In a recent post I said that I needed to explain more clearly why I feel that trust or trust* is so important in healing divisions between individuals and societies. I don't know that this will do that. The previous posts on society and democracy considered areas in which breakdowns have occurred and pointed very tendentiously toward possible salves. I'm not sure they were convincing but perhaps could act as starting points for reflection.
Here, well, I guess I'm heading into my personal perspective again... but as I assume that though we are all unique we are all also in many ways very similar (in having bodies of limited variability and frameworks of meaning that will in many ways overlap, leaving very few individuals - if any - with any aspects that they do not share with at least some others and with most of us sharing the majority of our deepest needs and desires).
Now, let's recall the circumstances: currently I am not working and I am keeping myself at very low risk - because it seems rational to do so as I am not required to go anywhere or do anything or see anyone. Consequently, I have essentially been again in solitary lockdown. In addition, as I am not in any particularly intimate relationships (no partner or child), no one places any exceptional value on their relations with me. I do have good friends and family members who care for me (and for whom I care) and those relationships are valuable.
Here's the perhaps critical point, though: as a result of my personal dispositions and experiences (having been in therapy, perhaps, as well as my rather tedious on-going investigations into 'meaning' and 'worth'), I have come to recognise the presence or absence of being a 'thou' (see here where I outlined what that means) in conversation or in relationship with another. There are some people in my circle, notably those who have trained in therapy, who do have this tendency to look at me as a 'thou' - but on all the occasions that I have interacted with these people, they have been on the other side of an internet connection. That is so far from being not the same that it is almost irrelevant. Or perhaps I should say that the cognitive awareness of being seen as a 'thou' in no way matches the embodied and emotional experience of being seen as a 'thou'.
When I am with other people, who see me, in contrast to as a 'thou', as an 'it', then I recognise the difference. Indeed, I was thinking about this before I resumed work for a period of five weeks earlier in the summer, when I realised that not having the discombobulating experience of being seen as an 'it' had been deeply calming to me. Now, though, instead of being calmed by not being seen as an 'it', I am feeling anxious about not being seen as a 'thou'. To be fair, as not many people do this and as I see few people in my 'normal life' anyway, then perhaps it's of little consequence. Perhaps, but I think not.
Indeed, the force of being seen as a 'thou' was made clear to me a few days ago when I saw a friend of mine who knows me well and has known me for a long time. He is a person of considerable insight, who values rationality above emotionality and who is inclined to be more than usually tolerant and accepting, without necessarily approving. When I felt acknowledged, that he recognised by subjectivity, individualism, difference, flaws, needs and so on, I experienced a sense of - well, the opposite of Jean-Paul Sartre's idea of being 'pinned' by the gaze of the other. No, I felt validated. He made me into a subject.
Simone De Beauvoir wrote in her essay 'Pyrrhus and Cinéas' that 'every person needs the freedom of other people, and in a sense we always want it because it is only the freedom of others that prevents us from atrophying into thinking of ourselves as things, as objects.' (From Becoming Beauvoir: A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick.) The vital importance of this freedom, the freedom of others that enables them to see us, too, as subjects rather than as objects, was explored further by Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity. Again, I am drawing on Kirkpatrick's explanations here. Beauvoir argued that 'in order to be free ethically you must use your freedom to embrace the ties that hold you to others. [...] Every human being longs for her life to be seen truly, and to matter not just because it is a life, but because it is her life. We all want to be "justified", to feel that our lives have meaning. But to listen to the call of freedom in ourselves without hearing the call of freedom for others is solipsism: a kind of spiritual death, a refusal that stultifies our own becoming. Only with others can we bring certain projects, values – and a changed world – into being.'
I should add here that it does not take an intimate connection or real 'knowledge' of a person to see them as a 'thou'. The other day, a delivery man came to the door with a parcel. He could see that I was upset and talked to me for a few minutes. From the moment he recognised that I was upset, his eyes carried the 'thou' message. It turned out that when not doing deliveries he works for a mentoring organisation. Either he was already constitutionally suited for the work or he had developed a skill, but in either case Declan (for that was his name) demonstrated to my utter satisfaction that a 'thou' view is possible between complete strangers.
What is stranger is that it is not always or indeed often the case between friends, family members and colleagues.
I have some theories about this.
