Who is my neighbor? Skepticism and the claims of alterity

Abstract

This paper begins with the question put by the teacher of the law to Jesus about the limits of obligation to the stranger and, hence, the extent of neighborhood. It relates this to the ways in which ideas of alterity are manifested in the language of multiculturalism. It considers the inflation of language that occurs where “other” is capitalized and acknowledges the connection of this with the indirect influence of Emmanuel Levinas. While this is taken to be a skepticist distortion of Levinas, some criticism is made of Levinas’ conceptualization of the cultural other. On the strength of this, attention is turned to the more nuanced account of such a relation that is to be found in the work of Stanley Cavell, especially in his reading of Thoreau’s Walden. Particular attention is given to Cavell’s recent essay “Walden in Tokyo”, in which a contrast is drawn between Thoreau’s reception of East Asian influences and Heidegger’s encounter with Japanese thought. The discussion points towards the view that a better relation to the other is realized where there is acknowledgement of our own non-transparency, our strangeness or “nextness” to ourselves. In the light of this, a different approach to multicultural education is recommended through a reorientation of the curriculum as a whole.

“Who is my neighbor?” (Luke, 10, 29). The point of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is Jesus’ response to this question posed by the teacher of the law, is to make us think again about how we are to regard those who are strange to us. It calls into question the connection between obligation and belonging. In effect, it requires a shift from a physics to a metaphysics of nearness. It reorientates obligation, towards the stranger.

Various responses to the question of the relation to the stranger—to other cultures, as this might be more commonly expressed today—are to be found in education in liberal cultures today. In some circumstances, there is an apparent acceptance of difference, but in such a way that it is assimilated into the dominant culture. The Paris-Match cover photograph of the black soldier saluting the French flag, which Roland Barthes made infamous some forty years ago, has come to be seen as a classic representation of this attitude. The colonization implicit in such an image takes a more surreptitious form in more recent celebrations of cultural variety, where difference is manicured and displayed in order to gratify a taste for the exotic that has been tamed—United Colors of Benetton. The curriculum satirically referred to as “steelbands, saris, and samosas” provides a further example.

It is in resistance to relations to difference along these lines that arguments have been raised to the effect that such responses fail to answer adequately to the other. Indeed it is predominantly in the discourse of multiculturalism that the question of the claims of alterity has been registered, the language sometimes inflated with reference to “radical alterity” or to the (capitalized) “Other”. The purpose of this might be to urge, against unwitting tendencies towards colonization, the recognition of the extent of difference, and this surely has its place. It might also be to make the more drastic claim that the cultural Other is not to be understood, and that any attempt to do so is itself a kind of violence.

The inflation of the language owes something to the legacy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom questions of alterity are clearly central. Indeed it is in the translation of Levinas’ work into English that the capitalization of “Other” most influentially appears, no doubt subsequently to be passed on via the work of Jacques Derrida and other thinkers more widely known amongst educationalists. The more drastic claim identified above does indeed echo Levinas’ writings about the relation to the Other: I do violence if I presume to understand the other person in a cumulative or global way, because this obscures or obliterates the sense in which I need to see them as having an interiority that I can never fathom, a sense that deepens the more I acknowledge it. Acknowledgement does not, it is important to see, consist in a recognition of the features that differentiate this person from that person, a progressive accumulation of information or mastery. It is more like a bearing witness to the absolute difference that structures human relationships, and a fortiori everything else. The familiar echo of this central Levinasian idea is then a distortion, whose relatively sonorous reverberations in multicultural education themselves obscure his concerns: by turning attention towards differences between cultures, which take the form of particular characteristics, they obscure the absolute nature of the relation to the other human being. Their adoption and adaptation of this language makes it all the more difficult to understand the nature and profundity of Levinas’ insight. In other words, the drastic claim that the cultural other is not to be understood is not to be supported by this central, most important line of his thought.

