UCH belated, I’m afraid, (or is it? Blog time is so very odd) but here it is: a sketch of Levinas’ conception of an ethical response to suffering. I’ll keep it brief; the binding-together of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Cassell will have to wait, I’m afeared. I’ve used this theory as a critique of medicalisation in the thesis (a bit crudely, so I have to rethink that section), but it also plays a role in the later work I do on various kinds of difference (disability, intersex, ‘ugliness’, trans, shortness, ‘BIID’ (in scary marks coz this is the pathologisation of an identity which has already called itself ‘wannabe’-ness), dwarfism, just to mention a few (did I mention this thing is probably going to have to be sliced and diced before I hand it in?). More on suffering stuff and that later. Admittedly, I screw a bit with the semi-and-questionable distinction between alterity and otherness/difference (corporeal difference for my concerns, but Levinas’ a bit chary of this kind specificity, I think) in Levinas, but that’s something I’m all good with, really, for reasons I’ll go into. (Besides, I gather that Bernasconi, amongst others, thinks that difference/otherness and alterity are already linked in Levinas. My jury’s out but in strong debate.)
So. Last time I demonstrated that in the other (the face of the other, actually, but now we’re just getting technical!) there is (damn that copula) a trace of alterity; that which is absolutely and completely other to me. In fact, Levinas argues that just as the other is fundamentally not me, fundamentally irreducible to me, so too is his/her suffering. The suffering of the other is completely other to me. This means that any attempt to grasp the other’s suffering, to place myself in his/her shoes must inevitably fail. Worse, because this seeks to make the other’s experience comprehensible only through my own, it is unethical: it attempts to reduce, often even efface, the alterity of the other’s suffering. This is what I’m going to call (again all contemporary usage, and based solely on the etymology because of what’s to come), empathy (from em, in, and pathy, feeling/suffering (do you think the Ancient Greeks had a completely different structuration of emotion? I mean, really, using ‘feeling’ and ’suffering’ interchangeably seems such a peculiar move to us now!) Empathy attempts to deny the difference between self and other, the very same difference that enables the ethical relation and thus the production of the subject (and let’s not forget all that comes after that: all knowledge, meaning, world…) In denying that difference, one denies the other, and the other comes first. Denying another’s suffering (which happens quite a bit, really) denies their alterity and my dependence upon them. Just as bad, I think, is the medical flattening of suffering into pathology, attempting to thematise it. One can’t know the other, nor their suffering; not fully. But that’s an entirely other post.
So what, then, is the ethical response to otherness? This is actually really important, because the response to the suffering other is the origin of sociality. That is, the call of the other to the subject (the pre-originary one) is a call from ‘height and destitution.’ The other’s suffering is that call, and so all possibility of sociality is premised upon it and my relation—my response—to it. How do I respond without thematising?
Levinas’ answer is compassion. Com-passion; suffering-with. (Theoretically this is etymologically equivalent to sympathy, but the ’sym’ there has too many association with syn-thesis for me to be happy with it, so I’m glad he chose otherwise, even if it’s only because sympathetique (sp? tis regularly shortened to ’sympa,’ so I hear) mean s’nice’ in French). In suffering because the other suffers, alongside but without seeking to replace their experience with my own, an affective rather than a thematised experience, I offer the possibility of its alleviation. The reason for this is complex, but interesting. Suffering is, as we saw last time, fundamentally isolating. It turns the subject in on his/her self, breaking the ethical relation upon which the subject, meaning, the world is premised. This breakdown, then, is the breakdown of the world. When the other suffers, it is not merely an experience alongside any other, because the very terms by which they are a subject who could experience anything have been breached. There is absolutely no way for the other to make any sense—or anything else—of their suffering. This is what makes it suffering, this utter passivity, passivity beyond passivity (that is, beyond the antithesis of activity).
In suffering-with the suffering other, then, I enact the ethical relation, thereby prising open this closed-down non-subjectivity, creating a space which “opens them to the realm of the interhuman.” In this opening out, the pre-originary relation comes back into ‘being’; and with it meaning, the world, may come to be for them once again. This is ethics, and the ethical response. And according to Levinas, it is my ethos, my dwelling, my way of being; I am only because I am responsible, responsibility; only because I am compassionate, because I am compassion, because I am suffering-with.
