Useless Suffering, moral injury, Zarathustra, Levinas

CHAPTER 5 [DRAFT] THE CHILD (Beast) I NNOCENCE IS THE C HILD , AND FORGETFULNESS , A NEW BEGINNING , A GAME , A SELF - ROLLING WHEEL , A FIRST MOVEMENT , A HOLY Y EA . A YE , FOR THE GAME OF CREATING , MY BRETHREN , THERE IS NEEDED A HOLY Y EA UNTO LIFE : ITS OWN WILL , WILLETH NOW THE SPIRIT ; HIS OWN WORLD WINNETH THE WORLD ’ S OUTCAST . 1 For the Christian interpretation, the Original new beginning, first movement, world outcast; is Eve. Originally outcast as a rib, a ‘Holy Aye,’ she is the original Child, mother, and moral spectator of the world. An embodiment of the feminine that encapsulates, for the game of creating, a forgetfulness that allows every spirit, from origin unknown, to willeth its own will. A new modality of responsibility, where humans are divorced from the normatively untamed nature of Beasts. To a State of Being conscious of, informed by, and demarcated from, its own nature. The meanings engendered, and the knowledge imbued, from the human language game, became powerful abstraction from which questions could emerge and which humans problematized to develop ‘Ought.’ With Beasts, there were no questions. With Adam, why is there ‘something,’ rather than ‘nothing’ emerged. But with Eve, the original moral spectator, the question shifted from why, to what; what to do with ‘something’. With Eve came humanities’ consciousness of itself, an original question, an enlightened question, one pragmatic about Divinity, and the first question of humanity, by humanity. Thrown out from the world, and along with it, communion with God, Original Sin was to follow thereafter and inform the Christian narrative that buttress the justification of theodicy. The existence of suffering in a world created by an all knowing, all loving God. A pure moment of suffering birthed, its meaning enshrined and defined by separation from original sublimity. The worlds outcast is also, therefore, the original suffering one. The one conscious of her own consciousness, the first to receive the human metric of suffering as a replacement to lost communion with original meaning. The Judaeo-Christian tradition problematizes suffering with meaning. The original ascetic ideal of a human will, turned utterly against itself, for its own sake; a sacred game that wards off existential nihilism. Suffering is the condition that all religions must attend to, and which in so doing, harness its power to provide balsams for existential and social afflictions. Yet unlike the Outcast, the Original moral spectator and sufferer, whose will now willith the spirit; one cannot willith suffering, in fact suffering is the very abrogation of willing itself. The alterity of suffering finds conceptual expression in the writings of French existential philosopher, Emanuel Levinas (1906-1995). 2 Like all leading intellectuals from that era, Levinas philosophical oeuvre was profoundly shaped by the moral cataclysm of the Second World War, specifically the Holocaust. An event that had rendered leading religious voices mute for expression on meaning and condemnation. Although Levinas would call Being and Time the most important work of the 20 t h century, the infamous ‘silence of Heidegger’ prompted Levinas to remark, one can forgive many Germans, but there are 1 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Three Metamorphosus, I 2 One of the origionl les chevaliers de l’Ordre des Sociologues whom gathered in Paris to write a defence of Nietzsche some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger. 3 Of Lithuanian Jewish descent, Levinas had become a naturalized French citizen and when France declared war on Germany, began military service as a translator of French and Russian. Upon surrendering to German aggression in 1940, Levinas was to spend the remaining half a decade in a 'Forestry Commando Unit' specifically assembled for Jewish military Prisoners of War. A provision that likely saved his life, as unlike civilian captives, Germany still respected the 1929 Geneva convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. A strange moral assuagement in the atmosphere of the Final Solution. A segregated, non-identifiable piece of humanity caught in the flux of moral, political, and religious upheavals, chopping trees for a world that was never to arrive. But not, it appeared, the philosophy such morally injurious events were to inspire. During this time Levinas was to recount a wandering dog as the only humanizing interaction: In a place that stripped us of our human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes. A small inner murmur, the strength and wretchedness of persecuted people, reminded us of our essence as thinking creatures, but we were no longer part of the world […] Here, we were nowhere. This [wandering] dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives. 4 Drained of what it meant to be human by its most cruel catalyst, another human, it was to leave an indelible mark. An impression which only after some 40 years, reached what was arguably an apotheosis in a short, but incredibly dense article on the useless suffering of a stranger (autobiographical). It is uncontentious that suffering is surely a given in consciousness, a certain ‘psychological content,’ like the lived experience of colour, of sound, of contact, or like any sensation. 