From Word To Word

Jean-Luc Marion, in God Without Being, says that one must “obtain forgiveness for every essay in theology,” a remark that I have quoted more than once.  The theologian requires this forgiveness, according to Marion, because “theology consists precisely in saying that for which only another can answer.”  For this reason, and for others, I need forgiveness for what I am about to write.  If there is one who can answer for it, I am certainly not that one, but I will write it nevertheless.

What I will write is that I am confronted by something that I might call the unrecognizability of God, by which I mean, not the nonapperance of God, for I will unjustifiably assume this appearance in advance, but the impossibility of recognizing the God who appears.  This God, the God who appears, the God who is revealed, the God who would in Christian terms be called the Christ, is unrecognizable because he must always appear according to the measure of human understanding.  To whatever degree the Christ might be said to be the appearance of God, a degree that is traditionally held to be absolute, he must still appear only in the limited ways that the human mind can comprehend.  To appear in other ways would be not to appear at all, at least not to human minds.  Yet, by appearing only according to the limits of human understanding, the Christ can never be recognized definitively and unmistakably as God.  The Christ can only appear as human, never as God.

This is why even John the Baptist, the one who prophesied that the Christ was soon to come, the one who baptised him, the one who witnessed the Holy Spirit descend on him, the one who heard a voice from heaven affirming him as the son of God, sends disciples to Jesus to ask if he is really the Christ or if they should expect another.  This is why Mary Magdalene sees and speaks with Jesus when he approaches her as she mourns at his apparently empty tomb, but does not know him until he calls her name.  This is why the two disciples on the road to Emmaus walk with Jesus for hours, speak with him about the scriptures, and invite him into their home, but do not recognize him until he breaks bread for them.  This is why the eleven remaining disciples, those who were closest to Jesus, see him on the beach, speak with him, obey him when he tells them to drop their nets in the other side of the boat, but do not know him until their nets are miraculously filled.

Again and again, those who would most be expected to recognize Jesus as the Christ fail even to recognize him as the Jesus they have followed and served.  It is as if there is some quality in him, or some quality in his appearing, that hides him from them.  Though they see him, and though they speak to him, they fail to know him for what he is, and even when they do finally recognize him, it does not seem to be through any act of their own.  Christ speaks their names or breaks their bread or fills their nets, and they, quite apart from their own will and activity, find that Christ has become recognized in them, as if according to a will and an act that is not their own.

It is in this way that Anna and Simeon recognize the infant Christ.  They do nothing to effect this recognition.  They simply see him and know him according to a sight and a knowledge that is not their own.  They receive this recognition.  They do not accomplish it.

This is also the case, and more explicitly, when Jesus, many years later, asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”  Though the disciples initially defer the responsibility of this question, choosing instead to offer the opinions of other people, Jesus is insistent, and it is finally Peter who says, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”  It is then that Christ makes clear that it is not Peter who has in fact recognized him for the Christ.  “Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you,” he tells Peter, “but my Father who is in heaven.”

When the Christ is recognized. therefore, it is not a recognition of God by the human.  It is a recognition of God by God that merely takes place in and through the human.  Peter does not himself recognize the Christ, does not recognize the appearance of God as such.  It is God who recognizes God in and through Peter.  The movement is entirely distinct from Peter, occurring through him rather than by him.  The recognition of Jesus as the Christ occurs apart from any act of Peter’s own.

Of course, it may be argued, and with some justice, that the Christ is recognized through Peter because Peter has actively pursued this recognition, actively made himself open to it, actively sought so that he might find it.  I will not deny this.  I will only insist that, however good and right these activities might be, whatever role they might play in determining whether God will indeed perform this recognition in Peter, none of them are capable of accomplishing the recognition of the Christ as such.  Only God accomplishes this recognition in him.  Only God recognizes God.  Peter can merely ask that this recognition might occur in him.

