Sunday, September 27, 2009
The question emerges from both intersubjective and coexistential depths. Which is deeper, the intersubjective or the coexistential? Perhaps this question is destined, by virtue of these depths, to remain in a state of transfusion. It absorbs a liquidity. It swims.
The interrogative clause (the opening clausula of *-subjectivity) functions as a politeness marker in various discursive universes. The interrogative phrasing, involving syntactical transformation as well as prosodic inflection, makes requests nice. It shows care for the face of the other, which emerges from both intersubjective and coexistential depths.
A typology of speech acts will not stand as an adequate guide to the description of all that can be adventured with the question. Yet, let's ask in passing how the paradox of inquiry, one starting point for philosophical questioning, might be connected with the everyday request or the functions of the interrogative.
Is the request a passionate form of inquiry? Can there possibly be any true love of inquiry without passion? Well, the votaries of dispassionate inquiry have much to say in their favor. Indeed, as a provisional critic of dispassionate inquiry I rely upon the indirectness called "dispassion" in order to communicate a critique of and ultimately to think about—very about—the question. Nonetheless, exploring the empathic dimension—function, modality, horizons—this is yet exploratory—of the question inevitably touches on the matter of the passions.
In questioning we catch a glimpse of the for-itself at the same time we work with the for-others. On another plane it appears that the question entwines with feeling, or with vulnerability. We feel for the others whom we question.
To inquire is to empathize? Contrary examples abound. However, the quotidian polite question by its nature of caring about the face of the other demonstrates a consciousness of vulnerability. Are we already empathically understanding the other even before we inquire of them? If that's true in any sense, then how do we make up for the horrible impoliteness of asking? Are our true feelings for others irrevocably wrapped up in polite fictions? Asked to sacrifice something resembling authenticity—must we be asked, or do we already feel this thing like authenticity being set aside as we begin to formulate the polite question, the empathic question? Do we set this thing aside for a true understanding of the other, or a true transfusion of horizons, a fiction true to our feelings for others? Would there then be something ultimately untrue about selfishness revealed by the question?
When asking about the question, which are the truths we must attend to?
Labels: empathy, intersubjectivity, pragmatics, questions
Monday, January 21, 2008
If I talk about chopping garlic, empathy and the ontology of flesh there may well be a subtext. Perhaps this counts as subtext: Kenyans hacked to death with machetes, reports Michelle Faul.
One man staggered past with blood streaming from the stump of his arm, which had been cut off with a machete. The arm was taken by a group of youths and placed on top of a pile of stones barricading an alleyway.
The maimed man, Peter Kyalo, arrived later at Kenyatta Hospital. He said he was warned on Saturday night by Luo friends he might be targeted because he is a Kamba, the same tribe as the vice president, a former presidential candidate who joined Kibaki's government this month.
In a separate incident, around 50 people attacked welder Dominic Owour, a 23-year-old Luo, and tried to cut off both his hands at the forearm, Owour said.
Both men said police watching the attacks did not intervene.
On the NewsHour last week I saw some footage of a man being hacked to death with a machete. He was running down an alleyway, trying to escape his assailant. I felt as if it could of been me running, my flesh hacked open by a machete. Nothing I saw would make me say that the person taking the footage intervened. A skeptical mindset will disbelieve the faintest whiff of nonintervention. Can I talk to you about my nightmares without intervening in some way? Perhaps intervention is the whole point of talking about one's dreams. I don't know. To be honest with you, I can imagine hacking somebody else's flesh with a machete. I can imagine watching such an attack and doing nothing to intervene–in the "comfort" of my living room that may be both the easiest and the hardest thing to imagine. I will tell you that my immediate response upon witnessing a machete attack on television was to empathize with the victim of the attack, and I ask you to accept that as true enough, as something that can be discussed without discussing the interventions that bring it to our attention. Yet since we are talking, perhaps we can talk about interventions.
I wouldn't know how to begin to go about intervening in Kenyan politics. One hopes one's friends are safe. Heads of state issue appeals, as they must. Who can disagree with an appeal for peace? Yet to what avail? The philosophical question to ask may be this: To what does one makes an appeal? A common humanity? A sense of empathy? Perhaps it would be better to ask: To whom does one appeal? A person immersed in whats, no doubt. Well, who wants to live in horror? Who has no guiding sense of empathy? Sometimes I feel as if my whole existence has been an exercise in learning to savor disillusionment.
If I now make an appeal on behalf of all living things, am I telling you my dreams or am I making an intervention? Does the mindset that would regard these as mutually exclusive mislead us? Because I care about you I will never tell you that life is easy, though I may on occasion play with a message–subject it to substitutions, reversals, inversions–to make it easier to digest.
Labels: dreaming, empathy, flesh, garlic, Kenya, politics
Sunday, December 30, 2007
I empathize with the potato. What cuts the potato cuts me. I don't believe the potato has a mind. Therefore empathy does not require that the empathic person has a theory of mind (or ToM, as some scientific types put it). The empathic person does not posit but simply feels. Were science to discover that minds do not exist and that everything currently attributed to mind represents some other phenomenon or set of phenomena, the problem of empathy would remain what it is: what does it mean that a person can intimately feel what happens to the body of another living entity? (The problem of the autistic person's purported lack of empathy might appear differently were science to disbelieve in minds, but that's another story.)
What does empathy for the potato mean? There's a russet potato with some other russet potatoes hanging in a basket in the kitchen. I'm going to peel off its skin, cut it into chunks, toss the chunks into a pan with some onion, pepper and garlic, rub oil on the lot of them, and put the pan into the oven. Once it's good and roasted I'm going to eat the potato. Should I feel nauseated? If I reflect upon it perhaps it is just a little bit nauseating.
I'm not going to liberate the potato. What would that mean? Growing more pototoes? Just throwing it away? Although I have thrown away food, some force within me rebels against throwing away food, and I can't help but think of the potato as food. It would be better to be just a little bit nauseated than to throw away food. Empathy with the potato is thus a delicate balance between throwing up and throwing away food.
Am I worthy of this potato? Is my life so wonderful that I can just assume that I'm worthy of any potato, including this potato? I suspect that living my life fully means that I must interrogate my eating of this very potato. How am I going to live that I should eat this potato?
Why this potato and not another? Is philosophy capable of talking about the accidentality of existence, or must it abolish or suppress the accidental? Adriana Cavarero says that the accidental needs care, and she says, "To tell the story that every existence leaves behind itself is perhaps the oldest act of such care" (Relating Narratives, p. 53). How would you like it if I roasted you for supper, told the story of how you came to end up on my plate, and called that caring? Let's be honest for a moment about the psychology of kitchen stories, about the nausea and the brutality they conceal.
Is it really proper for me to celebrate this potato? Would it be too poetic to call attention to its chthonic existence? What about the stickiness of its milky blood on the blade of the knife? In my dreams I'm drawing close to Proxima Centauri. Were I to tell you about the dreams of this potato, huddled up against the stars in the Idaho night, you would be right to suspect me of prevaricating, of covering over a great catastrophe of being. So I shouldn't live for my dreams?
Labels: autism, Cavarero, empathy, potatoes