The Other Point

One of the biggest stories, if not the biggest story, in the world and beyond, is the necessity and miracle of the self and the other being “in the same field,” as my favorite philosopher put it. The idea is that there is no way of seeing your self unless you take a viewpoint that is outside of that self.

 

The idea seems so very simple at first – that there must be a second point in order for there to be a perspective on the first point – but it actually gets into implications that are very far-reaching. My philosopher says that “Mind is the importation of the social process," meaning that our reflexivity presupposes a dialogue between two points. “Otherness” and “alterity” are two words you hear a lot in such discussions, which can get pretty dense.

But it is actually an old and very familiar idea. Like, love, for instance! - wherein the feelings and thoughts and welfare of the other are as immediate as the the feelings and thoughts and welfare of the self.

The idea of the Yin and Yang is also the idea of two in one.

And then the old idea of the Ouroboros has the meaning of the outside being within.

Another common symbol of it that I particularly like is the idea of the Cadeuceus. There is pedantic controversy about the Cadeuceus often being used as a medical symbol instead of the rod of Asclepius, but I think the so-called error is actually quite shrewd in the human way because our bodies' health is actually more of a balance between opposites than the approximation of some ideal on its own.

Asclepius

Cadeuceus

The commercial meaning of the Cadeuceus is just as shrewd in that commerce is actually a two-way proposition rather than the see-what-you-can-steal-from-someone-else attitude that is so common where I live. I recently saw the Governor of Ohio and some of his colleagues congratulating themselves on having lured a business away from the neighboring State of Indiana. But don't the people of Indiana matter? Business and commerce has to take into account the welfare of others, or else it just becomes a savage, rapacious, race to the bottom for everyone.

There are so many examples of the necessity of the two-ness that are in one that come to mind – male/female, self/other, good/bad, conservative/liberal, plus/minus, no man is an island/ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee – that it almost feels like a fundamental principle of reality. It's why they say that you really don't know your own language until you know a second language. I often think that to say that love is at the center of the universe, or that God is love, is saying just that.

It is very common, at least outwardly, among people around me to say that life is a war of all against all, so well described by Old Thomas Hobbes as to be called now "the Hobbesian worldview.” “Bob Dylan” saying in his Rolling Stone interview that “What other people think about me, or feel about me, is so irrelevant” is that attitude. It's all about me, the idea that life is a jungle where everyone is on his own and you get what you can “successfully" get off of others regardless of others.

A strange irony is that individuation, true selfhood, does not occur unless the viewpoints of many others are taken. We find ourselves by getting outside of ourselves. And if this getting outside of one's self isn't done, then the person remains a copy or even becomes a caricature. How often does it happen that a person becomes a caricatured copy of parents or others whom they have hated!

What really gets me angry sometimes is when I see a sensitive, loving person being told not to pay attention to what anyone else thinks. In particular, I know a couple women who are Highly Sensitive Persons, who get deeply devastated by others who are jealous, destructive, even murderous. The answer isn't to tell the others to rot in hell or not to pay any attention to these others. The answer is to understand, to take, the viewpoint, of these hostile others deeply – and thus discover that they may be feeling inferior to you for various reasons, especially your sensitivity; may be projecting their own un-admitted faults; looking for someone to pay attentions to them; perhaps having mixed up their medications; or having a thousand other inner realities that can only be understood by getting inside them, putting yourself into their shoes in some way. I can see certain cases in which there are people who are so hostile and murderous that there is no way on earth, given the practical and real limitations we have, that we can do anything else but escape or fight. There are limits! But it seems to work better with ordinary others to see more clearly through their eyes, to try to see more clearly where they are coming from.

It gets me angry when I see the sensitive being devastated, but then I myself have to understand that without this wrong, we would not be able to value the difference, to appreciate the good. Evil is still evil, but I think the fact is that there has to be an outside point in order to know and to appreciate the first point.