The Other

Friends reading

In my previous post I discussed a piece by Javier Marías on the subject of friendships, in particular their ending. In the case of the Spanish writer, the end of earlier friendships came when people who were once like-minded went different ways politically. From what he says in the piece all these former friends, like himself, were on the Left side of the political spectrum, and the deviation from this side as they got older ("matured"?) has resulted in "disenchantment, quarrels, betrayal."

Those three nouns sum up the way I felt in two cases where friendships with others have ended, but the occasion was not because of our political differences. As I wrote in the previous post, one of the friends was a conservative, the other liberal. I have parted ways with them because they had truly betrayed me personally, in the process severing any good will I once felt for them. I do not despise them. Henceforth, they do not concern me at all. In contrast, I suspect in the case of Javier Marías that these former friends occupy him too much mentally, that their supposed betrayals rankle.

These thoughts as a preface to the subject of this post, also inspired by another piece by Javier Marías from the same collection. The title of the piece is "For Me Alone to Read." Superficially, it has nothing to do with politics or betrayals. It concerns the sense of being soiled that one has in discovering that someone we dislike expresses enthusiasm for a writer whom we feel is "ours" alone.

I like the way he describes the private possession we experience on reading certain books, as if the author's intention was to address us specifically. Or, me, as JM emphasizes. In an earlier post, I wrote about the effects of childhood reading in providing us with a "map of life," and as JM writes this appropriation of a writer is felt most intensely in youth. It happens that if the particular writer becomes a cult writer, has too many enthusiasts, grows successful beyond the realm in which he was our personal discovery, we may  move on. All very true.

JM's subject, however, is the discovery that people we dislike, persons who "strike us as errant fools" or worse, have a passion for our writer. Mentioning Don Quixote, he writes that it is hard "to see people we consider to be utter idiots suddenly discovering one of our favorite authors and starting to quote from and to comment on him." Although JM retreats to ethical judgments to characterize such usurpers ("someone for whom we have little respect"), the subject is not individuals about whom most of the population is repulsed (say, Hitler or Putin), but about fellow humans. To his credit, JM realizes that he is speaking of subjective feelings rather than objective judgments and that others may think the same about him when he expiates on his own reading enthusiasms, thus taking him down a peg or two.

He does not go into whether our assessments of others, when they are making aesthetic determinations, are valid, i.e., whether the other person is in reality as disagreeable or foolish as he appears to oneself. To do so would force him to recognize a common humanity, to acknowledge that the other has something in common with him.

Common humanity, after all, is the basis, according to Kant, of the universality of judgment. Insofar as we all respond to something outside of ourselves -- art or the behavior of others -- we expect others to feel the same way. When we enthuse to our friends about a book or movie that we love, we expect that they too will love it. We feel discord in ourselves when they have a different opinion, for the universality of judgment means that we believe our judgments to be universally true and valid. When our friends disagree with us about novels or movies, we may let the matter go. But when people who are not our friends, who are in fact people whom we despise, we are disturbed by their concurrence with us.

What I am getting at is that ethical judgments are always aesthetic. This is evident today in politics. Whatever one may think about our current president, there is no way to arrive at an objective assessment of his presidency, as the media (left and right) are biased. People who dislike him, indeed hate him, bring out the language of ethics to attack him, but they are simply responding "aesthetically." He displeases them on a very visceral personal level. If this were not the case, why would thousands turn out to protest him in England, but no one turns out to protest Putin? I experienced this myself many years ago when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to the U.S. and gave a speech at Columbia University. Students gathered on the campus, as if a concert were taking place, and attentively watched the screen on which appeared the former president of Iran. The few protesters were kept outside the campus by police.

What does this have to do with "the Other"? For some reason conservative political figures (and their voters) are the Other. The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, identified the Other as one of the conceptual bases of intersubjectivity, of the relations among people. That is taken verbatim from a Wikipedia piece (by the way, it is time to make a donation to the site), which goes on: "The condition and quality of Otherness, the characteristics of the Other, is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self."

"Social identity" is the key term here, a very subjective state of affairs.

Enough for today.

Picture credit: PBS Parents

On the ending of friendships

I am reading a book of articles by the Spanish novelist Javier Marías. These are occasional pieces that were penned for a newspaper in Spain, translated now into English as Between Eternities and Other Writings. I have read several of his novels and am very impressed with his craftsmanship, if, at the same time, the stories leave me cold. From the articles, I get the feeling that he is person who doesn't like b.s. and  who sees through political correctness and the various vanities of our age. At the same time, he belongs to the species of European secular liberal who disdains religion and conservatism.

One of the articles, "Old Friends," has given me much to think about. He begins by mentioning how, over time, one loses touch with people with whom one was once evidently close, say, during one's youth. (In a related piece, he writes of "the ghosts" in his 30-year-old address book, for instance, names whose faces he cannot recall or who have since died.) He alludes to the reason for losing touch by mentioning that those earlier friendships were marked by the idealistic and combative stance of university students and that, in time, some of the same idealists now defend attitudes and people that they loathed thirty years earlier. The loss is thus the result of "disenchantment, quarrels, betrayals."

While he insists that he is not against people "changing and adapting and modifying and coming to see things differently," he finds that there are "limits that 'converts' fail to respect, a long path that needs to be traveled." "Sudden transformations are unacceptable," occurring as if by magic or overnight.

Since I came of age in the early 1970s, attending graduate school at the University of Texas with lots of idealistic and combative folks, I have had plenty of experience with people who, in my view, are stuck in the same combative and idealistic frame of mind as they were in the 1970s. They are people who would call me conservative, in fact have accused me of "becoming conservative." I would have to say, however, that my attitudes today are no different from what they were in the 1970s.

It just so happened that in 1975 I went to live in Japan for several years. On my return an enormous shift in cultural and social norms had taken place, and my friends from the pre-1970 days simply went along with this shift, accepting every hair-brained idea that has come down the turnpike, resulting in an ever widening extremity of social and cultural attitudes. Very few people in the early 1970s, for instance, talked about "dead white males." Very few even thought about "transgender rights." Or homosexual marriage. Since the 1970s there has been a continuous pushing back against limits, and anyone who objects is characterized as "bigoted." The idealists of my generation have simply marched in time and in tune, enlarging their identity. Had I not been away from the U.S. for several years, I might have become "progressive" myself. In contrast, my attitudes remain the same as they were back then. I have not "evolved."

Moreover, I don't have a problem maintaining friendships with people with different political views. Some former friends have dropped me, but I continue to like those with whom I am still in contact for personal qualities that have stood the test of time, not because we share the same political views. In fact, of two friends with whom I have broken in recent years -- because of what I consider betrayal on their part -- one is a conservative, the other a liberal. When that break occurs, it happens quickly and is not the result of simmering differences. I don't allow myself to be hurt or disappointed by the betrayal or to linger over it -- or even think badly of the person. Just move on. Remove them from your address book. Because of the peripatetic existence I have lived, I don't have a huge number of friends. Thus, I try to hang on to the few who remain and to cherish them, despite our differences.

Picture credit: New York magazine