On Being [Uncomfortable]

May 2015

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. Hannah Arendt

In the meandering quest for the meaning of Being, our bodies are undeniably responsive to other human beings: to the Other. French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has observed the body is the “delegate” of being and that “Culture and artistic creation are part of the ontological order itself… they make the understanding of being possible” (Levinas 1996, p.41). We think and feel and worry about ourselves in the world without always realising our expression and gesture define our world. We may not be more or less significant than another being, but our gestures, both thought and un-thought, are shaping culture and leaving traces which inherently demand a response. As Levinas (1996, p.4) has written:

In doing that which I wanted to do, I have done so many things I did not want. The act has not been pure, for I have left some traces. In wiping out these traces, I have left others… We are thus responsible beyond our intentions.

Implicit in the gentle reality of our existence lays an ethical obligation for the Other and “In order for things to work and in order for things to develop an equilibrium, it is absolutely necessary to affirm the infinite responsibility of each, for each, before each.” (ibid, p. 23) There is humbling freedom in acknowledging my own responsibility in the world; moving beyond being to encounter the person of the other. Such ethical responsibility “does not wait for the freedom of commitment to the other” (ibid, p. 89), but is responsive: face-to-face. I see myself reflected in another person and at that moment am beholden; caught in non-verbal discourse which leaves me forever imprinted and the world altered through this encounter.

edited Katie Charity Meeting Places- Tallulah SO 565 copy

Reference: Emmanuel Levinas Basic Philosophical Writings. (1996). (A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, & R. Bernasconi Eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.