth substantially within you”.

This may sound familiar to us, not only from a knowledge of ancient or medieval mystics, but also from more contemporary self-centered spiritual training programs like Avatar or Landmark. The idea that the entire cosmos is rooted in yourself, is apparently deeply anchored in the Western genes.

This is different in the Jewish tradition. Judaism also knows the belief that each person is a cosmos in itself, according to the Talmudic statement that who rescues a person rescues a  world. But the fascination here is connected rather to the radical differences between the cosmoses, than to the radical otherness of another person.

A corollary of this fascination is the belief that one therefore does not carry the whole world  substantially within oneself. On the contrary: somethings keep slipping from me, namely that in which another person is substantially other indeed. In a way that I never could imagine beforehand.

With this approach the Jewish tradition creates its own puzzles and questions: how can we understand each other, how can we, with those radical differences, live together ?

It is clear, anyway, that the self is never self-sufficient.

Also see Holy Fire and Secular Varieties

Moral vacuum

Most of us, at least outside the bible belts, are not afraid anymore of an allmighty, punishing God who monitors all of our comings and goings. And as to the omnipotence of nature, we mostly feel (rightly or not) we manage to reduce it to acceptable proportions.

It feels like progress that we are more able to relativize the absolute demands of the high authorities of the past, so that there is no longer a massive set of rules that everyone must obey. We now believe that every person has a right to their own opinions and that other opinions should be respected, even if it produces a multitude of viewpoints.

But where does that progress bring us? Does this trend not necessarily end in a cacophony of opinions and touchiness, or otherwise in aimlessness and indifference?

The Dutch historian Thijs Kleinpaste treats that question. Indeed, he says, we accept each other's equality, but there are many indications that we hardly want to consider the implications. Because real equality would mean that we are aware of the tragedy associated with the collision of several conflicting but legitimate views. Plurality of views means that irreconcilable opinions rubb painfully against each other and that nevertheless you want to keep it that way, says Kleinpaste.

Michael Sandel discusses the same question. He notes that with the disappearance of the great moral legislators (God and Nature) also the moral debate has disappeared. Important issues are only addressed yet in a technocratic or administrative way. We are so aware of the fact that we think differently about the public good, that in the public domain we try to be as neutral as possible and set aside our moral convictions. Hence the embrace of the concept of the free market: that is supposed to be neutral also.

But meanwhile, Sandel says, people yearn for public debate on major ethical issues. He notes that with his students. During debate colleges their faces radiate because they feel included in a community by the debate. Precisely because of the respectful exchange of views, however different, a sense of belonging is created.

But apparently that happens too seldom, Sandel thinks. You might conclude that progress has not yet sufficiently advanced. We hang halfway: God and nature can not scare us any longer with absoluta, nor do they give us moral guidelines. But there is nothing yet which has come instead.

What could possibly take its place? What is needed so that we again get the feeling that something is at stake?

In line with what Sandel says, I think we can take each our own and other people's opinions more seriously. With the effect that we not just tacitly allow everyone to have his opinion, but that we more actively question each other's views. Not in a panting or sensational way, but definitely curiously and eagerly. Because strange enough, that creates commonality.

Also see Holy Fire, Polyphony and Secular Varieties

The heroic cosmopolitical Individual

To think in complete independence, free from bonds of a national or religious nature, recognizing no collectivity except humanity as a whole.

That’s what Hannah Arendt wanted, and she rightly may be called an icon of autonomous humanistic individuality and uncompromising universality. In the film Hannah Arendt which I saw the other week these features are dramatically expressed when she tells her old friend and Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld on his deathbed that for her the Jewish people means nothing, but his friendship does. He turns off hurt.

In intellectual circles in the Netherlands such a radically individualistic stance as Arendt’s for decades was viewed as an ideal. It was the image progressive Dutch people used to cherish about themselves. That image we, as universally oriented ethical missionaries, coúld have of ourselves because we in those days ignored the fact that also Holland is organized according to the arbitrary principle of the nation state. The underlying illusion – facilitated by our geopolitical insignificance – was that universal values and nationality can merge in an unproblematic way.