But it turns out that, when it comes to understanding other cultures, Levinas himself presents a problem. Notwithstanding the immense significance of his writings on hospitality and the welcome of the stranger, as well as his several more political articles (not only on Israel and Palestine but also on the Cold War), a limit to the terms of his own thinking is apparent. When Levinas speaks of the achieving of human freedom, he connects this possibility with the thought of the Western world, specifically with monotheism, but also with what philosophy is itself understood to be. He writes: “The difficult route of monotheism feeds into the way of the West. One can wonder, in effect, if the Western spirit, if philosophy, is not in the final analysis the position of a humanity that accepts the risk of atheism, which must be run but overcome, the price of its coming of age” (Levinas, 1976, pp. 34-35, my translation). The costs of this Occidentalism need to be counted. It is not only that Levinas affirms the importance of this history to a mature religion—call this a mature philosophy too. It is also that his expression of this draws upon scenarios that are replete with Old Testament images—of the widow, the hungry, the orphan, the stranger, if not of exposure to a jealous God; these are images that are common to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all religions of the Book. Though this does not diminish the depth of significance of the relation to the Other in the absolute sense that is Levinas’ concern, it does, paradoxically perhaps, condition his mise-en-scène in a particular, culturally determined way, and this will be a further burden on readings of his work in connection with cultural difference. It was especially in terms of East Asia that Levinas spoke in the late 1950s of a “radical strangeness”, “not racial but spiritual”, and, in a throwaway, perhaps implicitly scare-quoted remark, registered a seemingly inevitable alienation from “the Yellow Peril” (Levinas, 2004, p. 108).

It is not my purpose here to press this point further. Rather it provides a starting point for the consideration of what I take to be the more nuanced account of the possibilities of understanding other cultures that is to be found in Stanley Cavell—for instance, in his reading of Thoreau. As with Levinas, the relation to the other is a sustained theme in Cavell’s work. The relation to cultural others is fore-grounded in a number of his works (for example, Cavell, 1979, 2005d): it runs as a steady undercurrent in his The Senses of Walden, and it surfaces more obviously in his recent essay “Walden in Tokyo” (Cavell, 2005a), as the title blatantly shows. In what follows I shall concentrate mostly on this essay.

Let us begin by remembering that Thoreau begins, on the first page of Walden, with thoughts of his neighbors in the environs of Concord, Massachusetts. His reference to these neighbors in the course of the book is disparaging, cynical, despairing at times, but these others, in all their everyday strangeness, are rarely out of the picture. Indeed it is not, contrary to popular prejudice, in seeking some remote rural idyll that Thoreau builds his hut but “about a mile from his neighbors”: he is like the “visible saint” of medieval times, displaying his “experiment in living”; in recording this experiment daily in his journal, he writes to wake his neighbors up.

In reflecting on The Senses of Walden, Cavell remarks that its composition has always been associated in his mind with “the relation between cultures, and not alone between America and Europe but between America and Asia” (Cavell, 2005a). It is surely significant then that The Senses of Walden was written at a time when American identity, or what America represents, was exposed in an especially painful way—the last stages of the war in Vietnam. Cavell wrote the book in a matter of weeks during the summer of 1971. Perhaps like Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, written defiantly against the backdrop of triumphalism over the demise of communism and the “end of history”, The Senses is also an “untimely” book. Cavell focuses philosophically on a philosophical work that has come to be denied, on something of America’s culture that has been repressed, which is as much as to say rendered alien within itself. He reads this in a way that challenges both what has become the conventional reception and celebration of this work, with its convenient placement for some within the genre of the pastoral, and the received understanding of what philosophy itself is– that is to say, an endeavor of thinking tidily demarcated from literature. Ostensibly Thoreau is finding a way to spend his day, to sojourn appropriately in this world. But in the process this is also an exploration of the possibility of a distinctively American literature and philosophy, the realization of which proves hospitable to diverse influences. Cavell reads Walden as a book about politics and education, and about what has gone wrong with the American dream: allusions to the visceral precision of Thoreau’s remarks regarding the Mexican war leave little doubt as to Cavell’s concerns about American encroachments on East Asia, while the Eastern influences acknowledged in Walden—its references to Buddhist stories and to the Bhagavad Gita, for example—reflect a hospitality to thought that America has learned to deny.

