Once upon a time two seafaring travellers were shipwrecked by a great storm and thrown ashore with nothing more than their lives and the clothes on their backs. They climbed the cliffs and staggered into a nearby village going from house to house begging for help and food. The local people were mightily put off by their ragged appearance, by their desperate eyes and unintelligible language. One after another they rebuffed the strangers, saying that they could not understand the guttural words or the wild gestures.
Eventually the travelers reached a ramshackle cottage and knocked on the door. An old lady answered. She too could not understand the words of the strangers nor the gestures they made, but it was clear to her that here were men in dire straits who must be cold and hungry so she invited them in. She and her husband built up the fire and served the guests the last of their food. The travelers, impressed by this generosity, reveal themselves as Jupiter and his son Hermes. They bless the elderly couple and invite them to name their own reward.
This story of ‘Philemon and Baucis’, told by Ovid in his ‘Metamorphoses’, is ostensibly a moral tale about how to treat others ‘because you never know who they might be’. Yet it seems to go much further. The old couple invite the gods in regardless of who they might be, happy to see the divine in any who might pass by, caring little for whether they are comprehensible or not, seeing past all the differences to the essential unity of I and Thou.
The danger of our modern dualism is that the Other becomes incomprehensible. If the Other is demoted from a Thou to an It, then I must also become an It. To depersonalise the Other is to eradicate your own humanity. This means that love is not simply an emotion but also an identity and a way of knowing the world. This preserves the intelligibility of the stranger which in turn brings us to self-knowledge. You cannot know who you are in the absence of the Other. This is why solitary confinement is such a terrible punishment. You are not just deprived of company but of the capacity for self-reference. You cease to know who you are.
This is why love is so healing, it connects you to yourself as well as to the Other, puts the ground back under your feet as well as the glint in your eye. That Descartes’ ‘Cogito’ should have attained such a pinnacle in Western philosophy is really an indictment of Western thinking and suggests we have been collectively regressing since the time of Ovid.
The idea ‘I think therefor I am’ is no less self absorbed and isolating than masturbation. Descartes, like the child’s recourse to self-pleasure, arrived at his conclusion via the negation of everything outside his own frame of reference, essentially that everything was incomprehensible except his own preferred organ.
This has given rise to the idea that independence is our greatest good and that the fulfillment of personal happiness our most basic right, which in turn has led to a culture of narcissistic encapsulation, the demonisation of anyone that is not-me, and the proliferation of arms required to defend the sacrosanct white picket boundary of self-hood. Meantime the reality of the Other is demeaned to the point that they can be invaded with impunity and perhaps for their own good, sovereignty lost in the Nationalism of ‘First and Only’. Such godlikeness eradicates our own humanity as much as that of the Other, creating wars, famines and ecological disasters for which no-one seems to be responsible or accountable because it is all so ‘incomprehensible’.
This rather suggests that the story of Philemon and Baucis is about something fundamentally different from do-as-you-would-be-done-by. Theirs is not simply an expedient or moral act but rather a way of being born out of a recognition of themselves in the Other. Their act of service is not in anticipation of reward, nor an insurance policy set against their own future misfortunes. Their kindness is absolutely grounded in the present moment out of the understanding that such charity is the chief source of meaning in life, that to give is to be enriched and to bestow is to find one’s own place in the world.
Even when the Gods invite Philemon and Baucis to name their own reward they choose to serve in the local temple and to die together. Their focus is still on the other, not because they are morally good but because they realize that their own fulfillment and purpose depends on it.
It’s as though Ovid was anticipating the erosion of the Principle of Relatedness in Western culture and doing his best to forestall it with his simple tale. Had he been able to gauge the extent of this collective regression he might have had more to say. Descartes is not alone in his material dualism. His philosophy extends itself to our entire view of nature from Darwin’s survival of the fittest, a model rooted in the idea of eternal conflict and competition, to Newton’s view of the cosmos as a giant mechanism in which we are all but cogs. By the mid 17th century Western separational philosophy had exiled the soul to the pineal gland and by the 19th century it had been even further demoted to a mere neurotic or hysterical symptom.
Separation from the Other renders that other incomprehensible and therefore a source of fear, insecurity and mistrust. Relatedness sees oneself in the Other which naturally gives rise to care and nurture without the need for moral pressure. Descartes’ narcissistic ‘Cogito’ needs reframing, ‘Estis, ergo sum’. You are, therefore I am. Perhaps James Hillman’s complaint that ‘we have had 100 years of psychotherapy and nothing has changed’, might then be resolved as the artificial unintelligibility of the other is allowed to collapse back into reverential awe and wonder.
Inspired by Satish Kumar’s book, ‘You are, therefore I am.’