But for the attentive onlooker that idyll was pierced with some regularity. Thus, strictly humanistically spoken, a thinker in terms of global citizenship can have no peace with strangers quotas. Because a policy based on the inalienable rights and dignity of every individual can not distinguish between refugees, or view borders as absolute. However, that’s precisely what we do already for years, also because the streams of refugees are getting bigger.

Another example of persistent national-Dutch defensiveness concerns our loitering in acknowledging our guilt to Indonesia. Making excuses for our colonialist behaviour may be considered as the least that such a progressive minded people can do, but to this day it remains problematic. And not necessarily because of any financial implications.

Hannah Arendt definitely cannot be blamed for such double standards. She was not held back by any loyalty to say painful things about Jews or Americans or other groups, if her reasoning led her there. She braved the scorn and hate campaigns she then had to endure from those groups and took the loss of old friends for granted.

What you possibly cán reproach her is that she made such an independence of mind to the standard to which every thinker should comply. In this requirement show up, in my opinion, a form of utopian impatience and a deficient appreciation of the extent to which people simply need group identities.

For it is not that easy for people and populations to break free from ordering principles like ‘nation’ or ‘people’ or ‘religion’, and it is a serious question whether that actually is not too much to ask. You don’t have to be fascistic when you can only limitedly identify with an abstract, cosmopolitan citizenship. It could very well be an existential necessity for many people to primarily identify with a local or ethnic group, before the rest of the world is covered.

Besides, there are pragmatic motives for drawing boundaries. If you do not want to immediately take the suffering of the world on your shoulders, a clear unity like the nationstate provides the most effective scale for organizing (more or less) sustainable arrangements of social security, health insurance and wealth distribution.

From that perspective Arendt could be blamed for a certain severity. She wanted, despite her efforts to practice thinking within context, not to be disturbed too much by historically developed, or pragmatic and therefore random elements. Even though for its bearers these could be of great significance.

I honestly think that Arendt aims a bit too high. That does not mean that attachment to nations or peoples should still have the stone-carved shape of classical Zionism or German or British nationalism. Actually, partly due to the scale of migration and globalization, the rise is observable of various forms of multiple identity in which one culturally focuses on more than one country or nation.

This trend seems to me a valuable correction or addition to traditional identities and nationalisms. Indeed, I would say double – preferably conflicting – passports for one person is a good thing. But that’s still different from the boundless, almost abstract universalism that Hannah Arendt had in mind. Also see Why Heidegger doesn't bring us any further and Hannah Arendt's Heroes

The dominant Economy

I grew up in a family where the men (except me) were economist and the women were mostly philosophically or socially interested.

My connection with the economic field has never been spontaneous, but it was clear from the start that the economy represents a relevant aspect of human existence. I have learned to appreciate the conversations about the importance of margins and profitability and robust financial management. And when I myself could not find employment in line with my historical interest the distance to the economic area was small enough for me to take the plunge into a guaranteed job in accountancy. For no longer than was necessary, of course.

However, dominant it remains, that economic thinking. And the bad thing is, it’s so obviously true. The once-again-with-both-feet-on-the-ground pretends to be the last word. Any attempt to define the world more broadly will soon go to the wall.

I suffered from that previously at home, but last week I experienced it again at the Nexus conference with the theme “How much is enough?”. Or actually, I witnessed that others experienced that impotence.

At the conference in Amsterdam Lord Robert Skidelsky (economist) gave a lecture on occasion of the appearance of the Dutch translation of the book which he and his son Edward (philosopher) have written under the title How much is enough? Money and the desire for a good life. In the book they advocate a shorter workweek for all (15-20 hours) and more opportunity for people to do what they themselves find important. And they wonder why we work ourselves to death only to gather more and more wealth.

After Skidelsky's lecture there was a panel discussion led by Rick van der Ploeg with as participants Skidelsky and three Dutch economists. Van der Ploeg presented to the participants questions like “What does the crisis mean for you personally?” And “What should be done to solve the crisis?”

The answers sooned turned out to be of a techno-economical nature. There was talked for more than half an hour about recapitalization, strengthening balance sheets and cutting expenditures for another ten years. Could you expect otherwise with a debate panel composed of economists and bankers, but, it appeared, not every visitor had come for that. The audience wanted more views in the spirit of Skidelsky, I think.

Anyway, while I was still busy with realizing that all this could only moderately interest me, a collective irritation was suddenly felt in the room. As if the economic talk passed by the heart of the matter or should urgently be associated with a broader view on society.

