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

Escape

Stultifying and oppressive, these are since the nineteenth century rather common characterizations of the straitjacket into which our regulated bourgeois culture constrains us. We control our affairs fairly well, but that straitjacket constricts us and sometimes threatens our joy of living, energy and creativity. The gray veil of a tough labour rhytm and mirroring office buildings would sometimes suffocate our soul.

This explains why, also since at least the nineteenth century, there were so many deliberate efforts to escape the constriction and boredom. Romantic music could serve that goal and compelling novels played a major role. It is not accidental that the novel as a genre from that time experienced an unprecedented boom, while frequently the regulated life and boredom themselves were the subjects (think of Madame Bovary or Oblomov). But also the rise of the sports may be related to it and maybe even the incidentally occurring enthusiasm for war and violence.

In our family we used to have our own kinds of escape. One was the large supply of money. That gave us a big house and a big garden, containing even a "paradise" with a pond and feasants and peacocks. And it permitted us an exuberant lifestyle that could keep the greyness at some distance.

A second form of escape was through religious transcendence. However well cared for our material life might be, the spirituality of ‘another, deeper reality’ never was far away. There were ascetically living reverend uncles and pious aunts and my mother loved meditation and study. Also in the table conversations the 'higher' world got attention regularly, usually contrasted against the 'lower' material world. Very dualistic and pulled apart indeed, but it was there.

And then there were the "soldiers", a table ritual which was carried out at the end of festive meals for birthdays and such. It was a question of hammering with your hands and fists on the table in order to produce as much noise as possible. For maximum effect first the glasses, serving spoons and cutlery were placed on the plate edges so they could well rattle. My father then announced the coming of the soldiers who had decided to convey their birthday congratulations. If you listened well, you could hear them coming in the distance, and so it was because he hit his hands gently on the table in a regular rhythm and everyone followed him in that. You could hear them coming closer, the hand slaps became stronger. Until at once they were there, then you could get loose banging your fists on the table, with maximal noise, for a few minutes. Then it had to still be finished, the soldiers went back, hand strokes became softer again, until the soldiers were back in the barracks.

This ritual was carried out family-wide, and not just for the kids. Generations back someone in the family must have experienced the irresistible urge to break out from the formal, regulated atmosphere to which at that time dinners were subjected. The ceremonious rigidity must have felt like a straitjacket, and the soldiers as an escape from it. Is it strange that finally I end up with a philosopher whose first really original book was titled: "On escape"?

See also Il-y a

Easy talking

Flying should be made much more expensive, that’s what I sometimes say. And why do not more people travel by train?

But yes, it’s easy enough for me to talk like that. Because I do not like to spend my holidays in Asia and I hate driving. I prefer skating to skiing and I think meat is tasty, but mushrooms and nuts are not less so.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong then with the love for distant journeys and expensive or less expensive cars? On the contrary, it can be enriching to travel. It can broaden your horizons, and it can confront you with different lifestyles and habits and thus help you bring your own axioms into perspective. Cars anyway extend our mobility and opportunities.

It is undeniably true that a lot of people do not achieve that enrichment, because they especially look for the sun and for their own national holiday colony. But for some people the desire to culturally look beyond their noses is authentic indeed. Is there any objection to make against it? And then, should people be discouraged to fly?

Is there something inherently better to my preferences, except that the environment would benefit? I do not think I could defend such a statement. Man apparently has been created as a curious creature and if that leads to a collision with the rest of creation, then we must conclude there is a flaw in that creation. There is little we can do to that.

Yet, another question keeps hanging. To what extent are we driven by boredom? Do perhaps the monotony of our lives or an intense feeling of futility make us visit all corners of the world? When Awee Prins in his book Uit verveling talks about the dissatisfacted saturation and despondency of the nineteenth century Russian bourgeoisie, he notes: "A constantly tried, but never healing medicine for those bored people is: travel".

And the question that comes next: is that – the boredom – also a flaw of creation? Is boredom – in an ordered society – unavoidable and inescapable? Or does creation give us opportunities to escape? Not by flying to Asia, but through the confrontation with some surprises at home, at work, on the street?

Levinas thinks so indeed.

Adrenalin

The idea, borrowed from Adam Smith, seemed to be so comfortable. Namely, that if only everybody takes good care of himself, society as a whole will also flourish. And that this is so thanks to the mysterious mechanism of the market – Smiths’ ‘Invisible Hand’ – which warrants the harmony between private and public interests. In other words, do not feel inhibited in your aspiration to self-enrichment because you are fully morally justified, it's almost social work! So let the adrenalin flow, that is being generated by the concern for your private interests.

But, says the French philosopher Jean-Claude Milner, there is no invisible hand and that awareness has been firmly drummed into our heads again by the financial crisis. It showed us clear enough how the hunt for personal gain is not necessarily running harmoniously parallel with the intrests of society. Rather, society was about to collapse for a moment and we still do not know what we will end up with. So, the idea of an easy harmony through the invisible hand is actually a piece of self-deception. If you are honest about it there is something fishy to that source of adrenalin.

