Overcoming The Other (1)
G David Schwartz

 

If a story does not speak to two, three or more points (people, traditions) then it is less than it could be. Yet this is not relativistic. What is developed in a new term, to be programmatically worked for creative insight?

Necessary steps toward accepting others are to be educated toward enjoy difference. For example, Native America dancing with the beat of drums is joyful. Chinese dragons parading though the street are not me. This joy and happiness are not mine because I/we are superior to them (we are not) but they offer enjoyment, the unique ways in which a people celebrates.

Amid a society which requires degrees of conformity, reduction to equality leveling to statistical democracy, the others offer a degree of wilderness and abandonment in celebration with unique finery which, sadly, is not me, but joyfully, I may behold.

We do not, however, live in ontological thought (not even professional philosophers do). We live in the real world which, far less than the world which can be analyzed into and out of good and evil, place, sense, and distance, replete with ambiguity and, therefore, layers of possibility. Insofar as ontological diminishes this ambiguity, it is merely thought.

From study of political and military history, "we rarely learn more about people than how it was ruled. From its poetry, we learn about its way of thinking, its desires and wants."

It is not not not not merely physical strangeness, nor did spatial distance which makes us realize the otherness which is always trying to grapple think a fictional story. Christian people had, and a few today even claim to have, a revelation from or about Jesus. What does not occur is a ‘negative revelation,’ a revelation of, if you will, not-Jesus. Nor, interestingly, does there occur a revelation in the form of Jesus-for-them (and not for us).

Nevertheless, there have been, and are yet, revelations not by, for or about Jesus. It is as if God had different venues, different approaches for different people. This is not such a foolish idea if only because different people behave differently.

Story lies on the edges of history. The potential in stories is to stretch (allow the continuance of) history. A story does not ask for "correct interpretation." A story asks for all interpretation. A story is not a particular concern to pass on a stasis once, the once and for all truth. A story is concerned to elicit all possibility.

The analogy is seen with football. One does not evidence an enjoyment of football if one cheers only the home team. Where this is not bigotry, it is local nationalism. Such a "sport" would not only have an abysmal epistemic implication but, if pressed, would turn out to be a form of solpticism. Enjoying only the hometown team is certainly not the same as enjoying primarily the hometown team.

To enjoy primarily (but not only) the hometown team is to establish a frame of reference which will last beyond the end of the regular season. One may see one’s own team fail to make the playoffs yet still have a team to root for. The game continues even if ones own team is "out" of contention. To enjoy ones hometown team is to epitomize the end of the season at the point where ones own team is "out" (after regular season play. Thus, play offs, as the Superbowl, are irrelevant (might not exist, have no true need to exist, takes the fun from other teams, etc.).

Truly, this person cannot do what we mean when we say we enjoy football. This person merely enjoys his or her hometown team. He/she is prejudiced.

Maxims, such as Nietzsche’s, only define an area of thought, not the entire thought itself. If extended, sentences only describe the boarder of thought. Books define large areas. Stories, on the other hand, were originally and are authentically, a process.

"Story" is the most appropriate term for the phenomena because the word "story" conveys the ideas of assessment and communication stretching from accounts to rumors. On the way (which is the way of language, its most appropriate form as social communication) is when the story weaves together reason and fable, legend and joke, myth and fiction, truth and concern.

"Story" functions, then, like our epistemological habits and projections. Story is, in a real sense, our thoughts in action.

It is illicit to delve into the history, traditional, sancta and muting of another people with no concern to understand them and their ways, as well as our relationship with them and every concern to pour out vengeance and ridicule.

Marcel notes that the competitive system which is assumed by our personality is the "most depersonalizing process possible; for the things in us which has real value cannot be judged by comparison, having no common measure with anything else."

We need not follow Marcel in his analysis of gifts; the idea that I am not the owner of the best part of my personality but merely "the trustee."

In our concern for what occurs in the social realm, we will be concerned with something above and beyond even personality. We will, in a sense, be concerned with that which remains to others in the social realm even when I go home, even when I am out of town, or otherwise unavailable, even when I have died. What remains in the social realm, what remains available for those who would seek to know me/mine/ muses? What remains is my story in the indelible network of comparison and contrast with my tradition in general history. It is a network of comparison and contrast with all stories ever told and as yet to be told.

Sartre’s truth can be listed in four shards:

1. I distinct/despise the other not because of what he, she, they are in themselves but for the fear of them in me; what I fear is my own ignorance.

2. The conditions for mutuality are present in Sartre’s analysis; Sartre simply will not have it.

3. Mutuality occurs where there are no masters. Where is the presence of the other without mastery or fear? Where we might touch the other with a certain mutuality (not the absence or neglect, both dangerous situations) or mastery?