Someone shouted her discontent from the balcony down. I could not hear what she said, even when the second time she used a kind of megaphone. But, unmistakenly, this did not please her, and, judging from the applause, it didn’t please a large part of the audience either.

The panel chairman could not negate this. So, the first waiting behind the interruption microphone got his turn. But after treating his question the next person waiting had to show ten minutes of patience because the panel chair now started to broach explicitly philosophical themes indeed, but in doing so followed mainly his own interest. Then suddenly time had run out. That was a bit sad of course, and therefore the man was allowed to put his question as yet, with barely time for a response.

In those tiny minutes nevertheless a couple of interesting themes lighted up, such as the question why economy and compulsory work and wage labor yield the kind of oppressive associations they produce. Perhaps, suggested Skidelsky, one must distinguish between work content that others decide about for you, and work content that you determine yourself. And perhaps in talking about less work not a division between work and idleness is at stake, but between work designed for you and work designed by you.

These themes were only briefly touched upon. But I had liked to hear a bit more about them from those economists.

Also see Blowing Bubbles and Begging for Feed-back

Collectivity and Individual

The relationship between collectivity and individual can be complicated. In the film Life of Brian the crowd shouts out oudly “We are all individuals” and so precisely confirms its herd character.

With (other) Jews it may be the other way round. They belong together in a shul or in Israel and pretend to be linked to each other by a shared tradition but then don’t miss an opportunity to emphasize their own individual positions.

It is interesting to observe the relation of the individual versus the collective through history for both the Jewish and the Christian tradition. Then it appears that the two traditions on this theme often are out of phase with each other, but at other times nicely match.

For the period - some two thousand years ago - in which the equation can be made for the first time, I would say that they are out of phase with each other. In the Jewish tradition learning is strongly emphasized, as a duty incumbent upon each individual. In the Christian tradition collective confession of the new faith is promoted under the leadership of clerics who tell the people what that faith must entail.

From the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance Judaism and Christianity in these matters moved towards each other. In the West humanism came to blossom, with great attention to the development and independence of the individual. This trend was only strengthened by the Enlightenment in the 18th and Romanticism in the 19th century.

Many Jews felt attracted by this development and joined with enthusiasm in the pursuit of greater individual freedom and fuller citizenship of the surrounding culture. The struggle for emancipation of the Jews was matched by that of other groups in society and the bourgeoisie as a whole.

In our own time, the developments seem to be somewhat out of phase again. Christians complain that the collective story is lost, that society consists only of loose individuals. What exactly connects these individual citizens to each other, according to the philosopher Marcel Gauchet, and how they relate to the state has become subordinate to the defense of their individual freedom. Which is not to be limited in any way.

Conversely, in the twentieth century Jews rediscovered, already before the Holocaust, their collectivity. This resulted in the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel. It may be true in general that, still, Jews don’t easily allow others to tell them what to do, not even their fellow Jews. But meanwhile, the Jewish tradition is alive and Israel, with all its shortcomings, is a thriving country. Paradoxically a certain connectedness stands out there.

Maybe it’s the connectedness of everyone who does not let himself be silenced: that creates a bond. But if that’s the case, then the Christian and the Jewish world at one point will be back in line with each other. Because, to wish that your voice is heard, isn’t that a universal human desire? Or as I heard say David Grossman recently: the least which must be awarded to each human being is the opportunity to speak in his own words about his own things.

Also see Parrhesia

Levinas and Rousseau

Sometimes it may seem like Jean-Jeacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) is still alive and perhaps the most timely philosopher we ‘ve got. “Be yourself”, or “back to nature” are slogans that are doing well and that could easily be led back to Rousseau. And something more serious but no less fashionable: the desire to get behind the appearance of things in order to discover the authentic core of one’s true identity, whether  rooted in a tradition or not. With his emphasis on the True Self, Rousseau may be called paradigmatic for a distinctly Western preoccupation with the Self, also in newborn Jews or Christians and nowadays in Muslims as well.

But contemporary commentators make it clear that this actuality of Rousseau is for the most part illusory. Because the collective pursuit of authenticity empties that aspiration of meaning to the degree that inauthenticity remains. “Once you try to be authentic you start playing authenticity, and you are no longer yourself in a relaxed way” says Wilfred van de Poll.