But where to get your adrenalin from then?

The Dutch columnist Johan Schaberg recently wondered whether business does not know any other motives for action beyond greed. He notes, based on interviews with other Cor Herkströter (Shell) and Frits Goldschmeding (Randstad), somewhat reassured, that money, options and bonuses with these executives don’t play a significant role as motives. But, he wonders, why do they tell this only at the end of their career? And why did they in their working lives uncritically do what the entire stock market quotated business community does: rely heavily on bonuses?

Schaberg finds more convincing examples of engagement of business with public interests further back in the past. In the thirties a number of left-liberal Rotterdam businessmen united in the Woodbroker House. There they spoke about their own responsibility towards society and they studied leftist ideological models that could bring improvement.

But in the thirties, before the bankruptcy of communism and the problems of the welfare state became apparent, faith in such models was easier to bring up than it is today. Schaberg therefore somewhat sadly notes that this kind of social involvement is hardly around in the current generations. And that this is dangerous because a society does not remain healthy just like that.

So, is there nothing to believe in anymore?
I am afraid that the great ideological narratives lost much of their stimulating power indeed, and to them I reckon the Invisible Hand and the idealism of the thirties. If there is something I believe in, it is that sometimes, now and then, one person is really dedicated to another, and not just in romantic love. Something small indeed, but yet something which can make our ordinary life exciting for a while and which can give color to our work. That creates its own adrenalin. The condition for this to happen is of course that a normal life is possible. Thus, that there are good societal institutions: democracy, good governance and fair justice.

The problem is now, says Milner, that capitalism does not seem to care any longer about those societal institutions. Perhaps because the efforts to carefully maintain them are too prosaic and generate too little adrenalin. The feverish capitalism only wants big shots of adrenalin. It does not bother any longer about the question of where the rules come from. If only there are rules, then the most aggressive will manage to wrench money out of it. According to Milner that’s a really dangerous situaton indeed. He therefore believes that we cannot enough cherish our constitutional achievements. Let us spend our thinking power also on that and not just on earning money.

Taylor, Levinas and Emptiness

Last month Dutch papers payed a lot of attention to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, because of the appearance of the Dutch translation of his book A Secular Age. In that book Taylor explains how the emptying of the churches in the West originates from the teachings those churches offered their members. In the papers’ articles he explains his views.

It is remarkable, after reading those articles, how many parallels one can find between the ideas of Taylor and those of Levinas.

To start with, both philosophers make the concern for an existential emptiness which many people in the West experience nowadays, into an important theme in their work. Taylor speaks about the loss of social relations and traditional religious meanings. This feels as if the connection between ourselves and the cosmos has been cut.

Levinas speaks, above all in his early work, about a surplus of self-consciousness and self-sufficiency of modern man. Because of that, modern man has become lonely and got imprisoned in boredom and weariness.

Furthermore, they both relate – be it in a completely different way – this void to the coming-to-stand-on-its-own of the individual which in the course of time has taken place in the West. Taylor does so through a cultural-historical description of developments in Christianity. The church summoned people to live according to the Gospel. That called for discipline which then came up indeed. Working hard and living a family life became important. This produced an orderly, productive and peaceful society. But exactly because of that, people gradually began to feel they could manage without God.

Levinas presents the coming-to-stand-on-its-own of the individual as the result of the struggle of man against the il-y-a. The il-y-a in Levinas means the threat which originates from an icy cosmos which in its indifference hits people with meteorite impacts, tsunamis and fires. By making use of his rational capacities man fights back against the elements. He counters them and organizes an orderly world of his own.

Both authors describe in related terms the human state of mind in such an orderly society. Taylor speaks of the enclosed self, as opposed to the porous self from before the disciplining, which was in a kind of naïve, natural contact with the surrounding world. The enclosed self has the possibility to take a distance, to disconnect itself from everything outside the mind. Everything becomes open to manipulation by the self. It may see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings things have for him.

Levinas characterizes organized man, in his separation from the cosmos, as sovereign, self-sufficient. He may regard himself as his own origin. Loneliness and boredom are characteristics that both Taylor and Levinas assign to this human creature that has come to-stand-on-his-own. It is good to keep in mind that Levinas considers nevertheless the coming-to-stand-on-his-own of man in relation to a spine-chilling cosmos a great merit, but its emptiness he calls depressing.

What makes them strikingly different is a more detailed analysis of the roots of this development to closure, self-satisfaction and loneliness they both describe.

Taylor finds a change in the effect which was produced by the emphasis on the Gospel. He notes that the original intention of the church with its disciplining impact moved into the background. The discipline itself came to the fore, and that brought us prosperity and safety. Then we no longer needed the Holy Spirit. The challenge now, as far as Taylor is concerned, is to create new forms of meaningful connection.