The presence of the other without mastery, even with his, her, their obedience or weaknesses exposed, occurs in their stories. The mutuality of mastery may occur in the availability of their stories for both their and our interpretation. We might propose an initial exclusivity of interpretation (my ideas versus your ideas - which need not lead to conflict).

What will bring this independence to mutuality while yet preserving my interpretations against your interpretation (even if preserving them as it were, in transcendence, in surprise!) is the will to converse.

The use of a living language to comment upon the coded language, the will to engage in conversation about it, and enliven otherwise static texts, dialogue, is to will both independence and mutuality.

Stories develop metaphors, surplus signifiers, thus pointing the way out of tradition toward connections which must be made. The story, then, even by identifying one king of otherness (an alien, even enemy to be defeated again and again in legend) implies more unity than not.

Stories (Lewis is speaking about fantastic and/or mythic tales) "can give us experience we have never had and thus, instead of "commenting on life" can add to it."

I will make two claims about the stories of others. First, the stories of others are embodiments of the other which I might introduce to myself as (relatively) non-offensive expressions of the other, frozen as it were, in his, her, their otherness which is so like/unlike my own. The key term here, bracketed with parenthesis denoting a superfluity which is just the opposite of deconstructs ‘erasure,’ is frozen.

The second claim I want to make is that these ‘frozen’ images are, although occasionally accepted by the other themselves as frozen, actually simply refrigerated. More often than not, they must be reframed from the frig to be used. In fact, as usable, the stories are imperatives for the other.

The imperatives may be assumed by the other to be ‘commands’ (icicles, if you prefer), but in the best tradition of all peoples, the frozen texts which emit icicles are actually Pascalian fire (or, if you will, Rosenzweigian star and flame) which not only warm the other but emblazon the other, act as ‘after burners,’ as the other fires toward the, their, our common future.

The stories of the other, for the other are either cold or hot, or at various times, both. This ought suggest how difficult it would be to freeze (interpretively dismiss) others who regard themselves as "under the authority of" specific texts, or classical texts, or identifiably associated texts, or extended texts (e.g. Bible, Talmud, Midrashim, Responsa or alternatively, Bible- church fathers-theologians, for example, or, again, Kierkegaard, Derrida, Kafka, or, Hegel, Marx, Tillich, Buber, Rosenzweig.

It is not so easy to decide where one might cogently begin to assess the proper ‘placement’ (freezing) of another. One may simply suitably supplant any of the secondary, tertiary, or quandary "names" with any in a metaphoric slide.

Barbara Johnson says "In chapter 6, what is not known is called ‘obscurity;’ in chapter 7, it is called ‘erasure;’ in Chapter 8, ‘teaching," Placement is captured in / with many names.

It cannot be the case, as ‘internationalists’ clam that a literary text has one and only one correct interpretation. If this were true, so, the entire industry of interpretation would be obliterated: literary analyst, hermeneutical thinkers, cultural critics, philosophers et. al. The only person with sufficient access to all the information pertinent to the correct interpretation would be the author of any particular work. Two facts demolish his/her privilege access; first, authors are notorious for being the worse interpreters of their own work. The reason this is so is expressed in the second fact we should mention: that an authorship is a series of transcendent applications of previous elements in that very authorship. In other words, an author no sooner ‘completes’ the terms and analyze of one work than he or she begins to apply the insights and principles which were derived through the work.

If so, every statement from an author makes about a product at one stage of his/her career is made from the perspective of a subsequent stage. An author cannot return to a previous stage of his or her authorship. He or she is already working in a new direction with new challenges, with the advantage of new dilemmas (or return to old dilemmas with new principles or insights) primarily regards his/her work from the perception of delimitation.

The new work in which an author is engaged may be more advanced or a regress. In either case, returning to interpret prior work, he or she returns with unworried dilemmas, with unusable tools, so his/her perspective is always necessarily skewed.

If it is hopeless for an author, with privileged information to assemble or dissemble the correct interpretation on a text, it is absurd to do so. Yet, hermeneutics is not to be construed as an absurdity. It must be the case that hermeneutics does something other, and different than interpret the text (or think they cannot do so in any event).

Nor will it do to say that the "correct" interpretation is the one which will result when all possible interpretations are laid on the table and the final, true one is assembled. First it would seem this spread table resembles an end.

To interpret something the practitioner does not recognize in his or her self and certainty not in his or her community of the world of interpretation and impossibility in historic continuity [the discontinuity of historical interpretation].