5 Yet as Levinas observes, this ‘experience’ is unassumable. Not in the way in which suffering results from the excessive intensity of a sensation, from some sort of quantitative too much, surpassing the measure of our sensibility and our means of grasping and holding, but rather, suffering is at once what disturbs order and this disturbance itself. 6 A modality of being that, as Levinas observes, is more profoundly passive than the receptivity of our senses: Taken as an ‘experienced’ content, [suffering] is the way in which the unbearable is precisely not borne by consciousness, the way this not-being-borne is, paradoxically, itself a sensation or a given. Suffering, in its hurt and in-spite-of- consciousness, is passivity. Here, ‘taking cognizance’ is no longer, properly speaking, a taking; it is no longer the performance of an act of consciousness, but, in its adversity, a submission; and even a submission to the submitting, since the ‘content’ of which the aching consciousness is conscious is precisely this very adversity of suffering, its hurt. 7 A modality more passive than the receptivity of our sensors. A modality, that for Levinas, articulates through its negation a fundamental truth that lives underneath and, most importantly comes prior to, the cognizant universalization our being. Suffering, in the same way as described in the Christian interpretation, becomes a pure undergoing. Not one that would degrade man by striking a blow against his freedom, but by completely removing the conditions of freedom itself: 8 3 Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Readings, 25 4 Levinas, Emmanuel. The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,”1975 5 Josep Corbí, Morality, Self-Knowledge, and Human Suffering: An Essay on the Loss of Confidence in the World, Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy 38 (New York: Routledge, 2012). 6 Lévinas, “Useless Suffering,” 78. 7 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering” (1982), in The Provocation of Levinas, Routlage, 1988, 156-167, 157 8 Lévinas, “Useless Suffering,” 157 The evil that rends the humanity of the suffering person, overwhelms his humanity otherwise than non-freedom overwhelms it: Violently and cruelly, more irremissibly than the negation which dominates or paralyzes the act in non-freedom. 9 Suffering is then precisely an evil. Permitting man the identity only in the passivity of the submission. An unjustifiable mode of existence where the overwhelming weight of existence entangles and suffocates the existent. The self is burdened, attempting an impossible escape to Being: the ground of suffering consists of the impossibility of interrupting it, and of an acute feeling of being held fast. 10 Thus suffering, in its hurt, is in-spite-of-consciousness, a submission without a synthesizing act of consciousness. It is ‘experienced’ as the breach of Being that we usually constitute through intentional acts. The origin of the Orienting Reflex, probably the most significant ‘discovery’ in psychophysiology in the last 50 years of the 20th century, that describes the nervus system response that orientates someone confronted with a personally significant stimulus. We can never ‘be’ suffering, rather only undergo it, an undergoing in which we are utterly passive. In this way even suffering that is chosen, cannot be meaningfully systematized within a coherent whole, existing as it does, as a rupture or disturbance of meaning through the destruction of one’s capacity for systematically assimilating the world. 11 A place that, for Levinas, was devoid of humanity, a place that is nowhere, a place no longer part of the world. A place devoid not just of a will to truth, but the very conditions of such will. Perhaps for such reasons, Levinas rarely recounted his personal experiences, preferring instead to talk on the metaethical foundations it inspired. The direction of an orientating reflex to suffering which constitutes the inevitable and peremptory ethical problem which each of us, and the societies we inhabit, have an existential duty to “medicate.” 