I think that this structure of recognition is essential, not essential to God, surely, for nothing can be said about the essence of God, but essential to how God appears to us: it is not sufficient that God appear to us, because we can never recognize God for what God is.  It is always necessary also that God recognize God through us and in us, for only God can accomplish this recognition.

This means, of course, that any recognition of God will be radically without guarantee, since no logic and no proof will suffice to effect this recognition or to demonstrate it, even to myself.  This is why the recognition of the Christ can never become a knowledge.  If it is a knowing, it is a knowing that is otherwise than knowledge, a knowing that might be called better, if still inadequately, a faith.

When I say, therefore, “This is the Christ, the son of the living God,” this confession can never justify a coercive or militant religiosity.  It can only be a cry or an exclamation, like a gasp of pain or pleasure.  It must only be my own recognition, always inadequate, of what has been recognized in and through me, always without guarantee.

There is a perfect love, and it casts out fear, not because it is the opposite of fear, driving it out as the light drives out the darkness, but because it is the master of fear, casting it out like a demon is cast from the possessed.

If I fear, it is because I do not know truly that I am loved.  If I knew truly, if I knew perfectly, how perfectly I am loved, I would never fear.  To take courage is only to trust in perfect love, though I can can never know it perfectly.  It is to seek perfect love, to find it out, to dwell in it, and fear will find itself cast away, because it cannot abide where love abides.

As I was preparing to write this final instalment in the history of my engagement with the problem of ethical response, I reread my previous post on the subject, and I was disappointed to see how narrow and inadequate it now seems to me just a few weeks later. I still agree essentially with what I wrote at that time, but I am displeased with how it represents my interaction with Illich’s writing as if the idea of the movement in the belly was the only thing I took from Rivers North of the Future, as if I was reading his work primarily in search of solutions to the problem of ethical responsibility. The reality is that I rarely have a predetermined purpose when I begin reading a book of any sort. I was not thinking about ethical responsibility when I took the book from my shelf, at least, not any more than I was thinking about several other subjects that preoccupy me, and I found far more in it than just the sections that were related to ethical responsibility, as significant as these sections were to me. My reading and thinking practises are far more promiscuous, intuitive, and fortuitous than my writing sometimes makes them appear. This misrepresentation does Illich, and myself, and the subject as well, I think, a gross injustice.

Unfortunately, the likelihood that I will write in similarly misrepresentative ways is even greater when I begin discussing Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity. Not only does this particular collection of essays have much more of value to say on the subject of ethical responsibility than I will be able to discuss in this single post, but Marion’s broader work means much more to me than I will ever be able to communicate in any way, no matter how much space I am given. Whatever approach I might take to describing how his thought has influenced my understanding of responsibility for the other will be hopelessly reductive of his true influence on me. I can do nothing more than signal this inadequacy in advance.

While Marion is certainly a significant philosopher for many reasons, it was none of these reasons that drew me to him. I discovered him first when I was working on my MA thesis. I had found a book entitled God, The Gift, and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. I was interested in it because it contained a discussion on the nature of the gift between Jacques Derrida and some guy named Jean-Luc Marion. Because the discussion followed Marion’s presentation on the name of God and negative theology, I read this paper also, and I was intrigued enough by Marion’s approach that I immediately bought his most famous book, God Without Being, which, without any hyperbole, shattered my theology irrevocably. I have since read Being Given, The Crossing of the Visible, and Prolegomena to Charity, all of which have been very influential on me, though they exceed my understanding in many respects.

Marion’s contribution to the problem of ethical responsibility, at least in the formulation of this problem that I have been tracing in my own history, begins where Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future ends. If, as Illich argues, I can only know my responsibility as a neighbour to the other, not by a law, but by a spiritual movement in the belly, it resolves the question of how I can know what I owe the other, but it does so only at a cost. While the movement in the belly justifies the Samaritan of our example, and while it calls us to act in similar ways, to be open and responsive to the movement of the belly, it will always be possible that there will be no such movement, that everyone will pass the beaten man by the side of the road and feel nothing. This possibility is not just that nobody will pass the victim, not just that someone will pass and turn away from the victim, not even that someone will turn toward the victim and find that he is not the victim he believes himself to be. This possibility is that someone might pass the victim and neither turn toward him or away from him, but walk on in perfect conscience because there was no movement in the belly.