Maybe first we should consider what Beauvoir meant about embracing the ties that connect you to others. In part, I think this is the mere recognition of the shared condition of being a sentient being with needs and dependencies, desires and fears. Beyond that, I think that she feels that people do shape the facticity of the lives of others and have to take responsibility for that and seek to extend rather than constrain the freedom of others, through remaining cognizant always of their subjectivity. Of course, the obligation is two-way: in a work environment, the manager will have certain expectations of the employee which the employee is contracted to uphold (to a great extent, whether she likes it or not). However, this does not exempt the manager from being alert to any infringement of her dignity. In love relationships, Sartre and Beauvoir provide an in part inspiring and in part worrying example. For while they valued each other's freedom, she, at least, acknowledged that on occasion they failed to fully value the dignity of others involved. This demand - to hear the call to freedom - like love in Martha Nussbaum's terms, is anti-narcissistic. But it is not, I think, like a tick-box list you can check off, rather it's a demand for sensitivity, empathy, honesty and integrity. It is, like a parent or caregiver in Winnicott's phrase, of the utmost importance that one is 'good enough'.
So, hearing the call to freedom, the foundation for treating someone as a 'thou', though demanding certain dispositional traits or ways of behaving, need not be some grandly perfect, idealised act. Which begs the question: why is it not our default way of being?
The trends I discussed in the first post on trust (about social and status anxiety, a pervasive sense of insecurity and disconnect) are certainly a large part of the answer.
In addition, I think we are often distracted. There never seems to be enough time. When I was speaking to my brother and sister-in-law last night, half of my mind, much of the time, was on the need to get back to reading so that I could finish Bernard William's Moral Luck and make a start on Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. So I was distracted - and not only was that a wrong to them, but it was wrong-headed as had I consulted the reading list properly I'd have realised that I had already read far more of Moral Luck than I needed to and that I needed to read far less of Reasons and Persons than I thought I had to. Idiot. Anyway. But even if we are not considering our to-do list, there are the alerts coming up on the smartphone, the cats climbing on the bookshelf and so on.
Another problem is that we can be distracted by our own thoughts in various ways. Not just by thoughts that run along orthogonally to the conversation, but by our plans about what we want to say next (we fail to listen) or by our judgments of the person entirely shaped by our objectified sense of them. This latter is the most interesting, but in all three cases we are failing to value them appropriately given the context of a conversation - we have not fully embraced the 'ties' of that relationship, which demands that we grant them their freedom and subjectivity by properly 'seeing' and 'hearing' them. In that third case, what we are seeing and hearing is a simulacrum of the other created by our views of them: the other is a person 'of this type', with 'these reactions' and 'these motives'. We have indeed 'pinned' them - but not even pinned them in a true state but in a state that is determined by our preconceptions. We are responding not to the other but to what our predictions of the 'type' of the other are. The other is lost in our solipsism. And this, I think, is very common. I do it myself rather a lot, now I come to think of it.
One more way in which we fail, which is perhaps less blameworthy, is in a failure of imagination. It is hard to appreciate that the other can have such different values and needs. Because we struggle to make that leap, and maybe we never can (as Zadie Smith suggested in the article I linked to when considering art as a moral practice), we hardly even try. We leave them unseen in their subjectivity. OK, we have not objectified them, but we have still failed to make sufficient attempt to see.
At the other extreme, we may be simply regarding the other as a means rather than an end, we may simply be objectifying them: wanting someone to entertain us, someone to walk the dog, someone to make us feel safe, someone to love us, someone to fill that role in the company, someone to look after, someone to fix the washing machine. Of course, we want these various things at various times, but if Declan can value my subjectivity when he delivers a parcel to my door, so can we in any of these situations.
I will have to think more carefully about the distinctions between asserting the call for freedom, treating someone as a 'thou' and trust*, because this is all very rushed and meandering.
But I do feel that something is coalescing. What was key for me was the precipitous feeling I had when my friend looked at me as a 'thou'. My solipsism was pierced by virtue of the fact that a subject was face to face with a subject. In his seeing me as a 'thou', I could not help but be thrown out of my interiority to recognise a 'tie'; to recognise the dignity and individuality of the being in front of me. I could not objectify him. I could not fail to see a person with needs and dependencies that I can only guess at. And yet, further, I could not fail to attempt to make the imaginative leap.
It is an empirical question whether people always or even often respond so powerfully to being seen. I think not. Perhaps it's dependent on the quality of the relationship as much as on the state of the subject. But that it can be contagious seems to me to be important.
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