12 The silent, or guttural half opening, that constitutes the original (and necessarily unintelligible) call for aid by another. An site that is otherwise than being and in whose very exteriority promises salvation: It is the original opening towards what is helpful, where the primordial, irreducible, and ethical, anthropological category of the medical comes to impose itself – across demand for analgesia, more pressing, more urgent in the [unintelligibility] of the groan then a [intelligible] demand for consolation or postponement of death. For pure suffering, which is intrinsically meaningless and condemned to itself without exit, a beyond takes shape in the inter-human. It is starting from such situations – we say in passing – that medicine is a technique, and consequently the general technology presupposes, the technology so easily exposed to the attack of ‘right-thinking’ rigour, [is an agenda] that does not merely originate in the so-called “will-to-power.” 13 The presupposed moral “medical machinery” for the suffering of another are the cognizing of universalized maxims and drives. Such praxis confers medicine in technique, not act. A process of medicine that can be mumbled in passing, even silently thought, that avoids any existential disruption to the ego. Levinas draws our attention to the technique of rigorous ‘right-thinking’, that may problematize and sublimate to the point of actual negation, any aid. Such matrices of ‘rightthinking’, need not exclusively derive from the Nectarian will-to-power, but also in the will-to-morality, identified in the freedom, and freedoms, Western culture enjoys. It is the practise Nietzsche believes we ‘Moderns’ are in danger of succumbing. Psychological artifices that become the bad will, the will we tell ourselves must sometimes be paid by the 9 Lévinas, “Useless Suffering,” 158 10 ibid 11 ibid 12 ibid 13 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 158 elevated thought of a civilisation called to nourish persons and to lighten their sufferings. 14 A challenge Nietzsche believed to be the great difficulty looming for the European consciousness, which Levinas rephrases as: This elevated thought is the honour of a still uncertain and blinking modernity coming at the end of a century of nameless sufferings (Holocaust), but in which the suffering of suffering, the suffering for the useless suffering of the other person opens upon suffering the ethical perspective of the inter-human. 15 The attention to the sufferings of another (despite, and because, of the cruelties of our century) can be affirmed as the very bond of human subjectivity, that according to Levinas, deserves to be understood as a supreme ethical principle, the always already will-to-compassion. Everyone nowadays wants to be moral; but only the immoral can want to be moral. Or put another way, your quest for peace of mind, is the same state as having a disturbed mind. Easement of this condition can be drawn from the Jewish dictum: my spiritual needs are the other person’s material needs; 16 it is in this disproportion, or asymmetry, that the ethical refusal occurs in the first truth of ontology - the struggle to be. Ethics is, therefore, against nature because it forbids the murderousness of my natural will to put my own existence first. 17 The only one not possible to contest and which can command the hopes and practical discipline of vast human groups, or as Zarathustra prosaically puts it, the fetter for the thousand necks. 18 Suffering appears, at the very least, to be the price of reason and spiritual refinement, where one suffers hunger of Soul for the sake of knowledge and truth. After all, he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow. 19 Along with Ecclesiastes, Nietzsche also believed such burdens to be formative for the loads of a Camel. While for Levinas, such pedagogies temper the character of an individual to the teleology of community life and inform social unrest or pathology. Social discontent or pathologies that, for Levinas, can awaken useful attention to the health of the collective body. 20 The emergence of Moral Injury as one such social pathology, must be, according to Levinas, addressed in terms of the purpose it now serves, not from the causes it has arisen through; albeit such causes are invaluable to frame the purpose. In this way Moral Injury is shown to be that quasi-ethical canary whose purpose is to draw useful attention to the health of the collective body, that suddenly finds itself very much on the back moral-foot, and in very serious trouble. For all the ‘right-thinking’ rigor in the rational administration and distribution of human courts, one cannot escape the arbitrary and strange failure of justice amidst wars, crimes, and the oppression of the weak by the strong. For Levinas, as it was for Nietzsche, such scandals draw attention to the malice and bad-will that human experience in history attests. Western humanity has, nonetheless, sought for the meaning of this scandal by invoking a metaphysical ordering, and accompanying ethics, which is invisible in the immediate lessons of moral consciousness. It is an Empire of transcendent ends, willed by benevolent wisdom, by the absolute goodness of a God who commands paths, painful to be sure, which led to the good. Just like Nietzsche who identifies the same painful growth with the ‘active bad conscience’ as it churns passions to virtues, pain and suffering is henceforth meaningful, subordinated in one way or another to the metaphysical finality envisaged by either faith or secular belief in progress. Christian metaculture the former, the Gnostic metaculture the latter of modernity. Such grand ideas are necessary to the inner peace of Souls in our distressed world. 