To put this problem differently, Illich’s approach permits the possibility that my concern might be diverted from the other to myself. This diversion, when functioning correctly, is not wrong, because it is a diversion, not to myself as myself, but to a spiritual movement provoked by the other in myself, a movement that should culminate in a return of my concern to the other, even if this concern is one that is not necessarily able to give what the other requests. In this way, the Samaritan acts rightly. Though he responds to the spiritual movement in his belly rather than to the other directly, this movement returns him to the other and impels him to relieve the other’s suffering. The priest and the Levite, however, feel no such movement. Making the entirely unjustified assumption that they were actually looking for such a movement, they could in good conscience continue on their way, because they had not been moved. Their ethical movement, to look into their own bellies, had diverted them from the other to themselves. In this way, Illich’s approach permits the possibility that my ethical response to the other may fail even to encounter the other at all. Though I may be open to the movement in my belly, I am open to this movement apart from any real encounter with the other. I may be responding ethically, but I am not responding ethically to the encounter with the other, only to a movement in myself.

Marion does not speak directly to this problem in Prolegomena to Charity, at least not in relation to the function of the neighbour, but he does describe a similar structure in his own terminology that opens up a possible resolution to the problem in Illich’s approach. Marion refers to the responsibility that I owe to the other as the injunction of the other, and he argues that this injunction does not come to me from the other, but that “it actually arises in me, like one of my lived experiences.” In this sense, he affirms Illich, because this injunction functions similarly to the movement in the belly, coming neither from myself nor from the other, but from beyond us both, as a movement that can only be understood in spiritual or theological terms. Marion is clear on this point. “The obligation toward the other,” he says, “is born in me, though it is not born of me; it is born for the other, though it is not born through the other.”

Marion too, however, confronts the problem that we find in Illich, that is, if the injunction does not arise from the other, then a response to the injunction is not a response to the other at all. This sort of response leads only to the injunction as law, he argues, but can never have a relation to the other in particular. “If we want to secure responsibility all the way to the point of love,” he says, “then the injunction must designate not only the other as such, but just such an other as the invisible gaze that crosses my own.” In other words, though the ethical response must not arise from the other, it must designate the other in particular, or it fails to be a response in any meaningful way.

The only thing that can accomplish this designation of the other, according to Marion, is love or charity. “In order for the other to appear to me,” he argues, “I must first love him,” because “only love opens up knowledge of the other as such.” Yet, love only “becomes a means of knowledge when my concern is with the other,” when I accept the face of the other precisely as other. Put differently, the ethical obligation that comes neither from me nor from the other is given particularity by the knowledge that I have of the other, that is opened by the love I have for the other, that is enabled by the concern that I have for the other.

This seemingly complex relation has a very simple implication: the ethical movement begins precisely in my willing to be concerned for the other. I must will to be concerned for the other, so that I can love the other, so that I can know the other, so that I become fully open to the obligation, the injunction, the movement in the belly as it bears upon me and the particularity of the other. In Marion’s own words, “To accept the other’s face, or better, to accept that I am dealing with an other, a face, a counter-gaze, depends uniquely on my willing it so.” As he says later, “The other appears only if I gratuitously give him the space in which to appear.” For this reason, ethical responsibility in its particularity depends on my will, despite the fact that it does not come from either me or from the other, but merely arises in me. My will does not produce ethical responsibility in particularity, but only opens me to concern, and love, and knowledge of the other, which opens me to the possibility of ethical responsibility.

