“I can finally relax,” she said. “I couldn’t really enjoy the music when we were with them. I really like those guys, but I’m not at ease with them. I’m happy now to be able to go out with you, so that I can just focus on what I’m doing.” That’s something I heard recently, and I found it very illuminating about the nature of action.
We often imagine that we, as individuals, are free to do what we want, choosing how we will exercise our powers on the things of the surrounding world. That was not the experience of the woman who was speaking, however. Her experience was that other people were a crucial link between her and her world: in the company of unfamiliar companions, she could not comfortably connect with the world, whereas the company of an old friend allowed her the freedom to engage with the world as she wanted. Indeed, it is this second part of her comment that I find particularly revealing and particularly important: being with her friend allowed her to focus on something else. This focus was what she could not do around unfamiliar companions—she could not settle into her situation.
When we spend time with a close companion, it is very often the case that our experience is not about that companion. Our companion, rather, accompanies us in our worldly affairs. We look at the sights with her, shop for clothes with her, read the paper with her: in each case, the company of the other “completes” our inhabiting of the situation and allows us to let ourselves be absorbed in the activity, secure in the sense that we are acting together, even if the activity is something singular and private like reading. What these experiences of companionship reveal is that our actions are characteristically joint actions—actions undertaken with the support of another.
We often misconstrue the nature of action, and, in a related way, we often misconstrue the nature of other persons. We typically think of another person as the object of our experience, as something (someone) to whom we are paying attention. On the contrary, in many ways the character of another person is most powerfully revealed precisely in those experiences in which she is not the object of our experience: our experiences of companionship reveal the other not as an alien object, but as the very medium for engaging with the world and, indeed, for our accessing of our own powers.
We should pay more attention to this notion of other persons as the ones who give us the world and, indeed, give us ourselves.
Participants in these
seminars consistently have the experience of growth in their conversation and
conceptual abilities, and typically leave with a transformed sense of the nature
and possibilities of philosophy.
2 Comments
Your point about not being able to settle into one’s situation in the company of unfamiliar companions is a powerful one–especially because it is a situation that we will likely be faced with in important spheres of our lives. I am thinking (in reference to one of your earlier posts) of the experience of leaving home, or of moving away from a place in which one has established a home (a frequent occurrence in many professionally-devoted lives). This experience can be so difficult not simply because one finds oneself in an unfamiliar place, engaging in unfamiliar activities with unfamiliar new people, but because in the absence of relationships that formerly sustained our comfort in the world, this very sense of “oneself” can be experienced as fundamentally, and suddenly, insecure. It is precisely when we are called upon to “be at our best”–to make worthwhile contributions in a new educational or professional sphere, to discover and forge new companionships–that we might feel most distant or strange to ourselves. Similarly, in the absence of comfortable companions the world itself can appear suddenly lacking and uninviting–not a sphere in which I can comfortably act and “be myself.” It is not the case, as you say, that I am simply transplanted, free to exercise my full powers on the world in a new situation; my very identity comes into question when I take myself away from the people that have previously linked me to the world. The role of other people in one’s sense of self and world, perhaps largely unapparent in the engaging comfort of the former home, is painfully revealed in their absence.
Generally, this feeling of alienation will be temporary: new relationships will be developed, and the world will be restored to its possibilities for absorption and enjoyment. One will feel “at home” with oneself again. But this “self” will not be quite the “same” one; in the company of new people, and through the differently-understood support of those far away, the world itself–the site of one’s identity and action–will be given in new lights and new possibilities.
Your comments about the experience of companionship as being “most powerfully revealed precisely in those experiences in which [the companion] is not the object of our experience” reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about lately….
When we open our eyes, we see things: a computer, a couch, a door, a friend, a room, an environment. But what never appears as an object of vision is the very manner in which we see — our perspective, our point of view. It is this very thing on which our seeing depends, that is also what never appears as a thing of vision.
It is as if in the centre of the world there existed a hole, something that does not appear (as an object) but on which the appearance of every thing depends and counts on.
There is a statement by Walter Benjamin that I have always found fascinating. He wrote: “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. . . . Architecture [is] appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception, or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building . . . [Buildings are appropriated] not so much by attention as by habit.”
It seems to me that this peculiar structure of habit is a constantly recurring question in your posts: the structure of those things that are most powerfully revealed precisely in those experiences in which they are not the object of our experience.
Thanks for your insights on the many facets and implication of this peculiar structure!