Wowww!

Obama president!

I was surprised this morning by my own gigantic joy that this happens. Apparently I didn’t know myself how deeply cynical I had become about possiblities for change. Eight years Bush do not leave one untouched.

Of course it has to be seen yet how far Obama can get. The problems are enormous, the financial possibilities smaller than ever. But the new president himself is very much aware of that. And it may turn out that his charisma and the enthousiasm he arouses open possibilites we could not think of before.

Inevitably the election of a black president in the United States will make a tremendous impression on those people in the world who politically don’t have any choice at all. The desire for democracy will undoubtedly be felt much stronger than when Bush believed he could install democracy by military means. Whether that desire will further the world’s stability is a different question altogether. The desire must be felt.

So, they can! And if they can, can we too? In Europe, in Israël?

Illusionbusiness

To speak about illusions and about unmasking them is one of my favourite things.

The Pope likes to do so as well, and recently he told us that the financial crisis learns us that “money is just an illusion”. With this statement he followed in Plato’s footsteps, who called the world around us just appearence and who found consolation in thinking that ‘somewhere else’ there is a world of ideas which is much more real. If only you know to discern false from real you will be less bothered by the ups and downs of this sublunar world, so he thought.

From that perspective I take part, by my workshops Good Intentions and Illusions, in the unmasking-industry which, already since Plato and early Christianity, opposes the reality of a spiritual world to the appearance of the material world.

But I don’t feel comfortable at all with their standpoints. That’s why I want to make clear what’s the difference between their unmasking and mine.

The first thing I don’t like in their unmasking is that they overreact. It is certainly true that the material world at times fools us and that behind seeming glimmer a rotten reality can hide. But to postulate in reaction a world of ideas that is supposed to be much more stable and reliable, that goes too far. It seems to me to spring from wishful thinking.

That brings me to my second objection: the denial of realitystatus to our material world leads to nothing. We happen to be connected by many threads to our body, our needs and our enjoyments. Disregarding those connections leads to unsavoury masochism or – more usual – to hypocrisy. You are rooted with all your fibres into material reality, but you don’t want to know it.

That’s why Marlies Pernot, the head of the Dutch association of house-owners, is angry with the Pope. It’s easy for him to talk like that, she thinks, with the many millions of Euros of the Church behind him. Completely different from “ordinary consumers for whom the possession of a house or a pension is not in the least illusory”. It also is, so she says, so much derogatory, towards the people who earn their money by working hard.

Following Plato the Church apparently has trouble finding a good relationship with the world. Perhaps she managed to find it at the political level, namely in the distinction between the domain of Caesar and the domain of God. But at the level of money and economy it seems to be much more difficult. Of course at a certain moment money had to circulate, also during the Christian Middle Ages. But those affairs were preferably left to others, for example to Jews. That was very convenient because they were not allowed to have other occupations. And besides, you could reproach them to be so materialistic. Hypocrasy thus accompanied the Christian West as its shadow.

The question which still remains is: wherein lies the difference between my illusionbusiness and the Pope’s? Essentially the difference is that I don’t believe in a sharp line of distinction between appearance and reality. And certainly not that one could link appearance and reality to domains like the worldly or the spiritual atmosphere. Appearance and reality are not to be mapped out in such a dualistical way. They alternate in a way we can hardly systematically catch.

If anything systematic could be discovered in the appearing of illusions, in my view that‘s linked to our thinking. The same faculty of thinking which we take recourse to for clarifying the world, can get entangled in its own categories. Plato’s unmaskingproject may be the best illustration of the way in which thinking creates its own illusions.

Also see Levinas and Egoism and (Un)purity

Crisis of ethics or of thinking?

It was to be expected that, in response to the financial crisis, people everywhere would appeal to ethics as an answer and incantation. People talk about revitalizing old virtues. Journalists look for the guilty ones and the public wants to hear confessions and repentence.

Most of the indignation is about greed. But in my opinion greed did not do much more than use our thinking and its inherent illusions as a vehicle. So, to really touch the crisis, discussions should rather focus, not on greed, but on the thinking which legitimizes that greed and gives it an unlimited free ride. That thinking should be the object of critical reflection.

This asks for something else than spontaneous, holy indignation about so much greed. This asks for insight into the tricks which our thinking plays us. Of course the airing of deep indignation relieves us, but it also is an easy way out. It is powerless and fails to be really critical. In a certain way it's a symptom of the problem. Which is that we are not critical enough on our own thinking. With the consequence that we let ourselves be taken away by and too easily believe in our own ideas. Until the illusions appear untenable any longer and the bubble bursts.

So the real question is: who or what is able to stop (in time) the free ride of our illusion producing thinking? That question has been leading in the philosophical examination which Levinas undertakes in his works. And his answer was: only an external force, like the Other, can fulfill that critical role. The other shows his distress and resistance caused by our acting and thinking, and by doing so breaks through the euphoric stubborness with which we believe in our own plans.

But how complex the present crisis is, may perhaps be derived from the impossibility to unequivocally answer Levinas's central question: ‘Who is the Other who, in this subprime madness, could have stopped us?’

