Meaning of Intersubjectivity

CHAPTER VI

INTERSUBJECTIVITY

LESSON 1: MEANING OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Human as Object versus Human as Subject

• Human as Object - some people treat others as mere objects because they only look at others as bodies like machines or property that they can use for their needs and wants. The human person is not an object. She only appears to be one because of her body. Her body is what makes her a thing like other things.
• Examples:

• Factory owners do not care if their workers don’t get enough sleep or food for as long as they meet the quota for the day.
• Maids are shouted at, snubbed, laughed at, or made to live in subhuman conditions because their “amo” only sees them as machine that can wash and cook.
• Prostitutes are not respected because they are only viewed as bodies that give pleasure to their clients.

• Human as Subject – people is a being with unique consciousness, personal experiences, personality, attitude, disposition, etc.

Intersubjectivity

• Prefix “inter” implies between, among or together.
• Subject pertains to a person (see Human as Subject)
• Intersubjectivity is the relationship among subjects
• According to Gabriel Marcel, intersubjectivity is “the realm of existence to which the preposition “with” properly applies”. There are instances in which we use the preposition “with” – it doesn’t simply mean being together through aggregation. Sometimes it does not exemplify co-presence. An example of this is a scenario in a jeepney where passengers are not with each other although they are riding in one jeep and are touching, bumping and impinging on one another. This is because passengers are concerned in various things like her bags (vigilant against pickpockets), his destination, her fare and his sukli.
• Intersubjectivity has three components:

• Shared emotion
• Shared attention
• Shared intention

• When does the jeepney scenario turn into a realm of intersubjectivity? For example, a lady passenger asks for direction going to Quiapo. Other passenger would tell the direction, some will warn about the danger and some will tell alternative route going there. In that brief moment, all the passengers in the jeepney were not just present to themselves but opened their presence to that lady, they were with the other. The other becomes present to us when we are available to them and, in turn, they are available to us.
• As Marcel would point out, this preposition “with” “does not properly apply...to the purely objective world”. The preposition “with” properly applies to the realm of persons, of subjects, not objects.
• To be with signifies co-presence, an openness of my presence to the presence of the other person.
•  “Being a mystery, the human being is removed from the category of things, or of “having”. Sometimes, “I have” is an instrument that one can possess, use, and discard after use. That is why any treatment of the person as a mere tool that can be manipulated, any treatment of the person as a beast, leads to a cry for justice, for it does violence to the dignity and essence of a human person. To mutually respect each other as subjects, that is intersubjectivity.

To-be-is-to-be-with

• The word living is a general term that covers plants, animals and human life.
• Life, according to medical science, is “the state of existence characterized by such functions as metabolism, growth, reproduction, adaptation, and response to stimuli”. For a medical point of view, a doctor can say that one is alive by looking at the vital signs of living. Marcel, however, argues that there is more to human life other than vital signs we share with animals in general. This is evident in some people who experience the loss for the drive to live.
• Example:

• A father whose daughter dies of leukemia would say that he feel as dead even while he breathes and all.
• A girl who loses a friend may be functioning physiologically, but feels as if time has stood still.

• According to Marcel, “human living is living of something other than itself”. The center of human life is outside of itself. This captured in one of the teachings of Jesus Christ, said “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”. (Matthew 10:38)
• Human life is not just about catering to one’s biological sustenance. Human life has to have meaning. For Marcel, we find that meaning outside ourselves – in the other. The French word for “meaning”, sens, literally mean “direction”. Hence, the argument here is that life is human as it is propelled or directed towards something other than self. A life that is only concerned about its biological sustenance is focused only on oneself.
• By contrast, people who live for others, ironically, are those who feel more fulfilled. We learn about saints, martyrs and heroes who gave their lives for others, and we wonder where they draw their strength and superabundant love. For Marcel, these are people who have embraced the reality of human living. They live for others because it is who they are, it is what human living is. To be, to exist in a human way, is to be with.
• Intersubjectivity is thus a state in which one recognizes one’s being as a being-with-others. It is not human life if it is centered on itself. It becomes human, that is, it is humanized, as soon as one de-centers oneself for himself, that is, when the center of one’s life is on the care for the welfare of another.