21 Lattices of meaning that translate to normative 14 Emmanuel 15 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 159 Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 159 16 find 17 find 18 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Thousand and One Goals, XV 19 says Ecclesiastes (1:18) 20 Emmanuel 21 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 158 Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 160 delineation called upon to make suffering comprehensible and medicalizable. Either an original fault, as with Eve the original moral spectator; or a congenial finitude of Being, as with Heidegger’s philosophical notion of Being-towards-death. Such a supra-sensible perspective is invoked to imbue significance and order for something we can never “undergo,” which is essentially gratuitous and absurd – even arbitrary. By underestimating the temptation of such psychological arbitration, one could misunderstand the profundity of the Empire which theodicy exerts over humankind, and the Epoque making character – or the historical character, of its entry into thought. As both Levinas and Nietzsche note, theodicy, at least up until the trials of the 20 t h century, has been a signature component of the self-consciousness of European humanity. It persists in watered-down form at the core of atheist ‘progressionism,’ of which the Gnostic metaculture of modernity describes. The usefulness of useless knowledge, is a paragon example, enshrining as it does, the case for self-directed “theoretic”, or seemingly useless, research: The raison d'être of The Institute for Advanced Study. Theoretic investigations orientated to the efficiency of the good imminent to being, called to visible triumph by the simple play of the natural and historical laws of injustice, war, misery, and illness. Just as Nietzsche believed, nature and history furnished the 18 t h and 19 t h centuries with the norms of moral consciousness associated with the many deisms of the Age of Enlightenment. But theodicy is as old as certain readings of the Bible, and dominates the consciousness in societies that explained misfortune by reference to Sin; or at least to his or her Sins, or even the Sins of ancestors still non-expiated by the sufferings of exile. As Levinas makes clear, the 20 t h century was marked by events that will be understood as important in Sacred History. The events of the 20 t h century rendered impossible, and even odious, every proposal and even thought which would explain them by the sins of those who have suffered or are dead. The Jewish experience in war, abstracted to the unjustifiable character of suffering, became the scandal which would occur by my justifying my neighbours suffering. So that the very phenomena of suffering, in its uselessness, is in principle the pain of the other. Accusing oneself in suffering is undoubtedly the very turning of the ascetic ideal, the ego turned against itself, for its own sake. Thus, it is perhaps for–the–other, that the most profound adventure of subjectivity, in its ultimate intimacy takes place. But this intimacy, remains importantly for Levinas, discreet. Not to be given as example and not narrated as an edifying discourse. It could not be made a prediction without being perverted. 22 Thus the original conditions are enshrined to protect the dignities of the suffering other, revealed by Levinas, as the most profound adventure of subjectivity. The philosophical problem, then, posed by the useless pain which appears in its fundamental malignancy across the events of the 20 t h century, concerns the meaning that religiosity, and the human morality of goodness, can give after the end of Theodicy. A modernity beyond the fumes of the crematorium ovens of the final solution where Theodicy abruptly appeared impossible. Is humanity in its indifference, Levinas implores, going to abandon the world to useless suffering, leaving it to political fatality – or drifting – to the blind forces which inflict misfortune on the weak and conquered, and which spare the powerful and the conquerors - a category whom the wicked must eventually join. Are we the wicked? Must not humanity now, in a faith more difficult than ever, in the faith without theodicy, continue Sacred History? 23 A history which demands even more of the resources of the self in each, and appeals to its suffering inspired by the suffering of the other person, to its compassion which is a non-useless suffering, which is no longer suffering ‘for nothing’, and which ‘always already’ has a meaning? 