For one could not say this role was played by the American slum dweller who got a subprime mortgage foisted on him by a bank. That slum dweller may, at the time of the transaction, have been very happy with it. And he doesn’t suffer that much now, because by returning his key he gets rid of his mortgage debt. He just returns to his old situation. In the worst case he will be a bit more desillusionated than he was before.

It may be the lower middle class figure - let's say Joe the Plumber - who, before having his luxury mortgage, had already a decent dwelling and now is being expelled from his dreamhouse into a slum neighbourhood. This kind of distress can hurt considerably.

But the deliriously rushing, frantic financial figures hurted themselves as well. Bankemployees, mortgage brokers and house-agents also suffer on a large scale. They are their own Other. But if so, what remains then of the externality of the adjusting force of the Other, which has, according to Levinas, as most important feature its very externality? Crucial for Levinas is that no one can ever fabricate by himself the correcting effect of the other’s distress, for the very reason it is external.

Apparently, Levinas’s philosophy and its capacity to clarify what thinking does to us, reaches its limits here. What remains is my preference for Levinas’s critical distance towards our thinking and its effects on us, over against a powerless moral indignation about so much human greed. For this last attitude does not help us any further in the fundamental reflection on our thinking.

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

How naïve is Levinas really?

Quite a few authors consider Levinas as being naïve. They mean by that that he drafted a nice theory on the essence of the human subject as ‘to-be-for-others’, but that he did not treat the question what that looks like in everyday reality.

Mark Dooley, for example, criticizes Levinas because the latter fails to provide concrete suggestions as to how suffering, cruelty and humiliation might be avoided. Because of that omission he calls Levinas politically naïve.

Philosopher Ger Groot in an article compares the work of Levinas with that of Derrida. His conclusion is that the position of the last one is undoubtedly the most realistic because he explicitly gives a place to societal institutions in his analyses.

Columnist Bert Keizer disposes of Levinas in one blow by his characterization of some honest, politically-correct people as figures “who know their Levinas”. Apparently we can speak of exemplary naïvety of the kind that passes into a proverb.

Levinasstudents who have objections against the image of a naïve Levinas sometimes try to defend him by pointing to the role ‘the third’ plays in his work. The absolute obligation which, according to Levinas, man has for the Other is being relativized because apart from the Other there are other others (thirds). To them I have absolute obligations as well, and because of that all obligations become less absolute. Weighing of all obligations against each other finds place in the political and constitutional institutions of a society. Levinas considers their existence of great importance, but he stresses that the original moral obligations are always to a certain extent betrayed by the weighing and the calculation that goes with it.

I have never been impressed very much by this kind of defense of Levinas. For, when it comes to weighing people’s intrests Levinas does not offer us any particular added value. He just sanctions a tradition of social and political philosophy which already for centuries emphasizes the importance of weighing intrests and which concentrated much more on its elaboration than Levinas did. At most Levinas can elucidate whý so much energy and thinking power is invested into that tradition. That is, because the appeal of the Other lies at its base.

Moreover, the bringing up of the third as an argument against naïvety does not remove the adduced objections. For nowhere in his treatment of the third Levinas speaks in really concrete terms (as, by the way, he fails to do in his treatment of the second/the other). So, also with the third, you can keep having the feeling that he is rather vague and doesn’t do justice to social reality. That’s why I think we should not look for the value of Levinas’ writings in the field of social philosophy. For that there are social philosophers and it has never been Levinas’s own intention to practice social philosophy.

His intention wás, actually, to show that everything we invent in the field of the weighing of intrests, never is just good. It originates in something else, namely in the absolute obligation for the other, and that obligation keeps being betrayed by the weighing of intrests. However beneficial the work of our legislators, judges and scientists may be, the selfcomplacency those institutions sometimes display is definitely out of place as far as Levinas is concerned. And the stability and quality of their products have a high illusory degree, when measured to the question how much violence is being done to the original moral obligation.

Levinas’s real contribution, I think, is in his indefatigably emphasizing the illusory character of much of our rationally constructed reality. This seems to me to be a far from naïve, but rather sharply critical position, in which political and other respectable institutions are never just taken for granted. Apart from that Levinas is very conscious of the possibly offensive nature of his position, for he explicitly links this position to the Jewish tradition of prophets and rabbis who cherished the moral voice and by that raised a lot of trouble for themselves.

Levinas knows very well that the message of the Jewish tradition which he brings, does not fit into social reality just like that. He has no illusions about the resistance that established institutes and fierce nations may display when they are confronted with appeals to conscience. Without going into the complexities of those confrontations he realizes that the voice of the Jewish conscience runs the risk of being reduced to “the whispering of a subjective voice, without being mirrorred or sanctioned by an objective order. Jewishness is: humanity on the verge of an ethics without institutions”.

Levinas is familiar with the dangers of that position. The conscience which asks subversive questions, he says, runs the risk to end up suddenly and without being warned in the comfortlessness of its exile, its desert, its ghetto or camp. “Already an icy wind sweeps through the elegant apartments, which rips the paper and paintings from the walls; it extinguishes the lights, makes the walls crack, snatches clothes into pieces and carries along the howling and roaring of merciless crowds. Is this anti-Semitic Word, which does not resemble any other word, an insult like any other insult?”