After God and religious traditions had disappeared already as absolute values, it is now the turn to the belief in an authentic self à la Rousseau to disappear. This removes our last beacon of absoluteness, after postmodernism ‘pretending’ is the only thing we have got left. Actually, no contemporary philosopher yet believes in the absoluteness of anything.

No one? Well, one - yet very French - philosopher tries hard to uphold, in the midst of postmodernist violence, at least something of an absolute value. But in order to do so he has to give a radical twist to that absoluteness. That is no longer – as was the case for centuries with Rousseau as a highlight – the Self,  but the Other. Because according to him, the other sometimes appears to us in a way that can not be contradicted, that is to say: absolutely.

The philosopher who makes this turn is Levinas, and the radical nature of his orientation becomes visible as Levinas with regard to various themes ends up at positions that are contrary to those of Rousseau. For example when it comes to the valuation of reason and the appreciation of technology.

Rousseau , although he was a philosopher, manages to embrace a romantic anti-intellectualism. He may even seduce us to stop thinking. He does so through his emphasis on authenticity and on the idea that reason robs us of an originally given innate purity.

This idea is entirely foreign to Levinas. Indeed, Levinas formulates important objections against reason, but the last thing he propagates is to stop thinking. On the contrary, we should strengthen our thoughts, and let them be corrected through confrontations with the other.

In line with that position Levinas has an optimistic view of technology and science, unlike Rousseau who accuses science and technology of alienating man from his original self, the reflection of which he believes to find in primitive peoples and noble savages.

Really, nothing could be further from Levinas than that. And actually nothing is further from  Jewish tradition than that idea of Rousseau.

Also see Harder than postmodern and Levinas and Derrida

Levinas and Egoism

Egoism is bad. That's what we learned and the idea is deeply embedded in the surrounding Christian culture. But the idea is definitely not limited to Christians. The well known British Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman for example propagates the same idea in his numerous books. He opposes to the strivings of the ego selfless devotion to the Other and thereby confirms a mindset that is deeply rooted in the West.

Many people who think this way believe their views about the badness of the ego and selfishness to be confirmed in the writings of Levinas. By his emphasis on the ‘Face of the Other’ and on the inroad the Other makes on the I, Levinas seems perfectly ready for annexation into the originally Christian ideas about original sin, the wickedness of man and his selfishness. That could also explain why, precisely in the Calvinist Netherlands, Levinas relatively early became popular. Levinas is thus placed in line with the Christian denouncers of human selfishness and messengers of neighbourly love. According to this view he is, in short, an outstanding example of a moralist.

I have always objected against this view and fortunately recently a thesis has been published which goes into this matter more deeply. The thesis has been written by Henk den Uijl, who graduated in Philosophy of Management and Organization at the Amsterdam Vrije Universiteit, and is entitled Beyond Egoism and Altruism. A Levinasian Approach. In it Den Uijl calls, using the work of Levinas, for considering egoism as morally neutral.

That’s quite something, precisely because this call conflicts with the prevailing thought which by Den Uijl is characterized as a form of dualistic thinking. With dualism he means a polarized system of two opposing poles, of which one pole is good and the other bad. In this case, altruism is good, egoism is bad.

According to Den Uijl the prevalence of this dualism comes to the fore in the observation that “when theorized about it, people will say that altruism is better than egoism”. To this Den Uijl opposes that, “to say this (the ego) is wrong or good is a categorical mistake, the egoism is the (not yet) about ethics or morals”. Egoism has its own area where it is in place and should not be seen in a hierarchical relation to altruism. “Egoism is ethically neutral, and is good in the sense of enjoying life, yet not in an ethical sense. There is no definite hierarchy between egoism and altruism. Egoism is not something condemnable; it is no normative notion at all”.

How for this position Den Uijl harks back to Levinas becomes clear in his presentation of Levinas’ assessment of egoism. From that presentation I will present a few sentences that together summarize Den Uijl’s argument and which for the occasion I cite one after another. “He (Levinas) does not see egoism as a vice, rather, it is the very way a subject in solitude behaves through intentionality; the ego wants to understand, or better, grasp the world so to suspense anonymous being”. “Egoism is the very way an ego stands in the world. It is strange to say that the ego perceives the world wrong, for who else should perceive the world than the ego?”