In “Walden in Tokyo” Cavell recalls, furthermore, that around the time of the book’s composition he had been studying Heidegger as well as Wittgenstein, and that he was beginning to consider the intersections in their work as the ground for fruitful reflection between Anglo-American and German-French philosophizing. A contrast between these philosophers is evident in that while the problem of the other is central to the later Wittgenstein, the treatment of the other in Heidegger is either casual or, as Cavell goes on to show, self-indulgent and mystifying. It might be added that a contrast of a different order is apparent in that while Wittgenstein was relatively unknown in Japan, Heidegger was widely read and translated (with no fewer than six Japanese translations of Sein und Zeit between 1939 and 1969 (see Parkes, 1996, xi)), and in the inter- and post-War periods many Japanese went to visit him in Germany. Heidegger provides his own obvious reference point for the significance of these encounters in his “A Dialogue on Language” (Heidegger, 1971), originally published in 1959—a text that has until recent years remained relatively under-examined (see May, 1996, p. 11). This dialogue is at the heart of Cavell’s essay.

Cavell recalls Wittgenstein’s remark that “One human being can be a complete enigma to another” (Wittgenstein, 1976, #000), which is linked, recurrently in the Philosophical Investigations, with his recording of the remarkableness of our (assumptions of) ordinary mutual understanding. It is a different orientation that Cavell finds in Heidegger:

It is interesting to me that in a striking essay on what can be called the problem of the other . . . Heidegger too describes the problem in the register of different cultures, in this case between the German and the Japanese, the former represented by Heidegger speaking for himself, the latter by a Japanese speaking sometimes for one he calls Count Kuki, who is described as having before his early death studied with Heidegger and introduced his work to Japan. But Heidegger’s animus is to bring us to the recognition that representatives of each of these cultures do not in all seriousness understand each other, indeed cannot, whatever the appearances, at least not without the most excruciating Heideggerian investigation (Cavell, 2005a).

A number of moments in the dialogue draw Cavell’s particular attention. Both speakers are concerned with the threatened “complete Europeanization on the earth and of man” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 15), which the Japanese speaker relates to the deification of reason with the French Revolution. This lays the way for reference, by the Japanese, to the “internationally known film Rashomon” (p. 16), whereupon the other party to the conversation—Heidegger presents himself as the “Inquirer”—affects to take the film as an authentic experience of the enchantment of the Japanese world, “the enchantment that carries us away into the mysterious” (ibid.), which in turn makes possible the feigning of surprise at the claim by the Japanese that the film is an example of “all-consuming Europeanization” (ibid.). The East Asian world, it turns out, is altogether incompatible with the framing and objectification effected by photographic representation: the “foreground world” is captured by film; the “background world”, which is necessarily lost through this medium, is what is experienced in the No play. Heidegger confesses that he is an outsider to this experience. It has, it seems, taken someone of his intellectual stature and insight to realize, modestly, these limits of understanding. Heidegger’s move is at once to affirm the impossibility of understanding other cultures, and simultaneously to show, without claiming this (there is no need), that he—in his understanding of the gulf that separates cultures—has transcended this impossibility. “The speakers seem, and will seem further,” Cavell comments, “to be getting along very well in their doubts about whether they are getting along well with the process of coming to understand one another” (Cavell, 2005a).

Cavell detects a further aside, to the effect that the superficiality of film as a medium is a measure of America’s banality. Why then does Heidegger choose to highlight this point of connection between cultures, which is ultimately a debasement of the Japanese? And why, Cavell asks, as it were facing out any charge of bathos, is “this particular revelation chosen over other apparent coincidences, hence intimate differences, between the popular cultures of Japan and the U.S., such as the fact that both enjoy baseball” (ibid.)? If the question is how far one culture can understand another, then a coincidence such as this, pointedly brash in its contrast to No theatre, may “provide some indication of the power of revelation in play” (ibid.). Cavell records a concatenation of phrases—from “getting to first base” and “putting on a suicide squeeze” to the more familiar “hitting a home run”—whose allegorical force has found its way into colloquial speech, in English and, as it happens, in Japanese. It is as if Cavell were matching up against his own pondering, in a related essay, of “how to balance Thoreau’s strange playfulness with his utter seriousness” (Cavell, 2005c, p. 234). 