One may question whether in this passage Jewish tradition and anti-Semitism are not rendered too much reified and essentialized. But one can definitely not say that Levinas thinks too easy about the problem which is at stake. He knows all about it.

Also see Levinas and calculation

To see and not to be seen

Gyges, a mythological figure from Antiquity, happens to find a ring which can make him invisible. From the moment he discovers this possibility he slips down into a attitude of complete immorality. Because now he can follow his bent and get away with it, he doesn’t shy back for anything anymore. He starts cheating people and he ends up raping the queen and murdering the king. Plato, who tells us this story, makes clear that there is an obvious relation between invisibility, shamelessness and moral decline.

Levinas loves this story. He applies it to the process of acquiring scientific knowledge. According to him, that process is characterized by putting the objects of scientific research at a distance and then passing rational judgments on them. In short, it is spying upon the world from a sheltered position: seeing without being seen.

Because of this interpretation of Gyges, Levinas’s evaluation of his actions is, unlike Plato’s evaluation, not just negative. Of course it is not sympathetic to reduce the world to dead material which, via experiments and reasonings, you can manipulate as much as you like. But in a way, according to Levinas, it is unescapable for us to do so: we humans are beings that create representations in our heads, by which we reconstitute the world and thus keep our foothold. And although that mental reconstruction is an illusion, we cannot help doing it. Moreover, says Levinas, the pursuit of objective knowledge is very laudable: it helps us make the world better accessible for each other.

Apart from that, for Levinas – in opposition to Plato and other philosophers as for example Sartre – shame is not only connected with being seen but as much with seeing. And, indeed, one may wonder whether watching without ever being moved, as Gyges apparently could, is possible at all. The manipulator (Gyges) may, be it only for the twinkling of an eye, be touched by the injuries his manipulative violence and objectifying gaze bring about. The accompanying shame comes from within and, by that, is not dependent on the visibility of his deeds. That shame will have a corrective effect on his intercourse with the world.

Things and People

Enjoying my holiday in the Dordogne, reading a book, brings me each year again into a contemplative mood. Old churches, the silence of a monasterial garden, a scorching afternoon sun and chirping crickets lead me unavoidably to meditative atmospheres.

In this attentive presence in the world around me I should look – that’s what my book tells me – for the ultimate assurance against the thoughtless hurrying and activism which haunt our lives.

But why then is this contemplative tradition slowly disappearing from our Western culture? And does that disappearance say something about its credibility for our time? Could it perhaps be that the values of the vita contemplativa are not as timeless as they want to appear? Or should we, very pedantically, say that people nowadays do not know anymore what is important?

In my opinion contemplativity contains an important manco: it is, in first instance, not interested in people. It does, to be sure, engage into relationships, but primarily so with things and only in second instance with other people. Certainly the Christian tradition, in which contemplation plays a main role, knows also a social philosophy. But this social philosophy is emphatically placed at the second level, behind the contemplative attention for creation as a whole of divinely created things. That’s why this attention is called prima philosophia: the first philosophy, which is significant enough.

The book I read situates itself clearly within this tradition. It attributes a fundamental role to contemplativity for reflection on a world that gets stuck in its vita activa. It suggests that we perhaps could escape the coupling of technocratic observation and acting “just by reflection on that connection and thus to dwell with an emptied mind upon the things themselves”. In this thought the author is supported by Heidegger and Nietzsche.

Honestly, I think that the spirituality of the monastery doesn’t fit us anymore.
The problem is not so much that that spirituality is too much withdrawn from the world and does not engage with it. For that withdrawal is rather relative. The contribution to society of the early monks by way of bringing waste land under cultivation was enormous. They worked actively in the care for the sick and the poor. And the accumulation of wealth in the monasteries and later by the ascetic-protestant capitalism made the economy flower.

The actual difficulty is that that spirituality, in line with the definition of contemplativity as prima philosophia, proceeds primarily via things. The dwelling upon creation and things belongs to the heart of the vita contemplativa. Paradoxically enough this stilled attention for things is best expressed in the frugal soberness of Cistercian monasteries. There buildings and objects have been reduced to their essential simplicity.

But exactly that primary attention for things does not suffice anymore. It suffices most of all in a world which lies at your feet to be cultivated. But our world ís cultivated, people are being overloaded with things. Now it are relations which count, communication is primary. In such a situation a spirituality of things is less appropriate than a spirituality of human relations.

One could say, with Levinas, that our conception of prima philosophia should be revised. According to him not the attention for the essence of things is fundamental but reflection on the ethical relation.

But rather I would let go the whole idea that there is a more and a less fundamental philosophy. The first person (where contemplativity departs) and the third person (the source of ethical transcendence) alternate continually as the central focus for human beings. By placing them on an equal level we keep space for surprises. And at the same time we dump a bit more of our hierarchies.

See also Order