Den Uijl tells us that when he talks about egoism in these terms to managers and economists, they sometimes find this very hard to swallow. Their reactions are often defensive. Den Uijl explains this because of the negative load the word egoism got under the influence of Christianity.

Apart from that, in those very circles of managers and economists, he also encounters the exact opposite. In those cases altruism is seen as naive and therefore bad, and egoism is hailed because individual ambitions and covetousness could engender the collective’s prosperity. Here dualism appears again, says Den Uijl, with its associated but now inverted hierarchy.

Apparently it’s hard to stay calm when it comes to egoism and quickly ideological terms slip into our discourses : there is either total rejection (as in Christianity) or total embrace (as in the extreme market-ideology). To these extremes Den Uijl (in line with Levinas) rightly opposes the idea that there is no hierarchy between egoism and altruism, and that they constantly alternate.

Once one realizes this, it starts sounding quite outdatedly dualistic to hear philosophers say that in our time the Christian emphasis on charity is crucial. As for example the Dutch philosopher Andreas Kinneging did when he said that “Christianity, based on neighbourly love, makes people less selfish and makes them more focused on the community and the other”. For this reason, according to Kinneging, Christianity coexists better with democracy than Judaism and Islam do.

Kinneging says so despite the fact that by now the Christian dualism and the privileging of altruism are experienced by many people as an overstrained ideology and have lost much of their credibility. It is no coincidence that Alexis De Tocqueville, whom Kinneging holds in high esteem, could define himself as still only a ”Christian by culture”, not by faith. He could not really believe all that anymore.

Also see A Real Shame and Emergency Shelter

Greek and Jew

Hannah Arendt's observations about Eichmann remain to the point. They show it is not necessarily far-fetched to see a connection between totalitarian thinking, bureaucracy and our common desire for the creation of order. If such connections exist indeed, honest family men just can become schreibtischmörder à la Eichmann and evil can get a somehow banal character.

But occasionally Arendt could be off and run on. At such moments she had ideas in her head and she was only interested in events that corresponded with those ideas. One of the prosecutors in the Eichmann trial, Gabriel Bach, recounts: “A few days before the trial at once a philosopher arrived, who only used the testimonies and documents which fitted her ideas. With us, the prosecutors, she never even wanted to talk”.

Moreover Arendt could be very severe in her opinion, especially when she speaks about the attitude of the Jews during World War II. According to Bernard Wasserstein she divides Jews roughly into two categories: on the one hand, the passive majority that let itself be led to the slaughter, and on the other hand the members of the collaborationist Jewish councils.

I am inclined to link Arendt's harsh assessment of the Jewish attitude during the Second World War to her predilection of the autonomous, sovereignly acting subject. This predilection is associated with a certain disregard towards people in situations in which their free agency is seriously hampered or absent. That is: people in a tight corner, for example by persecution, poverty, or other kinds of dependency. This contempt is there despite the fact that Arendt, as a German Jew, experienced firsthand what it means to be unwanted. She had to flight to France and finally to America to find safe shelter.

Maybe she found that to be the only dignified way out for independent thinking people. In any event philosophically she felt most at home with the ancient Greeks, who also believed that there is little glory to be gained by carrying out activities directed at earning a living or at creating a minimum of security. Entirely in the classical Greek vein she sees unbound thinking and acting as the most sophisticated and the most pleasant thing a person can do.

It is true the Greeks went a step further and organized things in such a way that servants and slaves performed the lower types of work. Thus free citizens could be completely devoted to the worthy work, such as politics and philosophy. Arendt definitely doesn’t go that far, because in her book The Human Condition she pays much attention to those inferior kinds of work which she calls ‘labor’ and ‘work’. Together with the (political) ‘acting’ which for her embodies the highest species, they constitute the human condition.

Yet Arendt was not unequivocal in this respect, she sometimes contradicts herself. On the one hand she says: one cannot cut up reality, all types of work are part of being human. But elsewhere she argues to sharp distinguish between different types of work, and she puts the lower kinds of work on their place: laboring man is actually an animal laborans, a toiling animal. And no craftsman transcends the result-directedness in the same way as the unbound polismember could. Between the lines it is possible to hear Arendt’s craving for the sovereign existence of the Greek free man.