But why baseball, one might say? Wherefore base? The apparent casualness here hides circuits of meaning that illuminate so much of Cavell’s work—through the idea of the common and the low in Emerson and Thoreau, through the ordinary in Wittgenstein and Austin, through the vernacular of popular culture, and, of course, through the various abasements of King Lear. The implicit juxtapositions with classic texts are irresistible[1]: baseball figures the stages and risks of a journey out, across a line, to a nether region and to a turning, with stopping points on the way home. Like Walden itself, home amounts to the finding of a place, a place constructed by the journey that reaches it (this is, after all, what a game realizes), and a place that is suggestive less of an enduring Heimat than of somewhere from which one must again set out. The building of the house in the woods is tantamount to an enacted meditation on the building-dwelling-thinking that Heidegger will thematize a century later (Heidegger, 1975). Yet Thoreau’s economy of living is to be distanced from the kind of salvation from ephemerality to which Heidegger repeatedly gestures—a fidelity to one’s steady sense of place and history.[2] In the end it is not attachment to this unique place that is the heart of the matter: what is more important is the combination of attachment with a readiness for departure—before, as it were, it fossilizes, or perhaps comes to be romanticized or to parody itself, before, that is, it succumbs to nostalgia, the pain of home. Thoreau’s leaving of Walden, his detachment, demonstrates

what Freud calls the work of mourning, letting the past go, giving it up, giving it over, giving away the Walden it was time for him to leave, without nostalgia, without a disabling elegiacism. Nostalgia is the inability to open the past to the future, as if the strangers who will replace you will never find what you have found. Such a negative heritage would be a poor thing to leave to Walden’s readers, whom its writer identifies, among many ways, precisely as strangers (Cavell, 2005c, p. 218).

Nostalgia’s painful longing for home is foiled by the willingness repeatedly to forego this, to find home only to set out again. The tread of the peasant’s shoes after the toil in the fields, the gravitational force in Heidegger’s journeying home, contrasts with a more muscular readiness for excursion where one lives “each day, everywhere and nowhere, as a task and an event”. Openness to experience realizes the “essential immigrancy of the human” (p. 000).

As a coda to his discussion, Cavell recalls a PhD defense in the Department of East Asian Studies at Harvard University in which the candidate had examined connections between Mencius, the student of Confucius, and Cavell’s own work. In the celebration that followed, Cavell posed the question whether one could be sure that scholarly work that traversed such linguistic and cultural boundaries as between the American and the Chinese could increase understanding beyond a superficial level. Cavell professes to be no more trusting of the skepticism negative answer that his question eventually aroused than he would be of its opposite. But what is superficial and what fundamental here, what intimacy in these differences? One human being can be a complete enigma to another, we are told. So can Japanese and Americans understand one another?  The skepticism here is to be faced out: they can get along well enough surely to get to first base.

If the others we encounter are lions, we shall not understand what they say. If they are human beings, we shall still not fully understand them, but this is not what we need in order to find our feet. And full understanding is a fantasy that hides the extent to which human beings are enigmas to themselves.[3] The belief that another culture can be completely opaque is as unwarranted as the assumption that a culture can be transparent to its members.

Before pursuing this question of transparency, I digress only to note certain ramifications of the artful non-transparency of Heidegger’s text. The “Dialogue” is based on his encounter with Tomio Tezuka in Freiburg in 1954, which Tezuka recorded in “An Hour with Heidegger” (in May, 1996). That Heidegger’s version is more fiction than fact is scarcely concealed by the stylized and poetic form of the dialogue (between “a Japanese” and “an Inquirer”), which is neither an innovation in philosophy nor necessarily any cause for complaint. Although the main purpose of Tezuka’s visit was to speak to Heidegger about German poetry and the significance of Christianity in contemporary European thought, this is not what is highlighted in the two texts. Both reflect Heidegger’s fascination with Japanese conceptions of language (kotoba): the proximity of the ideas of words and things in the meaning of kotoba undoubtedly resonated with Heidegger’s own recent reflections in his essay entitled “The Thing”, and the significance of this word is elaborated, with some license, in the “Dialogue”. There are significant divergences in the accounts, however, especially in the way that Heidegger has his Japanese bring up two important points in the discussion. First, it is the Japanese who voices most explicitly the suspicion that Japanese film is irrevocably compromised by Western technologized enframing and hence not authentically Japanese. Second, there is the manner in which Heidegger’s dialogue starts. The Japanese asks “You know Count Shuzo Kuki. He studied with you for a number of years.” And the Inquirer replies, “Count Kuki has a lasting place in my memory” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 1). According to Tezuka, it was Heidegger who had first mentioned Kuki, who had visited Heidegger in the 1920s, as a preamble to showing his treasured photograph of Kuki’s grave in Kyoto. Heidegger and Kuki had often discussed, the Dialogue claims, the extent to which it was “necessary and rightful for Eastasians to chase after the European conceptual systems”, and it is as if, in a world where there is now “no escape” from such dangers (p. 3), the possibility of this other, authentic form of thought is memorialized (and deadened) in the photograph of the grave. Changes such as these expose a kind of ventriloquization of the other. It is as if, in spite of his mission to acknowledge cultural difference, Heidegger cannot resist the power of his own understanding. This amounts, to put it in Levinasian terms, to a kind of ontological occupation of the other. While it is true for Heidegger that our being is always beyond ourselves (in ek-stasis, not identical with ourselves), this is not primarily because of our relation to other human beings. It is true that our being is a being-with-others (Mitsein), but these necessary others stand, as it were, alongside us; they do not confront us as strangers.