Levinas, for his analysis, goes further back in time. He notes that the West has already for much longer been in the grip of the belief in rationalization and ordering. That is a philosophical attitude that goes back to Parmenides and Plato and which Christianity took over. Within that attitude reason is the deepest ground of meaning and reality, and human experience is mistrusted. Christianity has not abandoned that scheme but gave it a religious garb by presenting history as a goal-directed divine plan with salvation through Jesus Christ as the pivot on which everything hinges.

From this perspective what is happening with Christianity nowadays is not that mysterious. And disciplining and rationalization are not just some by-effects that have gone wild, as Taylor would have it. According to Levinas, what comes out now has been within from the very beginning.

As to Levinas, something more is needed to overcome our emptiness and loneliness than new forms of meaningful connection. Because these could turn out to be even more of the same: organized, disciplined, forced meaning according to the best Greek-Christian traditions, ultimately grounded in reason and neglecting any particular individual experience of meaning. And with more emptiness as a result.

The only thing Levinas can offer as an alternative is the efficacy of a transcendence that has not the appearance of a historical plan which can be worked out systematically, but one that occurs in unpredictable social encounters. In such encounters the image of a coherent history, a perfect picture, breaks in pieces. There is nothing left to manipulate but nonetheless something happens there. There there is no emptiness and boredom. There happens, to speak with Taylor, “something big”.

Il-y-a

This picture deserves a big format. For the photograph can elucidate certain aspects of the il-y-a, a theme which plays an important role in Levinas’s work, mainly of the early and middle periods.

Il-y-a with Levinas denotes being, but then being in its specific appearance of formless, undetermined being. He sometimes calls it a noise, a roar, but it also is allied to the perennial silence of infinite space which Pascal talks about. It evokes associations with the ‘nothing’ which other philosophers speak about, but for Levinas the il-y-a is worse, precisely because the anonymous being just goes on infinitely. It is frightening, on the one hand because of its unstoppable character: it is unlimited. But more so by the repugnant indifferent character of the il-y-a, the colossal neutrality of an apalling cosmos. The unlimited aspect evokes disgust, because of the endless continuity, the neutral aspect frightens because of its meaninglessness. Levinas encounters the il-y-a in insomnia.

Already in his book ‘On Escape’ Levinas describes the oppressing experience of being chained to the indifferent being, although he doesn’t call it il-y-a yet. He talks – before Sartre does – about the nausea and the fear which are evoked by that anonymous existence. It makes him look for an escape. Levinas observes that in the course of history all human civilizing efforts were directed to one goal: fighting the wild and depressing il-y-a. Man wants to put the il-y-a at a distance. Whenever possible he will try to procure himself a safe shelter, where he can hide for the cosmic violence. Man starts to regulate and to domesticate. This culminates in the cultivation of his habitat and, at least in the West, in devellopping a rationalistic way of thinking. Man sets out to build houses, riverdams and dikes against the sea. He starts calculating, organizes society and assures his future.

However, observes Levinas, the answer of civilization – articulating the formless being and rationalizing the world – does not suffice as an answer to the meaninglessness of the il-y-a. For, he says, there is the continuous return of the il-y-a, even in two appearances. The original il-y-a, say the primeval il-y-a, manages at times to break through our rational regulations and controls, and because of that unleashed elements like tsunami’s and hurricanes keep threatening us. But apart from that the regulated, insured world brings with it a certain dimness, alienation and loneliness. Those features appear to be inherent to reason and to the high degree of rationality of an organized society. Typical forms of repugnance and disgust belong to it, which nevertheless remind us of the – supposed to be expelled – primeval il-y-a, primarily in the experience of meaninglessness and uneasiness that are allied to a rationalized universe. One could speak of a variety of the primeval il-y-a , I call it the veiled il-y-a.

For one who is familiar with these descriptions by Levinas of the primeval il-y-a on the one hand and the veiled il-y-a on the other, the above photograph is very striking. It shows in a certain way the two spheres next to each other, separated by the Dutch IJsselmeerdam.

The primeval il-y-a, of course, is to be found above the dam, and known as Waddenzee. It radiates the wildness and infinite openness which characterize the il-y-a. The feature of formlessness, which Levinas couples to cosmic forces, does not apply so much to the Waddenzee on this picture. On the contrary, the image shows intensively lightning swipes and shades of color in the water. Because of that it rather approaches the ‘sublime’ as thematized by Romantic poets and thinkers: frightening and mighty, but horribly beautiful.

The veiled il-y-a on the other hand comes to full expression in the enclosed IJsselmeer on the photograph. Safe, domesticated and regulated. But also monotonous, opaque and greyish green, in a certain way made meaningless. Kindred to reallotted landscapes, mirroring officebuildings, strict laborhours, weariness and bureaucracy. Here becomes visible how rationality, on the photograph embodied in the IJsselmeerdam, can become the bearer of the same hurting features which characterized the primeval il-y-a: meaninglessness and indifference.

As said above, the Waddenzee on the picture leaves space for more exciting associations. But in the last resort – as far as Levinas is concerned – a horrifying indifference lies hidden underneath the sublime lightreflections of the Waddenzee and of the rest of the cosmos.

See also Escape