From that predilection I explain the reserve she shows on more than one occasion towards the Jewish conception of human existence. Because the latter deviates at this point in an important way from the Greek conception. Whereas the Greek view extols a life purified of labor and work, in the Jewish tradition there is no question of such a strive for purity. Sure, a person shall be praised for the time he spends on Torah and study, but the depending economic existence that we lead should be taken fully seriously. Purifying that away would mean, for the Jewish mind, nothing less than a reduction of reality.

Also see Hannah Arendt's Heroes and Levinas and Arendt

Megatrend

The transition from bondage to freedom, is it a jump, or even an absolute break? Or, to put the question differently: a bit more freedom, is that possible to exist once you've got a taste of freedom? Or is a bit more freedom something like being a bit pregnant? Something that does not stop until the freedom or the fruit matures?

That question may be posed in response to the rebellions in North Africa. Are the ghosts completely out of control, will the insurgents in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi still accept anything less than full democracy and participation? Or is there space left for a half-half situation, for a little more freedom within an autocratic framework?

So, for example, for a little more freedom in a state still run by the military, as now in Egypt. Or for greater involvement of the people while maintaining a powerful and popular king, as in Morocco. Or, as in China, for a bit of freedom in combination with rapid economic growth under an authoritarian party.

Or would half-half not last and should one radically march on? Have the Chinese leaders reached the borders of their ability to keep stupefying their population’s drive for freedom by offering prosperity and will they therefore have to allow more freedom? Will the Egyptian army have to give in to radical freedom-loving forces in the country? Or, if half-half is no option, are they going to choose, as in Iran, for completely stifling all freedom?

Closer to us in Western Europe the above question may be posed as well, be it that, fortunately, we know less physical and statedriven violence. And, another difference, I want to apply the question to the leadership in our companies. There we used to have directive and more or less top-down ways of leadership, but does that still work well? There is a growing number of voices that think it does not work any longer as a standard approach.

Carney and Getz for example state in their book Freedom, Inc. that the hierarchical model has run out. According to them the future belongs to companies that give their employees the freedom to do their job as they think it should be done. Because otherwise these freedom-loving people just walk away. Knowledge workers can not be managed in a controlling manner. The task of the leader is merely to create optimal acting space for his employees.

Another radical sound comes from Alan Murray. In his view managers are only a barrier to the full deployment of their employees and the prosperity of a company. "Their fundamental tendency is to maintain themselves. They are, almost by definition, averse to any change". Moreover, the younger generations don’t let themselves be commanded by parents or bosses. They listen to whát is being said. Not for nothing many people choose a position as worker without fixed tenure.

When you view the radicality of these statements, the opening question of this piece comes up again: once you have smelt freedom, will you not be at odds with any authority? Or is there space left for mixed forms of the authoritarian and the democratic, of hierarchy and freedom. Can these styles co-exist, or has the unfettered, free knowledge worker unmasked the manager as being a conservative potentate in such a way that the two are no longer compatible? That would mean the end of management. If so then we are living in historic times and experiencing a mega trend in both North Africa and in our own organizations.

But, to be honest, I think we must be prepared to manage with the hybrids. Complete freedom, both in North Africa and in our organizations, is something we will have to wait for a little longer. I feel strengthened in this thought – as far organizations are concerned – by a newspaper article that emphasized the indispensability of the organizational controlmodel. It was about the Belgian juridical system which had failed in an investigation into the murder of a student. The report on the police action can be read as a tribute to classical bureaucratic management because its absence is identified as the cause of failure: there was "no team manager, no file manager, no coordinator, (...) no structure, no information management, and leadership was absent. All this could be read as the chronicle of an announced failure".

Also see Must work be fun

Something small

The workshop Thinking for someone else examines what happens when one person thinks for another person, when that other person doesn’t like that and when, because of that, the thinker is suddenly ashamed of himself. He feels as having made an intrusion into the other’s domain.

It occurs that, after participants in the workshop have intensively discussed that phenomenon of ‘rationalityshame’, they remark: “After all, it’s something very small, isn’t it?”.

They are right, because we then talked for two hours about confrontations which lasted just a split second, between not more than two people, and often with some trivial cause.

