Abstract
This article is far less a position paper or a descriptive analysis than an attempt to illuminate the lines that connect commonly recognized realities of human life: unfamiliar others in the form of strangers, interpersonal feelings in the form of trust, and organized belief systems in the form of religion. Its epistemological and even ontological conclusion may be sketched as follows: where belief overtakes wonder, religion fails in its mission to enhance life. When fear overtakes wonder, individuals fail in the promise of their aliveness. In particular, when belief overtakes wonder, religion fails in the sense of constraining or even shutting the individual off from investigation and exploration of the unknown or unfamiliar, or from what is not sanctioned as proper. When fear overtakes simple curiosity and the desire to know, the individual fails in the sense of simply reacting, prejudging a situation or a person as threatening or dangerous in advance of actual experience. When belief and fear together take over, human experience is shackled and crippled. It remains ideologically tethered and affectively maimed. The effect of this tethering and maiming has moral consequences having to do with a recognition or non-recognition of the foundational common humanness of humans.
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Notes
“The proof of my condition as man, as an object for all other living men, as thrown in the arena beneath millions of looks and escaping myself millions of times—this proof I realize concretely on the occasion of the upsurge of an object into my universe if this object indicates to me that I am probably an object at present functioning as a differentiated this for a consciousness” (Sartre 1956: 281).
Further examination of Sartre’s exemplary descriptions reveals additional perspectives on how affectively-charged epistemological facets are fundamental. Sartre describes the feeling of shame as “an intimate relation of myself to myself” (1956: 221), emphasizing from the start that such a relation is not a reflective relation but an immediately lived one, i.e., “in so far as the Other is watching me,” I immediately experience myself as an object. It is thus clear how “the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me” (Sartre 1956: 222), and in particular, how “I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other” (Sartre 1956: 222), namely, as an object caught in an unseemly act of some kind. As indicated above, however, the primordial vulnerability of humans is not a matter of being seen; it has nothing to do with ‘appearance’ as such. When we distinguish between a purely ontological rendition of the Other and an epistemologically inflected ontological rendition of the Other—between a theoretical concern with the being of the Other tout court as distinct from a living concern with the being of the Other as familiar or unfamiliar—we find that the primordial vulnerability of humans has to do not with the look of the Other, but with the full-bodied presence of the Other and the potential harm that full-bodied presence embodies, above all with respect to its familiarity or unfamiliarity. The primordial vulnerability of humans, like the primordial vulnerability of all animals, is indeed tied to the existential condition of being alive, and alive among full-bodied Others. Shame is in truth only one possible form of communal vulnerability and a highly sophisticated one at that. The starkest form is tied to the simple fact of being communally alive. It hinges on the unpredictability of unknown Others and on the incipient to full-fledged fear that unpredictability evokes or may evoke. Sartre himself points up the “unpredictability” of the Other in the fact of his being “no longer master of the situation” (1956: 265f.). Clearly, an epistemological gap exists, a foreboding scissure engendered in the very presence of an unfamiliar Other. The gap is implicit in Sartre’s descriptions of his ‘situation’ before the Other: “I am in a world which the Other has made alien to me” (1956: 261); “I experience a subtle alienation of all my possibilities” (1956: 265); “every act performed against the Other can on principle be for the Other an instrument which will serve him against me” (1956: 264); “I grasp the Other […] in a fear which lives all my possibilities as ambivalent” (1956: 264).
An exceptionally lucid and detailed account of just such acceptance is given by evolutionary anthropologist Shirley Strum, who describes the patient and protracted lengths to which a strange male olive baboon (Papio anubis) went prior to being accepted within a new group (1987: 23–37).
Jung’s concept of the shadow and his analyses of the practice of projection are highly relevant to understandings of the stranger and warrant full examination in their own right.
Jung also comments provocatively in his essay “The Undiscovered Self” on the fact that “resistances to psychological enlightenment are based in large measure on fear—on panic fear of the discoveries that might be made in the realm of the unconscious. […] Often the fear is so great that one dares not admit it even to oneself. This is a question which every religious person should consider very seriously; he might get an illuminating answer” (1970: 271f.).
The deftly programmed relationship of the federal government to the electorate in the United States from 11 September 2001 until the bursting of the Republican bubble on 7 November 2006 is a sterling example. Fear of terrorism was willfully injected into public life—via duct tape and other such measures—to secure trust in the federal government, which trust, of course, kept fear of terrorism at bay. See foot note 7, in short, trust was politically cemented by the social manipulation and control of fear. Injections of fear not only kept trust in federal governments alive but strengthened its social hold.