All of this implies that the movement in the belly arises, not randomly, but whenever I will myself to be concerned with the other, whenever I will myself to accept the face of the other. If I accept that I am dealing with an other, if I will this to be so, I will necessarily feel the movement in the belly, in every case, without exception. This does not at all imply that I will be moved to respond to the other in the way that the other desires or expects, or in the way that I desire or expect. It does not even imply that I will be moved to respond in any way at all. It implies only that, if I am willing to accept the face of the other, I will find myself moved in some way. There will be a movement in me, a spiritual movement, a movement that it will be in every case wrong to ignore, even if this movement is to do precisely nothing.

The neighbour, therefore, is the one who wills to accept the other, the one who does not pass by a victim on the side of the road without willing to accept this victim as the other, without willing to experience responsibility for the other, whatever it might be, without willing to experience a movement in the belly, whatever it might be. The neighbour may not always be moved to help as the Samaritan was, but the neighbour will always will to be moved in whatever way the injunction appears in relation to the particularity of the other. The neighbour will always be prepared to be concerned for the other, to love the other, to know the other, to be moved by the injunction toward the other. No act, therefore, and no law, can ever guarantee what is proper to the neighbour, only a continual will, a continual willing, a continual willingness.

There is still the logical possibility, certainly, that I might will myself to accept the face of the other, that I might be open to the movement that this acceptance will permit in me, but that I will nevertheless find myself unmoved to help the victim by the side of the road. It is still possible, certainly, that everyone might will, that everyone might be open, and that everyone might nevertheless be unmoved. Yet, this possibility is permissible only according to the perversity of logic, not according to the movement of charity. If the priest and the Levite had willed to accept the beaten man as an other, if they had been open to the responsibility that they bore for him as neighbours, is it conceivable that they would not be moved to pity? If, in other words, they willed themselves to be open to the other and the spiritual movement that the other founded in them, is it conceivable that this spiritual movement would not be a movement to pity? The logical possibility exists, but the spirit of charity knows better, knows that the kind of movement that moves the belly will not leave the bleeding man beside the road unaided.

The fault of the priest and the Levite, therefore, is not that they passed the victim without turning to him, because they had no legal responsibility for him. It is not that they refused the movement to pity in their bellies, because they felt no such movement. It is that they refused to will an acceptance of the other, refused thereby the movement of the belly that they could not foreknow but that they knew even still must almost certainly be to pity. Their fault was that they refused to be concerned for the other, refused to love the other, refused to know the other, and therefore refused to be open to the particularity of their ethical responsibility to the other.

None of this, I want to emphasize, means that I must do everything for all people. None of this even means that I need to do anything for anyone. All it means is that I must will myself to accept the face of the other and to accept the movement that will arise in me, and to act according to this movement, even if the act is to do nothing at all. The act itself will always be nothing. The will to accept the face of the other will always be everything, because all of ethical responsibility flows from it.

At about 3:00 AM this past Tuesday morning, approximately nine hours into the fourteen hour drive home from Black Mountain, North Carolina, I was reflecting on some of the things that tend to preoccupy me when I have the time to be preoccupied. In order to keep myself awake, I was reflecting aloud, and in order to keep my children asleep, I was reflecting in a sort of muttered whisper that my mother-in-law was probably interpreting as yet another sign that her daughter’s husband is not altogether stable. I feel a great deal of sympathy for those who have to live with me.

The subject of my reflection was the nature of giving in a theological sense, specifically the question of how it is possible for God to receive a gift. Now, I do not have the time or space here to introduce the philosophical and theological idea of the gift in even a rudimentary way. The weight that this word bears in philosophy and theology is immense, and even a very inadequate contextualization would require me to write at length on the role of gift and givenness in an extensive list of phenomenological, deconstructive, and poststructuralist thinkers. Even to make a list of the relevant authors would take too much time and explanation for this medium, but by way of beginning such a list, I would recommend Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida (especially La Carte Postale, where he responds to Heidegger directly, and The Gift of Death), and Jean Luc Marion (especially Being Given and in John D, Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon’s God the Gift and Postmodernism, where he and Derrida discuss the idea of gift together).

