Then, in the midst of being absorbed in a world that is my world, I encounter the face of another person, and the world as I had experienced it, my world, consumed by what I wanted and what I was up to, breaks open. Another person’s face stops me short. Why? Because a face can never be just an object in my world. The face is the site of another’s experience, never reducible to what I know or what I want. The other, like me, is looking out at her world. How the world occurs to her, from her perspective, always exceeds and is different to how the world occurs for me. Again and again, and in each case otherwise, the face makes it impossible for me to turn the world into my world. This, he writes, is the beginning of ethics.
In this passage from Danielle Celemajer's Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future - a truly phenomenal book - she's considering Emmanuel Lévinas. What then strikes her, as it strikes all those who care about animals, is that he thought only humans had "faces" that you could respond to in this way.
Only when we are face to face, human to human, can we say not simply ‘I want you’, but ‘I want you to have the life you want. I want you to be’.
Celemajer strongly disputes this. She writes:
Every time you make them an object, every time you block out their faces, you betray them, and yourself as well. I have never got over something else Lévinas wrote. Sometimes, he admitted, we cannot bear that others have a face. We cannot tolerate what that would demand of us. So we want to murder them. It is just too much of a burden to remain alive to the truth that all of these other beings feel what it is like to be thirsty, or what it is like not to have the space to move, or experience the loss of the others they nourish and are nourished by. Sometimes, it is easier to kill them than to stay face to face.
But these are the poles: to answer the call to be infinitely responsible to others, or to kill them because we cannot bear that responsibility. And though extreme, there is something simple about poles. The path that seems most difficult to take is, perhaps, the possibility that lies before us. To acknowledge that we will inevitably fail in that infinite responsibility to all of those whose faces look out to this world; and still to remain present to their faces and respond, imperfectly.
She also offers the best reasoning for thinking about predatory animals that I have come across.
I still find myself in a state of emotional and intellectual conflict when an animal who lives here and with whom I have formed a relationship is eaten or killed. I have not learned – at an emotional level, I mean, and not just intellectually – to reconcile my grief at their death with my recognition that these movements of living and dying, killing and being killed are precisely the turns of the world I am trying to learn to live within. There are philosophers out there who think that ethics means minimising suffering and that this commitment calls on us humans to intervene in everyone and everything else’s relationships. I appreciate what motivates them – the pain of witnessing suffering – but the recognition that these movements of living and dying, killing and being killed are precisely the turns of the world I am trying to learn to live within. There are philosophers out there who think that ethics means minimising suffering and that this commitment calls on us humans to intervene in everyone and everything else’s relationships. I appreciate what motivates them – the pain of witnessing suffering – but they seem to be basing their view of ethical action on the assumption that we humans occupy some privileged position from which we can come up with a calculation that measures the best possible arrangement of life. A humbler understanding of ethics would suggest that the very desire to make the world as we would have it is the root of the violence unfurling in front of our faces.
Talking of "the best way of thinking" about a difficult issue, Erik Jampa Andersson discusses the issue of eating plants when we know them to be sentient, intelligent beings. The obvious starting point is that as we cannot photosynthesise, we do have to eat some beings. He says that first the bodies of plants are organised differently, such that cutting off a part does not imply killing. He adds that fruits and nuts are intended to be eaten and that root vegetables are usually dug up when the plant's leafy life has ended, so long as one leaves some tubers for regrowth, the plant's plantiness continues. Finally he says that holding in mind the plant's actuality as sentient and so on is to treat the plant with respect and that by so considering the plant we are inclined to take only what we need and with minimal disruption.
Good post.