LESSON 2: AN INTERSUBJECTIVITY RELATIONSHIP ACROSS DIFFERENCES

Emmanuel Levinas: My fellow subject, who resists Totalization

Totalization of the Other

• Emmanuel Levinas, a contemporary and friend of Marcel, takes up a deeper reflection on the relationship between the self and the other. Levinas points out that the Other is “rigorously other”, that is, far more radically different than we would normally appreciate and accept in our everyday lives. The default perspective we adopt in our everyday thinking is that the others would think, feel, react, perceive things, the way we do. This natural expectation becomes more apparent when it is not met, that is, when we get frustrated over people who do not understand what we say, nor share in our feelings, or react very differently.
• Totalization occurs whenever I limit the other to set of rational categories, be they racial, sexual, or otherwise. I totalize the other when I claim I already know who he is before he can even speak to us. Totalization is a denial of the other’s difference, “the denial of the otherness of the other”. It is when I refuse to see that the other person can be someone else apart from what I expect him to be.
• Example:

• Normal expectation for street kids: not in school for studying, begging for alms or doing menial jobs. They are considered dangerous or menacing. They are nuisance in the street. Let us suppose that one day you come across one of them inside a bookstore, reading a book while sitting on the floor. Does not this astonish you? You are astonished because the street kid has just exceeded your expectations of what a street kid is.

• There are two things revealed by this experience of astonishment. First, it reveals what you have taken for granted as true (all street kids are dangerous, unlearned, uneducated and must be avoided at all cost), but turns out to be false (because this particular street kid is not dangerous, and clearly knows how to read). Second, this experience shows us that another person will always escape your attempt to fully grasp or understand them (the street kid has a desire to learn more, and you have never imagined such desire to actually exist in a very uncommon way).
• When you totalize the other, like when a totalitarian leader lords over his subjects, you are eradicating any possibility of being surprised by the other person. It’s like you are saying there is nothing new to learn about them.
•  What does it mean to say that one is “at home”? A home, as we all know it, is a place where we feel comfortable, where we can be in our most unpretentious state. The comfort we feel in our homes is due to the familiarity we have developed within the space and among the people that surround us. The familiarity gives a sense of complacency.
• Have you ever spent a night in a different place and found yourself unable to sleep? In Filipino, we say “namamahay”, an experience of discomfort due to newness, the strangeness of the place. This is the kind of discomfort we feel when we come to grips with the “otherness” of the other person.
• For Levinas, the other is “the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself”. The assumption of sameness is disturbed by the genuine encounter with another person.
• From the perspective of intersubjective relations, the level of comfort we experience with our immediate circle is due to the interactions that have become routine over time. We have been with these people for so long that we somehow have become “at home” with them. For Levinas, this feeling of familiarity prevents a genuine encounter with the other. The other becomes just as everyday as the bed we sleep on, or the toothbrush that we hold. Their presence become so stale, we no longer anticipate anything anew. Sometimes it gets to a point where we take the other for granted because s/he has become so familiar to us.
• For Levinas, “the Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinity foreign”. It is impossible to completely know another person. Not even mother who ahve been with their children from womb can make this claim.  A philosophical explanation for the impossibility can be drawn from the discussion of the human person as an embodied spirit. As this inextricable entwinement of limitation and possibility, the human person is not a fixed and self-enclosed entity, but a dynamic and moving individuality as it is constantly opened up by possibilities.
• For Levinas, people are infinitely transcendent. The word “transcendent” literally means “above and beyond”. A genuine encounter with another person is an invitation to go beyond what you see, what is given. To claim that there is nothing beyond what you see and what you know of the other is to force them into your self-made prison of expectations.
• In the language of Levinas, it is the spirit, what is transcendent in the person. It is the possibility for change, which is always there for as long as the person lives. To label people, to judge and act on them according to these labels is to kill what is transcendent in the person.

The Power of the Face of a Person

• For Levinas, power over another person can never be absolute because of the capacity of a person to resist it. One finds that resistance in the face of the other. “The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable turns into total resistance to the grasp”.
• From the magnum optus of Levinas entitled, Totalilty and Infinity, whenever he refers to the “face”, we should understand that he is not just referring to a part of our body, but to the whole person. Levinas chose the term “face” because not just like any part of a person’s body, it play a very special role.
• “Face” is what gives us an identity, what marks our difference from others. This is not an object that one can detach from one person to another, nor a fixed entity that is simply superimposed on one’s head. The face speaks as it discloses the person that bears it.
• When we see that face of another person, we do not just see an object, or a sum flesh before us. It is like when a person faces us; our tendency to objectify them is weakened. The face of another person issues a power of resistance against our tendency for violence. It is so powerful that when we are faced, we tend to look away. We find it hard to look someone in the face for too long without offending.
• But there is an alternative to violence, which is to humbly accept the other as different from us. In this recognition, we are able to hear the invitation from the other. One’s encounter with the other “promotes my freedom by arousing my goodness”. In other words, the face of another not only tames my tendency for violence. It also invites me to do good for that other person, to be generous, or to respond to their need.
• A genuine encounter with another person is an encounter in which we tame our tendency to overcome the other and imprison him within our demands and expectations. It is an encounter in which we receive the other despite his/her strangeness and difference. It is an encounter in which we accept that the other will never be fully the same as we are and yet be a person.

