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