Recognizing, then, that I can only gesture in the direction that this topic requires, let me summarize as succinctly as I can the problem of God as a recipient of the gift.  The problem begins not with God but with me, in the fact that it is never possible for me truly to give a gift because I always stand to gain in some way from what I give, even if it is only the satisfaction of having given without having anything to gain. To give a gift, therefore, is always to open an exchange of gifts, to participate in an economy of gifts, and is not truly to give a gift at all. Similarly, I can never truly receive a gift because, to the degree that it is really a gift to me, it will always require me to return a gift, even if it is just the gift of gratitude. To receive a gift, therefore, is also to enter into an economy of gifts, and is not truly to receive a gift at all.

Now, God, insofar as God is absolute, is usually regarded as the only one who can truly and absolutely give, because God can give without standing to gain anything. Since nothing can add anything to God that God does not have already, not even the satisfaction of having given, then God can give without receiving anything in return, can give truly and absolutely. If God gives, therefore, God gives as a part of God’s nature, not with any expectation or possibility of return. The gift of God would be a gift that disrupts absolutely the economy of the gift.

However, the problem with this idea is that it prevents God, by definition, from ever receiving a gift. Though God has given to me absolutely, I am always unable to give to God in any way, because nothing that I give to God can add anything that God does not already have. In fact, if God condescends to accept my gift, though God has no need of it, than even this acceptance becomes another gift to me. Because God gives absolutely, apart from any economy of the gift, God can only give to me, cannot actually receive a gift from me. Even when God graciously accepts the gifts that I give, it is only in the guise of giving another gift to me.

At 3:00 AM, however, somewhere in Virginia, it occurred to me suddenly that Christian theology potentially accounts for this difficulty through the doctrine of incarnation. By insisting that God can be both absolutely God and absolutely human simultaneously, it may be that the doctrine of incarnation opens the possibility that God can both give absolutely and receive absolutely, can both give to me and receive from me truly. As absolutely God, lacking nothing, God can only give to me,  but as absolutely human, lacking everything that I lack, perhaps God can also receive from me.

Even more, because the incarnate Christ, God as absolutely human, claims to do nothing of himself but only the will of his father in heaven, he gives nothing of himself but only what his father in heaven wills.  To this degree at least, then, God as human does not give at all, but only receives, and does so absolutely, so that God as God can give through him, and do so absolutely.  God as God would thus be the God who gives, absolutely, and God as human would be the God who receives, absolutely.  As both God and human, as incarnate, it would therefore be possible for God both to give truly and to receive truly and still to escape the necessity of an economy of the gift.  God, incarnate, would  enact the gift perfectly and essentially, would incarnate the gift as such.

Admittedly, this is a very rough sketch of an argument that would need to be articulated with greater specificity and greater rigour.  Admittedly also, it is an argument that, despite incarnational elements in other faith systems, is possible only within a certain tradition of Christian theology.  Even so, the direction of this logic appeals to me, and I am interested to see how it might develop with further thought and discussion.

In order to continue the history of my engagement with ideas of ethical responsibility, I indicated in The First of Those Other Things that I would turn next to Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005), which is what I intend to do in this post. Unfortunately, except for those who were reading radical literature in the sixties and seventies, relatively few people recognize Illich’s name any more, so perhaps something of an introduction is required.

Ivan Illich was a Catholic Priest who rejected a promising career in the church hierarchy and chose to work most often on the fringes of the church and the university. He served for several years with the Puerto Rican community in New York. He became the director of the Catholic University in Puerto Rico until he was forced to resign over a political disagreement with the Vatican. Having become highly critical of institutionalized education, he founded the Center for Intercultural Formation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, which provided language training for people wishing to work in international development, and which received intense criticism for its rejection of traditional development strategies and organizations. He taught and lectured widely, though never took a permanent position, living mostly in Mexico and Germany.