Second, the spread table theory would seem to make ‘assembly’ the interpretation the more difficult as more possibilities are laid on the table. But this seems cogent only insofar as the interpretative community is searching for truth. If, in other words, they are searching for a possible alternative, then the spread table theory would seem perfectly feasible.

Implicit in the spread table theory is not the search for truth, but possibilities which may be used as options. Any options are chosen, taken up, given preference. The reason is ‘to regard’. In history criticism we ‘respond’ to a text in terns of what it says to us.

What we intend when we read is not the text. That is laying before us! Rather, we intend that the text speak to our condition or, more precise still, tells us that everything will be (become) alright. Everything must proceed through these connections. What we read a text for is to derive some sense and understanding of a future. Classic texts, or beloved reading matter, are those which speak to me, for me and into my future. When we read we intend that future which we understand what we read.

There is a text in itself, contra Fish, but we are not primarily concerned with what the text says to its original readers (which is the implication of Juhl; or even what it says to its prejudiced author). We are concerned, and we do read what the text says to us, to our hopes, intentions toward the future.

Those texts which might be read in themselves as saying the most (ambiguous/possible/sacredly intending) about us toward the us-to-be (becoming) is holy, is a classic text. Thus, although distinctly, even radically different, one sacred texts might be the Hebrew Scripture (become it speaks to a specific/several specific us-to-be (become), or the sacred text may be Don Quixote.

The problem in the realm of Sartriean subjectivity (the sphere of me-me- me which is which is the world as we know it) is not how to introduce myself to the other. I know myself; I need no introduction. Rather, the problem is the twofold one concerning how I introduce the other to me and why I should I even do so.

The question "why?" is placed second because (as Sartre himself seems to have decided, after announcing that he was concerned to refute solipsism) the other is a given. So the first answer to the question "Why?" is that we live with the other. But this is neither satisfying nor enlightening. Our life with others is, in fact, sometimes disappointing. At best, there are several reasons for this disappointment. For example, others do not do what we want, or what we say do and both replicate and perpetuate the me-me-me world.

Nor do we understand the other. Hence, we need an introduction. An introduction says we are worth knowing, are not bad people, and that knowledge of us is good to have. Knowledge of the other might still lead to contempt, but it would be an informed contempt, based on principles which can be analyzed and debated so as to be modified.

Behind the need for an introduction trails, as it were the need for an explanation why the introduction (not the brute passion filled fact of the other) is important. Thus, the ‘why?’ question asks for a certain agenizing beyond the brut certainty of the other; asks, in short, for an amenable relationship with the other?

This said, however, the other is still the brute certainty of an expressed, unanalyzable, sure, slippery me-me-me world which I confront but cannot understand. The other is as selfish as I am self-concerned (and calls me selfish in comparison). In short, the other created his, her, their world just as I create my own.

But the world of the other, of otherness, is abysmal. Just look around. I/we did not create this mess. My best intention is to create the best possible world imaginable. To do so, utilizes common sensical reason: logic atop understanding. This (the conglomerate of effective thought process) dictates (we dedicate to ourselves in cogent, creative moments of rationality) that we get along with the other, with others.

But how would we do so if the other is the transcendental transcending subjectivity in something like a Sartriean world of me-me-me subjectivity, in modes of radical freedom. The other is too much fluidity (‘mid-really, to grasp. The other seems solid but is squishable at times. At times, we even give into squishing the other, as if we could squeeze him right out of his otherness.

Still, despite our best, or worse, intentions otherness exists. The problem, then, is to learn how to perceive the other beyond the muddiness the other claims not to posse at all, and the muddiness I, on the contrary, profess to be able to both see and understand.

The question, in short then, is not where to find compromise about and with the other (they know who they are as well as we know who we are), but to find a place in the universe where the other is graspable and does not slink through our fingers and cake our hands.

To turn the question a bit, where does the other, beyond illusion, or delusion, even -if they do not allow cleans on what I do - at least modify their claims of what they do (and perhaps even admit some wrong-doing).

Where, without invading the real life (sleep) dreams of the other do we espy their dreams: their good wishing for an image of the world they are obviously not living with, yet have been commanded to live? Where do we locate the analysis of the world (the world just out side our door, our neighborhood, our country, our planet and our universe) in which they would live if they had their druthers, a world which (because they, too, recognized is nit this world of my me-me-me) takes account of this world in either intuitive, commonsensical, logical analysis, and projects in logical, common, or intuitive terms which explain the world to come?