If one were a sociobiologist rather than a systems theorist, one would attempt to show that trusting and cultivating trust are behaviors enhancing reproductive success, not behaviors reducing complexity; that is, one would attempt to explain trust adaptively in terms of ultimate causation rather than functionally in terms of proximate causation. The explanations, however, would run basically along similar lines, i.e., they would determine ‘the benefit’ that comes from trust. In contrast to posing and answering the question, ‘what is it good for?’ or ‘how does it work?,’ one could pose and answer the question, ‘where does it come from?’ If phenomenologically inclined, one might thereby trace out the origin and development of trust, elucidating it as an existential condition of human aliveness. For a beginning attempt in this direction, see Sheets-Johnstone 2006. But see also Endress and Pabst for a phenomenological exposition of “basic (operating) trust” (2013: 95) as a “non-thematic” constituent (2013: 95) and “persisting background premise” (2013: 96) of actions and interactions in everyday life, a trust that can “only be analyzed ex negativo” (2013: 102), that is, in the context of interpersonal violence that shatters trust.
Although well-being, security, safety, and the like, figure in the compensatory spin-offs of religion that Kolenda describes, trust does not figure substantively and centrally in the equation in any way. What does figure centrally is death. As philosopher David Stewart points out, Kolenda attempts to find an alternative to the personal and transcendent God of the Jewish and Christian traditions through the notion of compensation: “The religious impulse, Kolenda argues, arises from our awareness of human finitude; another way of saying this is that religion grows out of our awareness that we all die. Because religions—at least some religions—give us hope for continued existence after death, they attempt to provide what Kolenda calls compensation for human finitude” (1992: 340).
She notes that “[p]erhaps the most overt acting out of this [shattering and repossession] occurs in the final plague on the house of the Pharaoh, the final entry into his hard heart, the massacre of the innocents in which the interior of the body as it emerges in the firstborn infant is taken by God (Exodus 12)” (1985: 204).
Scarry’s theme is furthermore to show how “God’s most intimate contact with humanity, His sensory contact with the human body, is in the Hebraic scriptures mediated by a weapon [e.g., a flaming torch, a burning bush, a rod, a stick, a stone (1985: 200ff.)] and in the Christian scriptural additions is mediated by Jesus” (1985: 213).
The relation between the ‘Word of God’ and the ‘Body of Man’ is mediated.
The Bible and Sartre aside, one has a readily available contemporary point of reference that documents the experience of living in a sheer and ongoing corporeally-gripping vulnerability: American-held prisoners at Guantanomo.
An incident in the United States points up the lapse in a homely but plainly incisive way:
“Less than 10 years ago I found myself one Sunday in a white Baptist church in rural South Carolina listening to a sermon titled ‘Surrounded’ and sincerely wishing I was somewhere else. For more than an hour I sat there, gradually realizing that my own considerable discomfort was dwarfed by that of the worshipers around me. The stares I received betrayed not hostility but genuine confusion. In a segregated town that was 60 % black, my presence in this white space was itself a statement. But about what, no one knew. The eyes fixed upon me desperately sought answers. ‘What are you doing here? You know the rules. Everybody knows the rules. We don’t go to your churches, and you don’t come to ours. Why are you doing this to us? What do you want?’
When the sermon was over, I tried to leave as quickly as I could, but a hand caught my shoulder. ‘Welcome. I’m so glad you came,’ said one woman. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be here,’ I said. On hearing my voice her face relaxed a little. ‘You’re not from here, are you?’ she said. ‘No, I’m from England,’ I said. As the words were repeated all around me a small crowd formed. ‘He’s from England,’ ‘He’s English,’ I could hear people muttering as a mini-stampede came to shake my hand and greet me. I was English. I was not their problem I would not be coming back” (Younge 2006: 12).
Gary Younge, a columnist for The Nation, later notes that “American racism has me pegged somewhere between the noble savage and the idiot savant—it adds twenty points to my IQ for my accent but docks fifteen for the bell curve” (2006: 12).
A scapegoat, the negative focal point of a community, figures in a similarly excluded way, but a way that is definitively hostile and vindictive. An insightful analysis of a biblical scapegoat in the person of Job is given by religion scholar René Girard, who shows how Job becomes the innocent victim of opprobrium, persecuted by his own people, including even his wife. The ‘scapegoat mechanism,’ as Girard terms it, operates on the principle of “all against one” (1987: 24). On a smaller scale, the same principle is at work with respect to ‘the black sheep’ of a family. Church intruder, scapegoat, black sheep—all are strangers in their own communal midst, foreigners outside the ‘circle of faith’. All are treated counter both to the way in which the Bible conceives and has been interpreted as conceiving strangers and to the way in which it admonishes us to treat strangers. The biblical thematic can in essence be condensed in quadrant form.
Note too, “I tell you the truth […] no prophet is accepted in his hometown” (Luke 4:24).
See also the analyses of José E. Ramírez Kidd in his finely researched book Alterity and Identity in Israel: The Stranger in the Old Testament (1999). Kidd documents in thorough fashion the prescribed treatment of strangers specified in the Old Testament. He shows that the Hebrew word for stranger in the text, for example, refers both to individuals and to Israel, that both orphans and widows are included in the former use of the word and that a distinct notion of resident aliens prevails that is not found in any of the ancient texts of the surrounding cultures. The laws the Old Testament sets forth as governing behavior toward strangers is particularly remarkable in light of present-day behaviors in the Middle East. See too theological scholar Bernhard A. Asen’s essay “From Acceptance to Inclusion: The Stranger (ger) in Old Testament Tradition,” which also contains a short but informative section on the stranger in the New Testament (1995).