The majority of his books are focused on analyzing the central social institutions of Western culture: the educational system in Deschooling Society; the medical system in Medical Nemesis; transportation and energy in Energy and Equity, and several others. Tools for Conviviality, which sets out a somewhat broader philosophy on the function of tools and systems in society remains one of my favourite books. To understand Illich more broadly, however, it is his later books that I find most helpful, especially Rivers North of the Future and Ivan Illich In Conversation, both of which are transcribed interviews with David Cayley of the CBC. Where his earlier works are focused on analysing a particular subject, his interviews with Cayley range more widely and provide both the context of Illich’s broader philosophy and the perspective of thirty years on his earlier work.

I first encountered Ivan Illich, as I have first encountered several authors, through Dave Humphrey, who gave me a recording of the CBC Radio interviews that formed part of Rivers North of the Future. Illich fascinated me immediately. Not only was his approach to theology and philosophy remarkably different than I had encountered in anyone else, but his voice, with its vaguely European accent that bears the inflections of the many languages he speaks, has a kind of slow precision and gravity that captivated me. I bought several of his books, read them all, read some of them twice, and have been greatly influenced by his ideas.

Of Illich’s texts, however, it was Rivers North of the Future that influenced me most in regard to this little history that I am telling. Working through the story of the Good Samaritan, Illich basically argues that what causes the Samaritan to know his responsibility is not some abstract idea of the neighbour but a “movement in the belly.” He says that the key phrase, usually translated from the Greek as something like, “He was moved to pity,” would be more accurately rendered as something like, “He was moved in his belly,” or “He felt it in his bowls,” akin to the English phrase, “He had a feeling in the pit of his stomach.” The one who acts as a neighbour, therefore, is not the one who renders a predetermined duty to anyone, nor even the one who renders a predetermined duty to the one who appears as a neighbour. The one who acts as a neighbour is the one renders the duty that is moved in the belly, according to the bond of the neighbour. The neighbour is the one who is open to the movement of the belly, who attends to this movement, and who renders the duty that it requires.

This understanding of ethical responsibility is essentially theological. It is not comprehensible within the logic of a philosophy or of a legality or of a religiosity. It is never determined by a premise or by a law or by a commandment. It is in every case determined by an attentiveness to this movement in my belly that does not come from myself but from elsewhere, from I can never guarantee where, but that I nevertheless believe to be my right and proper duty. However I construe this elsewhere, its movement in me bears the structure of a revelation and, therefore, of a theology.

This revelatory and theological approach to ethical responsibility satisfied the question with which I had been struggling since reading King Lear; that is, how do I determine my duty as a neighbour in any given situation. It accorded with my experience of responding to others that often, beyond any sort of rule or commandment, I knew what was required of me, sometimes in ways for which I could not find satisfactory explanation. To this extent, Illich’s interpretation of the Good Samaritan story seemed to me proper and right.

Still, Illich’s interpretation did contain one point of concern for me that I could never quite resolve: If the neighbour is the one who acts according to the movement in the belly, how can Christ’s story of the Good Samaritan portray the Levite and the Priest as not acting as neighbours? After all, perhaps their bellies were not moved. Perhaps they looked at the man beside the road and felt nothing. Perhaps a situation might occur where everyone who passed by felt no such movement and the man beside the road would die unaided. How could any understanding of ethical duty permit this possibility? In other words, if ethical responsibility depends on the movement in the belly, what happens when there is no movement? This question, at last, brings me to Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity, which I will take up in a later post.

I wrote a post some time ago called A Prologue to Other Things, in which I began a history of what the question of ethical responsibility has meant to me, in order to provide the context for an idea that I have recently encountered in Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity. I proposed to unify this history by relating its various stages to the story of the Good Samaritan, and I suggested that the history would begin with a discussion of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, which this post intends to do.

