An Ethics of Understanding and Justice

Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” i.e., “positionless position,” where “not two” signals a negation of the stance that divides the whole into two parts, i.e., dualism, while “not one” designates a negation of this stance when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation, i.e., non-dualism. Free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen’s achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism (i.e., neither “not one” nor “not two”).–Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

There are ways in which difference—fundamentally, the perceived rift between Self and Other—is inescapably real. Sentience is experienced (by most[1]) as life from a standpoint, through a Self. “I” is the subject of life. “I” experiences every face around it as an object, meaning someone/something separate from it. And most people (I reserve a space for the Enlightened and possibly some who are animal) will experience the challenge of ethical action as a challenge to do justice to non-Self others, even while understanding it perhaps, as a challenge to do justice to the All. That said, there are reasons to avoid building an ethics on difference, even while in theory that ethics may radically disrupt understandings of the Self and Other as distinct.

Ziarek uses Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference to articulate one such ethics that centers difference. Ziarek calls for “respect for alterity.” The declaration of alterity is itself a thesis, positing that at a certain point the Self must embrace the impossibility of experiencing for a particular Other in a particular instance something like the intersection of empathy and understanding. The experience I describe is like empathy in that it is a kind of radical striving to visualize and feel the Self in the place of the Other, and like understanding (I will call it understanding from now on, as “understanding” in its truest, though not often used, sense is what I mean) in that this experience allows the Self to speak back ethically, to say truthfully “Yes, I hear you, but…” to the Other. In Ziarek’s model it is left to the Self to decide when the point of irreconcilability is reached, when the difference between Self and Other must be conceived of as unbridgeable. It is when the Self abandons her striving for perfect understanding that she dons “respect for alterity.” To “respect” alterity is to say “This difference I see in you is not of me, it is something other than me, and it is not experience-able by me, but…I respect its validity and equivalence to my own reality.”

There are no insurmountable, irreconcilable differences when understanding is named as the precursor to the ethical action, that action which is intended to “do good” in a specific situation, involving specific individuals and communities, selves and Others. Rather than presupposing difference, should we not assume that understanding is possible, always, and thus allow understanding to limit itself in practice while we strive, unceasingly, for perfect understanding?

Sentience provides the basis for the reconcilability of the Self and the Other. The Self is enabled to act ethically when she can imagine herself, stripped down to pure consciousness, positioned to experience the world through the body and from the standpoint of the Other, understanding the ways in which that consciousness she imagines is shaped to allow for the reality of the Other, the reality she perceives as difference. It is usually not necessary to so fully strip away those things that shape an individual consciousness—the particularities of embodiment, and experience etc.—in order to achieve understanding. The Self may approach the Other already understanding the Other’s position, and fully enabled to say “Yes, I hear you, but…”. The oppressed often approaches the oppressor in this way.[2]

To understand the Other in the way I am describing is what it means to understand the Other as fully human. I intend “human” to refer to all sentient beings, and perhaps, even the non-sentient, though I am not sure that such a clear division between sentient and non-sentient exists, if it exists at all. I use the word “human” because it connotes both the subject and object of ethical action. That is why the assertion: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people” makes sense. Oppressed individuals, while perhaps “respected” by their oppressors are never viewed by their oppressors as fully human. To oppress is in essence to construe as non-human.

Even while Ziarek acknowledges that the degree of difference in a given instance between Self and Other is unfixed and unknowable, she fails to take into account the fact that difference might be declared and perceived as such even when it is not irreconcilable, and this premature declaration is often made, because, I would suggest, a failure to engage with and understand the humanness of the Other may disguise itself as “respect for alterity.” To be “respected” without understanding is the experience of feeling unheard, misrepresented, pathologized, to be cast as other than human. Pro-slavery discourse in the American South and pro-apartheid discourse in South Africa relied on the ethical platform of “respect for alterity.” The metaphors of the lips, touch, and mucosity (authored by Irigarary and employed by Ziarek) centralize the mutual constitution of the Self and the Other, but not what they share, not their common humanness. They do not encourage understanding, though they allow for the possibility for the Self to occupy (in a different moment than the present) the same symbolic space that the Other occupies in the present.

What then, does it mean to live in a world full of humans? Beings as complex, alive and important as the Self? If understanding is the precursor to the ethical action, what is the ethical action? I embrace the Golden Rule both as a koan—a logic-impenetrable, undeconstructable wisdom put forth by many far wiser than myself[3] that I accept, on faith[4], I cannot theoretically improve upon—and as a thesis that phenomenologically demonstrates its truth. Justice and injustice are above all things experiences, and it is no great stretch to say that injustice is more commonly experienced and/or recognized than justice. To live amongst humans is quite frequently to fail to understand and appreciate the humanness of others, and consequently, to experience others’ failure to understand and appreciate one’s humanness. Injustice takes place whenever the words “I understand” are uttered untruthfully. “I understand” is uttered implicitly whenever one takes action towards or regarding another. Thus injustice takes place whenever the Self takes action (though this action may be speech, or even thought alone) regarding the Other while failing to grasp, fully, from whence came the particular ways and realities of the Other she references, whenever the Self fails to see the possibility for herself in the ways and realities of the Other. The Golden Rule is the perpetually enigmatic explication of what it means to properly honor and understand the humanness of the Other and thus I leave the Golden Rule, quite deliberately, in the place of the koan as that which must be embraced, not argued. It is the thing that I can say I am “for”…but never theorize. Conversely, I can theorize and have theorized what I am not for—injustice—and injustice is the failure to understand the Other as human.

Endnotes:

[1] Enlightenment has been theorized and described as the experience of pure sentience—dissolution in the all—the profound realization of the Oneness of all things. To live this way means to exist not as a subject, but as The Subject (anything and everything that exists), and to experience no object. Many (paradoxical as it is that I should refer to the Enlightened as individuals) have claimed enlightenment as their experience. Also, I cannot attest to the ways in which all non-human (meaning animal in this case) sentient beings live sentience. The experiences of “subject” and “object” may not apply in every instance.

[2] While it may seem that I am making clear demarcations between “oppressors” and “oppressed” here, I mean for these categories to refer to particular people in particular instances of oppression and confrontation. Individuals may be (and usually are) oppressed and oppressive in multiple ways simultaneously.

[3] As Karen Armstrong argues in The History of God, the precept of “Do unto others…” is a tenet of every great religious tradition.

[4] Here “faith” means to take an unprovable/unarguable yet great wisdom as given. Appropriate humility is the motivating force.