The reason for this narrow focus of the workshop is that the transgression which thinking for another person may cause, is most acutely perceptable at those moments. When the thinker reads from the face of his interlocutor: I may have the best intentions but now I am going too far – exactly then rationalityshame may strike at its most intrusive.

Because of that vehemence, the small suddenly becomes very powerfull. What happens there is also very important from a philosophical point of view: thinking – even the well-meant, euphoric thinking – apparently causes harm. And thinking doesn’t realize this by itself, but apparently needs some external force to become aware of that. The autonomy we cherish so much doesn’t manage to carry on without moments of heteronomy.

The magnitude of this theme immediately becomes obvious when we relate it to twentieth century political history. Most of all the developments within the diverse communistic experiments give us food for thought. There was no lack of good intentions in the original communistic leaders, neither a lack of thinking power. But at the same time it became terribly clear that the uncorrected faith in ones own thinking power and in ones own definitions of the world creates monsters. Even if you have the best intentions. When the correcting power of dissidents is brushed aside, thinking shows its violent face.

So, the neglect of rationalityshame is very dangerous. Levinas spended a lifetime pointing to that danger. He stressed the often unnoticed violent character of thinking and placed the correcting effect of rationalityshame over against it. For him, the magnitude of twentieth century political horrors and the denial of the small trivial phenomenon of rationalityshame were narrowly tied.

Why is common sense so rare?

Thinking is not a wrong activity, but it requires to be permanently corrected. It’s remarkable how many people do agree with this statement at the moment.

In many cases this agreement has to do with the financial crisis. For instance the CEO of insurancecompany Aegon says we relied too much on ingenious models and too seldom on our common sense. And some people wonder in bewilderment why the high level of our education didn’t prevent all kinds of unferior products from being foisted on us.

More in general – and a long time before the financial crisis – critical thinkers pointed to the dangers of grand perspectives and logical reasoning. Sartre had lost already, in the eyes of many philosophers, the position of philosophical hero he held in the fifties and sixties. For it had become embarrassingly clear how much he had let himself be taken away by those grand perspectives, models and blueprints, when he flirted with Stalin and Mao.

And in his book The End of Organization Theory the philosopher Pålshaugen, already ten years before date, gave an explanation why inventors, sellers and consumers of those incredible financial products all just went on as they did. It is, he says, because those ingenious models create a fascination, which forms the secret connection between inventors and consumers. “Both of them know that it is an illusion to say that the model models reality. But in the same way that we cannot avoid being fascinated by a good film, even though we view it as nothing but a play, an illusion, neither can we avoid being fascinated by a good theory”. And a good theory is was; in academic circles anyway the calculation models were hardly challenged.

The underlying question forces itself on us: why are models and blueprints so tempting?

This question is not new of course. Many philosophers occupied themselves with it. But, in line with the accents of the Western tradition, the answers generally take the freedom and self-determination of the individual as their points of departure. Sartre – to mention him once more – thinks that nothing external should hamper the individual in his self-determination. And on this issue Sartre still finds much favour. Self-reflection is still conceived, nowadays as much as before, as a function of the autonomous, critical thinking. One has to keep oneself to the light. Ernestly and solitary, but also respectable and self-confirming.

Levinas’s idea, that the spark which triggers self-reflection, may nót come from your innermost self, but from somebody else who somehow breaks through your self-sufficiency, is, from this perspective, very much against the grain indeed. That idea is far from self-evident in our culture and goes contrary to two-and-half-thousand years of stressing autonomy in which we are steeped.

That’s what I notice in the workshops Good Intentions and Illusions. In the stories people tell there, it becomes clear how big our inclination is to be ahead of other people, to account for yourself, to make your own definitions of the world leading. Also when they concern somebody else, for that’s how, by definition, definitions of the world work. But if then it turns out that such another person is not really pleased by your wellmeant intentions, only then something really changes. That’s what shakes you, according to Levinas, because you could never think of that yourself.

This emphasis on the external origin of the correction on our thinking is an idea which Levinas elaborates in all his books. According to him we only have very limited space to adjust ourselves. The unexpected confrontation with somebody else, so from the outside, can help us with this. Something truly new can start there, precisely because you could never invent it yourself.

Unlike calculation models, blueprints and films, however fascinating they may be.