I first read King Lear in highschool, during a stage when I took the school library’s copy of the Norton Shakespeare and read all of the tragedies, many of the comedies, and a few of the histories before I ran out of motivation (or until rugby season began, actually, if I recall correctly). I did enjoy King Lear at the time, but it made no more impression on me than some of my other favourites like Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus. During my MA, however, I took a course on Shakespearean Adaptations and found myself writing a paper on an adaptation of King Lear, which forced me to reread the play, or at least to reread the first act. In my second reading, struggling as I was at the time with the question of how to be ethically responsible in the world, I was seized by the significance of the love test, in which Lear demands that his daughters publicly proclaim their love for him in return for a third of his kingdom. The youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses to participate in the test, basically claiming that Lear is asking more than is right for a father to ask, which provokes Lear to disinherit and exile her.

This scene caused me suddenly to recognize something very simple: that ethical responsibility is not a matter of absolutes to be applied in every situation, but is a product of a particular moment, a particlar place, and, most of all, a particular relationship with another person. Lear’s demand is not absolutely wrong. It is only wrong because it demands something that is not his to demand. Cordelia’s refusal to recognize his demand is not absolutely right. It is only right because it answers what Lear truly needs from her, the need that is appropriate to the relationship between father and daughter, the need that is beyond his explicit demand.

In the more positive terms of the Good Samaritan, my recognition was that the story is intended, not to indicate the kind of ethical responsibility that I bear in every case, but the kind of ethical responsibility that I bear precisely as a neighbour. I do not owe the man beside the road the duties that I would owe my father, which involves a different respect, or my brother, which involves a different affection, or my spouse, which involves a different commitment. I owe to the man beside the road precisely the duties of the neighbour.

This implies that it is possible for the man beside the road to ask, like Lear asks, for something that I can not rightly give, because it is not according to the bond of the neighbour. If the man were to ask me to pass by and let him die, for example, or if he were to ask me to find and kill his assailants, these may not be requests that I can grant as a neighbour in good conscience. My ethical responsibility, then, is not to what the man explicitly requests, but to what he needs from me precisely according to the bond of the neighbour that is between us.

Now, it might be objected that this understanding of ethical responsibility might permit me to rationalize away my duties as a neighbour, but this is in no way the case. The duty that I owe to the neighbour remains infinite in magnitude, though it may be limited in scope. It still remains that I owe my duty to my neighbour like an infinite debt that I can not repay. Indeed, my debt is now more difficult to repay, since there are some gifts that I may no longer give. What I can give, however, I must still give absolutely, without calculation and without reservation, because the debt is one that falls to me alone and no other. What is calculated and reserved are only things that are not proper to my place as a neighbour, or as a son, or as a brother, or as a husband.

There are some implications of this understanding of ethical responsibility. First, I cannot have this kind of responsibility to someone that I have not myself encountered. Though I do not know if it is necessary that this encounter be face to face, as some thinkers have argued, it is always necessary that I encounter the other, or, more exactly, that I become encountered by the other, that the other’s need as a neighbour or a father or a friend or a lover weigh upon me. In other words, the Good Samaritan owes nothing to the many men who lie beaten by the side of countless other roads, but owes infinitely to this one man who encounters him as beaten by the side of this one road. This encounter is the absolute prerequisite to ethical responsibility.

Second, though there remains the question of what duties I might owe the other in any given situation, I cannot owe duties that do not arise from the weight of the other as a neighbour or a brother or a lover, from the weight of the particular bond that exists between us. Only the singular, irreducible relation that is between us can hold me responsible, can reveal the nature of the infinite debt that I owe this other person. If the Good Samaritan had encountered his own spouse by the side of the road, it would not have been proper to leave her at the nearest inn, for he would have been acting like a neighbour toward her rather than a spouse. The nature of the duties that I owe according to my bond with the other may not always be clear, but they are always defined by this bond and by nothing else.

