From Word To Word

Dave Humphrey and I have been discussing his notion of coping for some time now, even before he had settled on this particular term to describe it.  He has recently published a post that summarizes some of where this discussion has taken us, an interesting read that is particularly interesting for me in that it articulates more concisely an idea that I had previously encountered only in the context of our long, sprawling, often interrupted conversation.  It is fascinating for me to see which aspects of the conversation he includes, for example, and to recall the occasions on which some of these ideas first arose between us.

What most intrigues me in Dave’s post, however, is that he includes among his definitions of coping one that he has not yet articulated to me in person. “Coping is my existence,” he says, “when confronted by the other.”  I am arrested by this definition because it relates the idea of coping with the idea of otherness for the first time in our discussion.  Until now, Dave has defined coping almost exclusively in relation to knowledge.  Coping, in this sense, means the choice to function, not in those places where one has the illusion of sufficient knowledge, not in the place of the expert, but in the place where one is entirely without sufficient knowledge, in the place of the amateur.  It is the choice to occupy this space, not because one is forced to do so by a particular crisis, but because one values the mode of coping as such.  It is not a coping with something, even if it always appears this way.  It is coping as being.

Dave’s new definition suggests, however, that the mode of being that is coping bears a relation to the mode of being that is being confronted with the other, that these two modes are, at least in some cases, identical.  I think that this idea is profound, but I would change it somewhat in order to make clear that not all coping is encounter with the other, even if all encounter with the other is a form, perhaps the purest form, of coping.  I would say, instead, “When I am confronted by the other, my existence is coping,” and I would insist that this coping remains a function of knowledge, though in a way altogether more absolute.  Let me explain.

When I am coping in relation to an object or a situation, or even when I am coping in regard to another person in such a way that this person appears as an object rather than as the other who is confronting me, the lack of knowledge that requires me to cope is never essential or absolute.  I may not be capable of discovering this knowledge myself, of course, as with Fermat’s last theorem, or I may not be willing to do what is necessary to discover it, as with changing the oil in my car, but it will nevertheless be possible for this knowledge to be discovered.  Coping moves, therefore, from lack of knowledge to knowledge, from the amateur to the expert, and this is why the one who copes as a mode of being must constantly be going further and deeper, beyond the places where he or she has come to feel too comfortable and too masterful.

When I am confronted with the other as such, however, with the other as other, with the way that the other has encountered me, I also find myself in the mode of coping, not only for a time, but essentially and absolutely, because my knowledge of the other is and always remains profoundly lacking.  Whereas coping with a situation or an object lead to an increased knowledge, coping with the other can only lead to a greater awareness of how fully I do not and can not know the otherness of the other.  The lack of knowledge with which my being copes remains irremediable, regardless of what I might do.  It is definitive of the encounter as such.

This is not to imply that I cannot gain knowledge of a particular person, but that this knowledge would only be of the person as object, not as other.  The othernss of the other would always escape this kind of knowledge, would always be ontologically prior to the particularity of the other that I can know and comprehend.  In every case, my lack of knowledge of the other as such would remain profound, and I would find myself capable only of coping with this lack.  My relation with the other, therefore, to the degree that it seeks to honour the other, would take the form of a continual and impossible coping, a coping for which there could be no recuperative movement toward knowledge and mastery and expertise, a coping that would always remain, purely, as coping.