July 14, 2007 at 9:26 am
In a previous comment, I said that Levinas’ definition of suffering does not include pain. It was a mistake: on the contrary, he uses the two words rather synonymously (which may mean that he does exclude some physical ‘pain’ from his definition). I was relying on Ricoeur’s distinction (in short: pain is physical, suffering is mental), believing it was Levinas’ or the same as Levinas’. However that may be, our culture has a deep problem with terminology regarding pain and suffering. There is a need, in moral psychology, ethical theory, studies of mind, and elsewhere for an inclusive term that refers to all our unpleasant feelings… Pain has played this role, but along with suffering, and some other terms, so that there is much equivocation and confusion. Actually, isn’t Levinas speaking, just like Ricoeur and Cassell, of a particular kind of suffering, a kind that is serious enough, precisely, to ‘alter’ the individual, to beckon, threaten, call the deepest in an organism and its surrounding?… To say, like you do in a preceding post, that “almost anything can be made justifiable, whatever its insult to mainstream norms, so long as it is claimed as a cure to suffering” has not the same meaning whether we’re talking about one kind of suffering or another… One kind may suffice as a final court of appeal, another kind may not. Now, distinguishing between one kind and another is precisely the main point of dissension in moral matters, isn’t it? Talking about suffering without specification is begging the reader’s assent… I feel much in agreement with what Levinas says, or you, or any other nice person, but I am wary about this agreement, especially since I noticed that we are on the matter of suffering great talkers but little doers, to the point that we don’t even have a valid theoretical, let alone practical, frame of work to deal with this supposedly important subject. Shame on us! I am even afraid that we are all doomed if humankind continues to disregard suffering in such a way: we do not even bother to get and share a valid technical term!
In a preceding post you quoted Edwards about the recourse to ‘transcendent’ teleology: “And what can one say to that? Here one has reached a kind of impasse; one is making, and responding to, first-order ethical claims that cannot be finessed.” Hopefully, “the ethical (in Levinas’ fairly specific sense) of the subject’s responsibility for the other” would avoid this reproach, but I cannot see how. Too much unknown is brought into play. Incidentally, I am realizing these days that conflicts of ideas are about opinions on the unknown, and these opinions reflect the needs of individuals to increase, or maintain, or not decrease their ‘territory’ (inner or outer), and most often suffering is brought up as an argument for one’s opinion, but finishes up by being endured as a result of the conflict. Levinas’ claims cannot be finessed… nevertheless here follow some contradictions that can be raised, I believe.
1. Suffering is at the origin of the subject –vs- it comes from the subject’s breakdown. Or, the other comes after suffering –vs- the other comes first (“before anything, is the relation with the other”).
2. Suffering has no meaning –vs- suffering is a call to the other, is creator of the subject, is a breaker of relationship…
3. To suffer is to be deprived of meaning, is to search for meaning –vs- it is unethical to offer meaning to one who is suffering.
4. Compassion only is good (it offers without violence the conditions for recapturing meaning) –vs- but what if my added compassionate suffering does not lessen the other’s (what’s the good of adding a suffering to another one if suffering is an evil)?
Levinas’ reflection about suffering revolves around questions of subjectivity, meaning, otherness… Those seem to me good points, but beside the main pivotal point which is ‘unpleasantness’ itself. It looks like a universal deviation, like if everybody enjoyed enrolling the potency of suffering as a support for their pet views. The more proeminently is placed the unspeakable unpleasantness, the more efficient is the support. Religions do that, and countless others, and Levinas too. In my view, this deviation reflects the fatal disregard of humanity for the knowledge and management of suffering, whatever may be the secondary value of the contribution which people can bring to that matter in other respects.
In favor of Levinas:
- He acknowledges that medical technology, which he approves, does not proceed only from the ‘will to power’ but also from a ‘high thought’: would there be good in thematisation and pathology (in fact, despite its ineffability and unknowability, doesn’t other’s suffering require from us to be said and known)?
- His insistence on the peculiarity, or alterity, or intrinsic unknowability of each case of suffering is important (though this can be said of every single thing, isn’t it?).
- The concern for the other’s suffering, he says, can be raised to a supreme incontestable ethical principle that might command the practical discipline of large human groups (though I object to words like supreme and incontestable, because it is always a matter of circumstancial and personal decision to make one thing supreme)…
- His attack on theodicy is much welcome, though once his asymmetrical distinction is made (the other’s suffering is sensical in me, useless in the other), am I not in a new kind of theodicy (I prefer the word algodicy), using my suffering for improving the world, and thence allowing, or rather forcing by our inescapable interconnectedness, the other to collaborate with me, so that we end up making use of each other’s suffering, like we have always been doing, but perhaps in a better spirit?
I like your distinction between empathy and compassion. I hope my post is not too much beside the mark: Levinas takes care at the end of “Useless Suffering” to specify in what context or perspective he has talked, and my comments may take insufficient account of this. I guess I react to deep deep motivation and to the general effect of discourses, where absence of an adequate whole consideration for the whole question of suffering makes me keen to criticise.