I mentioned recently Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks. He brings up an interesting concept taken from the work of Thomas Kasulis: the contrast between intimacy and integrity when considering how societies (or groups) behave. These aren't meant to be seen as two opposed polarities so much as, well, families of ideas.
So, intimacy has this idea of inter-relatedness - emphasising empathy, humility, dependency, respect, trust and emotional resonance; while integrity maintains distinctions and the focus is more on the rational, the impersonal. Intimacy is 'way-seeking', while integrity is 'truth-seeking'. Intimacy can be seen in the YinYang, an active inter-relation and inter-penetration, where nothing is settled for long and in Qi, where all is flowing; integrity by contrast seems linear, or perhaps atomic. And, of course, this is connected to what I was considering in the post on Harmony as well.
One could apply this intimacy-integrity axis to knowledge, say, and here I quote from an open access paper that you can find here:
The integrity orientation to knowledge is ... external where the knower is independent from the known. The integrity of knowledge and the integrity of the knower are maintained by agreed rules and principles to deal with disagreements and to allow that any knower canattain the same knowledge. Integrity-dominant societies see knowledge as available to all, and its public demands that knowledge should be freely shared.
From this, we can see how the integrity orientation is a common foundation for a number of ethical theories, such as the concept of human rights, the Golden Rule and Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Individuality, autonomy and independence are strongly valued. Integrity-based knowledge values empirical observation and logical reasoning and can be traced back to the quest for a pan-cultural ground through Plato, Aristotle, The Renaissance, Enlightenment and Modernism (Kasulis 2002).
In contrast, through the lens of intimacy, knowing seems rather different:
[T]he knower and known cannot be separated, because knowledge is relational to the person and reality. This means knowing is also partly learning about the knower. ‘Intimate knowledge’s objectivity... is accessible only to those within the appropriate intimate locus, those who have achieved their expert knowledge through years of practical experience’ (Kasulis 2002, 35). Knowledge is thus absorbed and incorporated into the body through praxis, rather than acquired externally and existing independently to that person. Intimacy is personal, tacit, intuitive, affective, situated and is achieved through practice.
Doesn’t this latter description fit better with what we’ve been considering in the role of the emotions? And with the view of consciousness in Heidegger and Sartre? And with Murdoch’s connection between the evaluative frameworks of aesthetics and ethics?
Specifically, with regard to ethics, in intimacy-oriented systems, the relational aspect demands context – and perhaps hierarchy too. So, a child has a certain set of duties to a parent – while the parent too will have duties to the child. These may supercede duties to strangers. Although many eastern ethical traditions say that where the parent demands a course of action that is ‘wrong’, the child should do what is ‘right’ rather than obey – but nonetheless filial duty might demand that one lies to a murderer, for example, thus going against Kantian ethics and would certainly lead to greater care and concern for the parent, rather than maximising the greater good.
Of course, many in integrity-cultures behave like that anyway, while also valuing the egalitarian concepts that come along with individualism.
Integrity values have, as well as equality, brought with them huge scientific, social and political goods, as I have said before. Yet, while we seek to be reductionist and rationalistic as a creed, we find it hard to ‘justify’ respect for elders, preference for the family and so on. We have to bring in other values and ‘bolt them on’ – ‘family values’, ‘care ethics’ and so on. It feels like we have to adopt one thing or the other. That we are seeking a simplistic consistency in a complex reality of competing demands.
What I am calling for is related, clearly, to the point I was making in the post on harmony. Intimacy, clearly, resonates entirely with the concept of harmony - not as a static state of concord where all agree on one view, but as a fertile tension that allows for difference. What I am suggesting, as in that previous post and in Enlightenment, is tuning down the level of integrity (from, say nine out of ten to seven, or six) and ramping up the volume of intimacy (from two to four or five). It seems that it would be beneficial to draw more intimacy into the 'usual' way of things in many Western nations. Especially as our great thinkers in the integrity tradition - like Kant and Mill - themselves valued some of the themes of the intimacy orientation a little more than we do now.
The desire to define, to argue for one narrow perspective, to embrace left or right, to enthrone integrity above all else; it all seems to lead to increasing conflict and polarisation as though we have become incapable of relationality. So much so that we cannot even bear to listen to opposing arguments, that we have to demonise the opposition, that nothing they could possibly say, feel, believe has any value. And because there are strong rational arguments to defend opposing positions, what really makes the difference is the emotional attachment you have to the originating premise - which you believe, maybe even unconsciously, to be true. So where will debate get you? That foundational belief (that four-week embryos are or are not persons, say) is often not tractable to rational argument. Nor to emotional appeals, for the emotions are already firmly invested with the opposing side. What then? In reality, the rational stance is not entirely rational.
Just think, when you have a thought you can ask yourself why. There will be an answer. Ask why that in turn is the case. There will be an answer. Then ask again - at that point you'll probably fall back on 'because I want to' or 'because that's just how it is!' We don't know why there's something rather than nothing* or why there is consciousness. Even why there is life. At a certain point, all arguments rest on something we just have to accept. But that doesn't make anything that comes from basing a case on that premise 'true' - just the best truth we have. We could all do with a little more humility.
Some people use north and south, east and west rather than right and left. What is a right hemisphere to them? Nothing. It may be north, south, east or west, depending on where they stand. Not so useful for the neuroscientists, but a darn sight more useful in a jungle. Integrity values would tell us they are wrong; intimacy admits there is much rational sense in that categorisation and, in its context, for fit purposes, embraces it.
Consider Kant’s ‘practical hope’. He couldn’t justify it. It was simply what was effective. It asserts a generosity of spirit, a love for something despite its failings. Martha Nussbaum says that love demands an acceptance of our own neediness (that we are interconnected) and that it allows an area of mystery and infinite complexity to the other. We struggle with that. We struggle with not knowing, or thinking we can know, everything. We hate not to be in complete control. And yet that monarchical quest to have control is, at its heart, narcissistic.
Intimacy does not mean we have to embrace, for example, female genital mutilation - it is not a case of moral relativism. It's just that instead of cold reason and harsh judgement we start from an assumed position of shared humanity. We speak with respect for the person and the culture, but still have the freedom to disagree - strongly - and seek to change minds, change practices. Because respect for another person does not imply that they are never mistaken.
Intimacy does mean a greater sense of shared responsibility. It does imply a duty to care for those outside the self. Individuality is not lost - just selfish individualism.
NOTES
*Spinoza does - it's because everything is 'god', an uncaused cause, which is eternal and infinite.
He is also, while a passionate proponent of the merits of seeking intellectual truth, a firm believer in the value of friendship. Indeed, that personal connection - albeit with others of a similar academic bent - is, to him, as essential of the good life. His philosophy, although it seeks to view the world from an intellectual, objective, universal and timeless standpoint (thus attaining as close as humanity can the nature of divine thought), also stresses the value of these individual others.
He writes: 'So far as in me lies, I value, above all other things out of my control, the joining hands of friendship with men who are lovers of truth. I believe that nothing in the world, of things outside our own control, brings more peace than the possibility of affectionate intercourse with such men; it is just as impossible that the love we bear them can be disturbed … as that truth once perceived should not be assented to.'
Like Kant and Mill, discourse seems to be integral to the pursuit of truth. It cannot be an entirely solitary quest. Spinoza's search for integrity thus embraces a certain intimacy.
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