Third, the universal ethical imperative becomes not any particular act, but an openness to recognize the particular bond that exists between myself and the other, an openness to the weight of the other and of the singular relationship that binds us. It is for this reason that the Good Samaritan was a neighbour: not because he aided the beaten man, but because he approached the beaten man as a neighbour and opened himself to the responsibility that the bond of the neighbour might impose on him. In the same way, the Priest and the Levite failed to be neighbours: not because they failed to aid the beaten man, but because they failed even to approach him as neighbours, failed even to open the possibility that this kind of bond could exist and could impose a responsibility on them.

Where King Lear left me, then, was with a more satisfactory understanding of how I might bear ethical responsibility in the world by allowing each encounter with the other to determine this responsibility for me according to the bond that exists between us in that moment. Where it left me unsatisfied still, was in how exactly to determine what my bond with a particular other might demand of me in any given moment. How was I to determine what my real responsibilities to the other were? How was I to distinguish between requests that were proper to a bond and those that were not? These kinds of questions would wait several years for a reading of Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future before finding the beginning of an answer.

I began writing this post with the intention of discussing an idea that Jean-Luc Marion presents in his collection of essays, Prolegomena to Charity, a book that I have just completed and that I enjoyed very much. The idea occurs in an essey entitled “What Love Knows”, and it relates to the question of how I discover and determine my ethical responsibility to another, a question that has preoccupied me, if not in those precise terms, for as long as I can remember.

However, because this question does have such a long history for me, and because my thinking on it has been influenced by so many people, what Marion’s essay means for me would be largely incomprehensible unless I were to provide some sort of history of my own response to the problem of ethical responsibility, all of which would be too long for a single post, even in its most reduced form.

So, by means of beginning this personal history, which I will continue over several posts, I will position myself within the narrative of the Good Samaritan, as the rich young ruler asking Christ, “Who is my neighbour?” because I know that the law tells me to love my neighbour as myself, but I am not always certain how to do this. The story Christ tells in reply to my question is masterful in the sense that it undermines my real motive for asking the question, which is to find a limit to how much I really need to give to others, but even when I address this motive in myself, even when I try actively to understand how I am to love in the way the story instructs, I am confronted by the reality that the easy interpretations of Christ’s story are not satisfactory. Traditionally, people have tended to interpret the parable to mean that everyone is my neighbour, or, since this is patently impossible, that everyone that I encounter is my neighbour. This view claims that I must love each person I encounter, that I necessarily bear a responsibility to meet each person’s need. While the unlimitedness of this interpretation strikes on something true, I think, I find, when I try to live it, that it is seriously flawed for at least two reasons.

First, and most obvious, is the fact that this interpretation is entirely impossible. Even if I were to restrict myself to the most obvious needs that I encounter, which I may not do, I simply encounter too many people and too many needs each day to hope to meet them all myself. If I were also actively to discover and meet the needs of those who are not obviously in need, it would certainly be that I would never venture farther than my street corner before my means of assistance, monetary and otherwise, would be exhausted.

Second, and perhaps less obvious, is the problem of how far I need actually to go in meeting the needs of those I encounter. After all, the Samaritan could easily have helped more or less. Would he have been less a neighbour if he had merely bound the man’s wounds and given him food and water without taking him to the inn? Or if he had merely taken him to the nearest town without paying for his lodging? Or if he had paid only for the immediate expenses and not offered to settle the later accounts? Would he have been more a neighbour if he had waited with the man until he had recovered rather than leaving him behind? Or if he had taken the man into his own home rather than placing him in an inn? How, in other words, do I determine exactly what the need of the other requires of me? How do I determine what I need to do to be a neighbour?

It is in this difficulty that I found myself as I tried to understand how I was to love, how I was to be responsible, a difficulty compunded by the suspicion that my motives for asking these questions were less worthy than I was willing to admit. It was not until I read Shakespeare’s King Lear that I began to find an answer, and I will take up that part of this history in a later post.