24 22 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 163 Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 164 24 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 165 23 Emmanuel At the end of the 20 t h century and after the useless and unjustifiable pain exposed and displayed therein without any shadow of a consoling theodicy, are we not all pledged to the second of these alternatives? Are we not all pledged to the Second Coming of a a new modality in the faith of today and our moral certainties; a modality quite essential to the modernity which is dawning. 25 In the political order of the city where the law establishes mutual obligations between citizens the inter-human perspective can exist, but also get lost. Properly speaking, the inter-human lies in a non-indifference of one to another, in a responsibility of one for another. The inter-human is prior to the reciprocity of this responsibility, which inscribed itself in interpersonal laws, and became super imposed on the pure ultraism of the ethical position of the self as self. A self not forgiven for living, but a self that is prior to every contact and determination through its responsibility, obligation, and selfmanifestation, through another’s suffering. It is the inter-human perspective of my responsibility, without concern or metric for reciprocity, in the asymmetry of the relation of one to the other, that we have presented the phenomena of useless suffering in relation to Moral Injury. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, an event which was to radically redefine classical notions of justice, a new meaning of suffering was required. The imperative was, and still is, greatly important. For while World War II was to enshrine JudeoChristian values in new international institutions and legal instruments, the very basis such values had been derived from had been profoundly undermined. The arc value of compassion now required an invention of sacrifice from one other than the son of God. One cultured in a cataclysmic petri dish moistened by a global bloodbath from the death of 100,000,000 humans, that left factored multitudes of this number behind in numb, and morally dumb, suffering. After the unimaginable, meaning contorting events of the war, we had a crisis of how to think about war that broadened to our everyday. The roar of the United States enshrined a latent ethic that is now starting to take hold of our imaginations. The days where a metric of aggression was used to frame condemnation are past. Arrived is the day where a violation of one’s very humanness constitutes the origin and meaning of that condemnation. To date the ethics of Levinas have found scant application, in no small part due to the supererogatory moral mandates it stipulates. Yet it is a mandate that dovetails with the moral, ethical, and psychological landscape ushered in by Crimes against Humanity. The philosophy of Levinas was birthed in fire, the very depts the degradation and subjugation of the humanity of the human, by the human, the rubric a brave new world now uses to understands evil. Levinasian ethical optics provide a powerful scalpel that can be applied to complex jurisprudential and psychiatric sequala. By not asking for whom the bell tolls, but instead racing to the International Criminal Court, we just might have less bells to toll. Levinas resolved the crisis in theodicy through a radical phenomenology of suffering that was to understand it as useless, simultaneously providing the philosophical world the germ of compassion Heidegger’s ontology was sorely lacking. In this way the Judaeo-Christian archvalue was radically redefined and situated prior to, and outside of, the purview of political macerations of expediency that could taint the term. Levinas, unintendedly identifies the primordial normative obligation which bore as its fruit the conceptions of genocide and Crimes against Humanity. Conceptions that the holocaust had prompted, and which had thrown into a tailspin the faith of the Judaeo/Christian traditions. A tailspin that, turning and turning in a widening Gyre, has spiralled out to this day. In providing an ethical narrative which resituates our duty of compassion outside the reach of any reasons of the world it sounds remarkably like the Christian ethic, yet it is an ethic for the secularized world and a modality quite essential to the modernity which is dawning. A resounding answer to Nietzsche’s challenge, and a panacea for the unexamined and unexaminable moorings of Judaeo-Christian values. If Moral Injury can be understood against the backdrop of a shared mythology of Crimes against Humanity, Levinas provides the philosophical and ethical instruments to appreciate its existential content. Not in otologic wantonness, but rather in phenomenological exactitude. 25 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, 164