We cannot (should not/ better not) invade their dreams, but we can introduce ourselves to their reveres. We cannot (should not/ought not) pinpoint, nor necessarily distinguish, nor necessarily agree with, their logic which, by not agreeing to implies it is only, at best, common sense, but we can recognize the conglomerate of reason, epistemological systems and subterranean hopes as creative emphasis.

We cannot crack open their skulls to see what’s in there, what makes them tick, but we can crack open our skull (symbolically) to investigate what we think about their creative endeavors. We cannot, in short, see them through the mud we sling but we can allow their introduction to us in, for example, the stories they develop.

These stories are efforts to explain the world, theirs lives, their hopes and accomplishments, their individuality in terms of the past, present and the future. Their stories are commands given them by their prophets, their mothers and fathers, their teaches and their storytellers. When they read their stories modify both their lives and their subsequent readings. If so, if we read their stories, we might modify our relationship. We may, in other words, read a relationship which is accommodating to the kinds of relationships we would will were willing words.

In fact, behind our every action and every thought, we will an image of the world. With this image, we either implicitly agenize an imperative to live in order to create this image in deed, or we live to avoid this image for some other creation.

Why ought we introduce the other to ourselves? Not only because I already have a relationship with the other, but because I do find the relationship unsatisfactory. We ought to introduce others to ourselves because; for the simple reason that we do not know the other. Our current relationship is built on faulty or nonexistent knowledge.

They / we lie, distort the truth, and talk at cross purposes. Their stories, on the other hand, offer them intermits proximities of that which was, is, and will be. We ought to introduce the other to ourselves because, in our stories, we are looking forward to the world where we will create. We cannot do so in ignorance nor alone, else would the world be misshapen, fragmented, muddy, and ignorant. It will be a mere replication of the world in which we currently live.

A way to help salvage the world is of course to speak in truth. It is interesting to think that fiction abides no falsehood. But there must be other ways to preserve the earth, the background of our existence.

Kinnamom tells us that, in order "to preserve the integrity of the community, consensus is needed on those things that are essential. But in order to preserve the loving openness of the community, diversity is needed on those things that are not essential. Yet diversity is needed ton debate, to find the essential. Diversity is needed to probe the depth of the essential in order to release the even deeper recesses.

If we begin assessment of "others," in "our" world by way of our prejudices, we tinge the future of our discussion. If, on the other hand, we proceed to ignore our prejudices, we do not resolve them. If we begin with accusations, our path toward dignity is that much more difficult. If, on the other hand, we begin with espousal of agreement and unities we alienate those who quite rightly emphasize those ideas and practices which speak against unity.

It seems, in the larger sense, that any beginning which starts with assessments and analogies are doomed to failure, but any appraisal which does not begin with such perspective is doomed to irrationalism. Any beginning then, is doomed to exclude someone whereas a refusal to begin excluding everyone.

Were should we start? Not at the beginning, but also not at the conclusion. We should start with neither assumptions nor accusations, but we should not allow silence. We should start, then, with statements or utterances of a sort which neither assume unity nor assumed the alienation of all others.

Such statements should be forms which neither speak for or against the other nor intend to ignore the other. Such starts must be positive assertions of any particular group which are prone to assert such universality. Such statements are stored in stories.

There is a curious reversal in the Sartriean implication of Sartre’s consciousness might more clearly be brought out by investigating a curious thing which is not a mere thing, a thing in itself which, given over to human consciousness, becomes another thing in an odd development which makes the think seem almost alive, and, indeed, because some people, who may even know that saints and righteous beings are for-others, identify with things not to annihilate some people who may even know that saints and righteous beings are for-others, identified with this thing so as not to annihilate their consciousness but to enliven both things through their consciousness and their consciousness through this thing of themselves as standing before (to be-fore and be-for) this thing they courageously and oddly call the Living Word. We will call this thing which we help escape its thingness the classic, or more formally, the story.

The story is more than a narrative which tells something and might be analyzed. The story creates us as we create it. We might live the story, but only in the sense that we live its implications (the periferia) of the story and thereafter modify the boarders of the story, expanding the story into our lives and expanding our lives with the help of the story.

Two classic treatments are the story of the Exodus and the story of Jesus. Each is the story of the coming to consciousness, of the coming consciousness. Each are appropriately named stories, even tough these two most important facts of Judaism and Christianity are not fictions (in the paradigm of the"historic" religions. That points out that a story, a tale, is either a mythic or a symbolic happening. A myth has too often been called a falsehood, but a "true myth" (which is not an oxymoron) is a shard of history and a shard of truth. It is, just like a report in the evening news, a symbol of happenings, a symbol of truth.

 

 

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Copyright © 2004 G David Schwartz
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"