Being a neighbour to the other

• A subtle form of “violence” we do to other people is when we reduce them into social categories.
• A category is, a pre-conception amounting to a pre-judgement.
• Category of Social Class

• Elitista, Jologs, Conyo, Jejemon

• Category of Race

• Tisoy, Negro

• Twisted use of medical conditions

• Retarded, OC, Addict

• Labels on derogatory look on gender or sexuality

• Bakla, Malandi

• Labels on place of origin

• Promdi, Barbariotic, Taga-bundok

• For Reinhold Neibur, a category serves as a barrier that prevents us from having a real personal encounter with another person. It makes us difficult to see the person behind the label, and hear the message coming from the other, like silent cry for help.
• Beyond their social categories, however, they were persons facing another person in need of help. Yet because they were too caught up within their social category, they chose to turn a blind eye to the man in need of help. Example: The priest and Levites refusal to help the good Samaritan for the fear of being impure or unclean during Jewish ceremony.

LESSON 3: GENUINE COMMUNICATION AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Moral Humility

• To understand people we should try to “put ourselves in the shoes of another person”. This refers to the invitation to imagine ourselves in the situation of others.
• Iris Marion Young argues that this common suggestion is problematic, and can be dangerous. It is problematic because no one can really claim to have access to the mind of another person. No matter how familiar a person has become, you will never be able to fully know what is on his mind.
• Individuals are shaped by their histories and social context. No two person share a completely the same social position and individual history. As such, no two persons can have the exact same experiences and form the same perspective.
• We learn that the best way to have more holistic perspective is to learn from others who see things differently from us. In short, we must learn to silence our minds that tend to totalize things and persons, and wait for the other to teach us something new.
• Based from the survey conducted by Young about the Persons with Disability (PWD), showed that actual PWD’s “usually think that their lives are quite worth living, and strongly wish to have discriminatory impediments removed so they can live those lives as well as possible.” In other words, it is totally unfair and insulting for us to imagine that PWD’s think that their lives are not worth living. They are, as studies show, generally happy and would rather not feel being pitied for their situation.
• For Young, PWD’s “are different, and it is important for u to recognize and respect that. It does not mean however, that we should treat them as lesser human beings. They deserve respect just as much as any other human subject does. To recognize this is to appreciate the meaning of intersubjectivity. The other subject is different from me, but deserves respect as much as I do.”
• Young points out that what happens in reality is that we are more of projecting fears, anxieties or anger on other persons. In this way, we do not really listen to the other, but are imposing our own voice on them. We will never fully understand the world of a person victimized by harassment unless we experience it ourselves. Until then, we should be more careful in making judgments and conclusions about them. The best that we can give them is our listening silence.
• Genuine understanding begins with the silence that is essential to listening. We cannot really hear what the other is saying unless we hold our tongue and tame our tendency to speak for them.
• Moral humility is exercised through the admission that we do not know the other person fully. With this admission, we open ourselves to the possibility that we will learn something different from them. Therefore, understanding those who are different from us cannot happen by simple imagining ourselves in their situation. We must listen to what they have to say.
• To many of us, the act of listening seems to be an easy matter. Genuine listening, however, entails great effort. According to Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, here are some of the things we should avoid saying if we want people to truly open up to us.

• Do not say that their feelings are invalid. There are no right or wrong feelings. Let them express how they feel. They should not be judged for emotions that they cannot help.
• Do not give advice if they are not asking for any. What they need is a friend who can be with them, not some expert who can look at them in a detached way.
• Do not philosophize about their situation as if you are above them and you truly know what has happened. (Ex. Saying to a friend who’s mother died, “That is God’s will.”
• Do not say “I know how you feel.” Sometimes, this can really be offensive to the other person because no one can really know how she feels unless you become her.
• Do not say, “If I were you...,” unless she asks you what you would do if you were in her shoes. Without her consent, saying “If I were you...,” would turn the conversation into something about you, and not the person who needed listening to.