When we are at a loss to name something, the typically unnoticed challenge of languaging experience is directly experienced and even heightened. For more on the challenge, see Sheets-Johnstone (2009).
As classically identified, stranger anxiety commonly appears at eight or nine months of age, but infant anxiety in face of a stranger might also be identified as vulnerability; the first stirrings of vulnerability, not in any ideological sense, religious or otherwise, but in the sense of an immediately felt openness to danger or harm from others, that is, a raw, culturally unembellished experience of the Other as unfamiliar, wholly unknown and thus threatening. Stranger anxiety from this perspective constitutes the ground floor of the experience of being at risk in the presence of a strange Other and of the possible harm that the full-bodied presence of the Other embodies. The response, in other words, is obviously in the service of survival. Looking back on our own infancy from this adult perspective, we find that it is not only conscience in the sense of reflection that ‘makes cowards of us all,’ as Shakespeare has it, but strangeness and strangers. The stranger must prove himself trustworthy, someone whose actions we can count on, someone whose words we can believe—thus, the later religious connection with knowing the name of the stranger and in turn trusting. Someone whose words can be believed—‘I am the Lord—is someone who will keep his word, someone who can do what he says he can do and will in fact do what he says he will do, someone who can thus be venerated and who will protect one from harm. It is of interest to note in this context that the first words of an infant are typically ‘Mama,’ the naming of someone already familiar, but now made even more familiar by naming, more familiar in the sense of having a distinctive call, so to speak. One can articulate the already familiar, and in articulating the already familiar, make the familiarity a felt presence, not just heard but presenced in and by the body. To be emphasized too is the fact that stranger anxiety is an evolutionarily-rooted phenomenon, as might be apparent from earlier references to non-human infant behaviors. See, for example, van Lawick-Goodall (1971), Goodall (1990), Strum (1987).
In this respect it is of substantive import to note that naming talk—what we might call veritable Heideggerian ‘idle chatter’ about the world and its occupants—is an adult occupation and preoccupation, not the occupation and preoccupation of infants and young children whose experiential knowledge of the world is nonlinguistically constituted and whose basically tactile-kinesthetic constitution of the world lays the foundation for its later linguistic constitution (Sheets-Johnstone 1999/exp. 2nd ed. 2011). Infants and young children, after all, have yet to be indoctrinated into the epistemological name-game by which what is unfamiliar is made putatively familiar by naming. Learning the world originally, regardless of one’s ancestry or religious environment, means making one’s way not by dint of language but in the flesh, exploring it, not naming it. In doing so, infants and young children take what is initially strange directly into their world, familiarizing themselves with it in the process.
Shame is close to guilt and guilt is close to sin in that feelings of shame can open onto feelings of guilt for doing or having done what one did, and feelings of guilt for doing or having done what one did can open in a religious context onto feelings of sinfulness.
Moreover Sartre’s description of the look of the Other as “eyeless” is akin to Scarry’s description of God’s voice as bodiless: “[M]y apprehension of a look turned toward me appears on the ground of the destruction of the eyes which ‘look at me”’ (1956: 258); the voice of God “is exclusively verbal […] [God] has no body” (1985: 19–23). Both look and voice are a pure and awesome presence distilled absolutely from anything corporeal. But like the voice of God, the look of the Other is actually physically substantiated, namely, in the Other’s corporeally-grounded ontological freedom, or in Luhmann’s words, in the “uncontrollable power [of Other people] to act” (1979: 41). In actuality, then, we live continuously on the edge of the death of our possibilities, on the edge of the unfamiliar.
For more on “punctuated existence,” see Sheets-Johnstone (1990), Chapter 8, “On the Conceptual Origin of Death”.
The teachings of the Buddha, we might note, focus in a related way on the preciousness of life. Moreover Lawrence’s and Nietzsche’s words might recall those of Aristotle with respect to the source of all nature, the unmoved eternal that imparts motion, the Prime Mover. Further still, the words might prompt us to ask why the stranger who wrestled with Jacob all night till dawn did not dance with him instead. The stranger was God. We might well wonder what would have happened if God had danced with Jacob. What would have been different if they had danced together rather than fought? Surely an intercorporeal attunement and spiritual rejoicing would have been present throughout the night. At the very least, Jacob would not have been injured by God in the hip and limped ever after.
For a further discussion of such kinetic distinctions, see Sheets-Johnstone (2006).
Vengeance and terrorism are paradigms of just such human adult-generated ills that heighten to an extreme the fear of strange Others, of death, and of the “uncontrollable power [of Others] to act” (Luhmann 1979: 41).
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Acknowledgement
This paper was originally presented as a guest lecture sponsored by the Templeton Foundation for Science and Religion at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2007 and as a guest lecture in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University in the same year.
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Sheets-Johnstone, M. Strangers, Trust, and Religion: On the Vulnerability of Being Alive. Hum Stud 39, 167–187 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9367-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9367-z