By comparison, Thoreau’s figure for this non-transparency and non-identity is that we are persistently outside ourselves. Being “beside oneself”—ek-stasis, ecstasy—can mean being mad. But it can also take less dramatic, more ordinary forms. Thoreau speaks in Walden of “being beside oneself in a sane way”. In the responsible use of our words, in our making and shaping of things, we project something beyond the way we are, projecting new conditions within which we may serve as examples to one another, within which we may (mutually and continually) find ourselves. Such things are, as it were, next to us: “Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are” (Thoreau, 1992, p. 90). We are less the author than the work. The workman with whom we love to talk is scarcely other than language itself, and it is this to which we are progressively attuned.[4] We find our pitch in the address by the stranger.

That this is the restoring of a correct relationship between inner and outer is borne out by Cavell’s remark:

Our first resolve should be toward the nextness of the self to the self; it is the capacity not to deny either of its positions or attitudes—that it is the watchman or guardian of itself, and hence demands of itself transparence, settling, clearing, constancy; and that it is the workman, whose eye cannot see to the end of its labors, but whose answerability is endless for the constructions in which it houses itself. The answerability of the self to itself is its possibility of awakening (Cavell, 1982, p. 109).

A proper relation to our words and work, including our response to those of others, awakens us from the spell of psychology and from the disenchantment of the world at philosophy’s hands. It depsychologizes psychology (Cavell, 1976, pp. 91, 93). Correcting the relation of the public and the private, it restores the ordinary world as one of nextness and neighborhood, of an internal alterity where we are strangers to ourselves, and of an essential immigrancy of the self.

Can someone who has not woken up to this strangeness within herself really relate to what is different in others? She assesses what sense she can make of them. The better direction of thought—from the other—is the means of my finding sense in myself. Cavell writes: “Here one is taking the problem of the other in rather the reverse direction from the way philosophers tend to conceive the matter, letting it provoke him to learn something else from the encounter: it is not the other that poses the first barrier to my knowledge of him or her, but myself” (Cavell, 2005c, p. 233).

My sense is that multicultural education sometimes begins by taking the other as the barrier to understanding, however much this may be denied by its own self-conception. The objectification of “steelbands, saris, and samosas” can take more surreptitious forms. The ventriloquized inflation of the cultural “Other” does little to dispel these dangers. Inadvertently this is an occupation of the other. To reverse the direction of address involves turning to other aspects of education where, across the curriculum, the demands of objectivity require a turning of the learner’s attention beyond herself. This is to turn away from maieutics, still more from growth from within, and towards a confrontation with what is strange, where “inspiration” may be the more apt metaphor.

We can see, at a demanding level, the kind of address to the reader that is provided by such texts as Thoreau’s Walden, as indeed by Cavell’s various responses to this book. These are borderline texts that defy easy categorization. They demand a reception that is necessarily indirect, where the attentive reader is forced to slow down, to ponder which way to take a phrase, where perhaps such a phrase can occasion a whole shift in how the world is seen. Such forms of language bring us up against a latent strangeness within ourselves, dispelling the illusions of transparency that schooling can otherwise reinforce. They have their counterparts throughout schooling in the kinds of texts and other curriculum materials that do not encourage easy assimilation. These are scarcely likely to figure prominently in educational institutions preoccupied with targets and efficiency, but in the end they are close to the conditions that make the whole enterprise worthwhile. It is the experience of our words as next to ourselves, the otherness to ourselves of “the workman whose work we are”, that can show our necessary, intimate differences.

References

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