This article is an abbreviated version of a paper that the author, a professor of philosophy at Carlos III University in Madrid, presented on January 23rd 2009 in Genoa at a conference organised by Resetdoc.
For Rafael del Águila, in memoriam
In the presence of intensification of conflicts that at least in part, if not totally, have a religious basis, to speak of tolerance seems a mere statement of intentions that clashes with the history and the resentment we are all experiencing. The contemporary world is tortured by wars that seem to focus on a calculus of probabilities and a utilitarian management of victory and defeat, rather than on political reasons or a moral attitude oriented towards tolerance. And there is more. In times of economic crisis, when to protect themselves European nations close their borders, and even expel both legal and illegal immigrants, to speak of welcoming outsiders can appear as a bitter irony. In the best case scenario, anyone continuing to speak of tolerance and reception will be considered naive, and with increasing frequency accused by cynics of perpetuating a false image of the reality of our society and our policies through words that philosophy addresses hopelessly to the world.
When times are dark, thinking requires sobriety and courage, and obliges us to resist our bad conscience, with which we speak of our times acting against the conscience that time has of itself. Philosophy has always had untimely rather than timeless characteristics. To speak of the present against the present is one of its characteristics. Without going back too far, this was manifest in Greece, during the Renaissance, in the Enlightenment and throughout the Modern Era. Another of philosophy’s characteristics is that it encourages us to think of ourselves as against ourselves. Reflecting today on tolerance and welcoming is perhaps the most radical and most urgent way of thinking against ourselves.
This does not mean envisaging another world, a future one, possible or impossible, but rethinking this world and this present. It means thinking of a present and of “us” as intolerant, or close to becoming intolerant and of a present and of an “us” little inclined to welcome others. There is one fundamental condition needed to rethink ourselves; we must place ourselves outside realty and our own condition. We must be conscious of and prepared to feel and experience disorientation and discord. It is necessary to personally and profoundly understand what is unacceptable in the current wars so as to understand the injustice perpetuated by our institutions and policies, also in the sphere of immigration. And to do this it is necessary to observe ourselves, our condition and the various models of our society and our policies from a certain distance. It is necessary to feel and to live as if we were extraneous and strangers to ourselves so as to learn to be tolerant. It is precisely this alienating process that creates the nucleus of tolerance and, although this may seem a paradox, to be welcoming we must be strangers in our own countries.
Alienation and aspiring to peace
Initially I will suggest the main cause capable of generating an experience involving disorientation and alienation. This is the perception that our own world and our own condition harms us and those dear to us. Every time we experience or see anything that is part of the damaging category we feel disorientated, alienated from our own lives. We suffer a wound that could and should have been avoided. Hence, we reject this wound and all that made it possible. We reject it. That rejection is what causes our alienation. Perhaps war, with its disasters and with the suffering of its victims has always been the principle symbol of this harm, understood as something that should and could be avoided. War, which appears to be justified by the rigid need to survive or a legitimate reaction to the aggression of others, can, as we know, be avoided. Those who start or encourage wars always consider them necessary and unavoidable. Those instead who suffer wars, know to what extent this is false and that it is possible to avoid wars using other methods such as politics and dialogue.
All the more reason to be aware that we must avoid war if we are the victims or witnesses of the suffering, the pain and the death of people suffering. The horror of war contains a dual negation; what could not have been and what should not have been. War, as a symbol of harm, is also the first symbol of what is known as alienation and disorientation. The rejection of war, of wounds and of death that could and should be avoided, is at the very foundation of a search for peace, for a form of social life that can avoid those wounds and that alienation. The idea that emerges from alienation, from wounds and harm, wants to suture and re-create the world so as to avoid the repetition of these experiences. Alienating itself from the wounds of the present, this idea proposes to therefore recreate the present in a divided and lacerated world in which we feel alienated. It imposes a search for conditions in which the wounds and harm can be cured as well as the need to change the world. This is what we call peace. The world of war itself, the world of the state of nature, as defined by Hobbes and Kant, because it harms us and leads to a first form of alienation, demands an aspiration for peace.
The part of us in search of civilised peace, reacts against the part that has induced or experienced the state of nature. War as a form of harm is the first experience in which we become alienated. We suffer the wounds of that harm, we reject its causes and often, hopelessly, attempt to ensure that this is not repeated. “Never again!” we shout. Tolerance is a form of that “Never again!” in which there is more determination than hope, more rage than comfort. The historical process that has determined the affirmation of tolerance, after the dark centuries of early European modernity, can be interpreted in the light of the despair that resulted from the pointlessness of religious wars, understood as the expression of a state of nature in which the differences between one’s own ideas and those of others were a sufficient reason, or a simple excuse, for eliminating the other and justifying the other’s desire to eliminate oneself. Tolerance appears and fully affirms itself only when we perceive the pointlessness of a conflict addressed at eliminating the other. When peace is achieved we will experience the need to guarantee tolerance as an institution protecting rights such as freedom of worship and thought, and to be a restriction to power as far as the freedom of the consciences of individuals is concerned. Through legislation and policies one could establish a system or a procedure repeating in a different form of expression the futility of violence as a way of socially articulating differences. By differences one means our philosophical persuasions and the doctrines according to which we interpret the world, including religious ones.
Thoughts on the “other”
Before this stage of institutionalisation however, it is necessary to have experienced the alienation and disorientation one faces in a social life that has inflicted harm. The specificity of the harm arises from the fact that the ‘Other’ is not taken into account, is seen as different, as if that difference were the cause of the conflict and should necessarily result in war and harm. And who is the Other, this someone we perceive as different and often distant? Thoughts on the Other have permeated a significant part of philosophical thought in the second half of the 20th Century. Levinas, Arendt, Derrida, Rawls and Habermas studied in depth the intuition that resulted in a radical change in western philosophy, with contributions reflecting often diverging theoretical programmes. It consisted in the shifting, in various ways, on the first person perspective, as when we say and think “I” or “we”, to the second person, as when we say and think “you.” During the 20th Century – with Levinas’ reflections on Nazism, Arendt’s on totalitarianisms and Rawls’ on Hiroshima – the second person perspective acquired colossal power that allowed the consideration of harm from the victim’s perspective rather than that of spectators or those who committed the crimes.
This is a change that modifies and strengthens our concept of what harm is, of what should always be avoided. We cannot, either morally or culturally, observe conflicts and wars without asking ourselves who is experiencing and suffering them. Our eyes, as Susan Sontag said a short time before she died, cannot look away from the distress and pain of others. A brother, or a neighbour, almost instantly appears to us as an ‘other’, someone who, precisely due to their difference, compared to what we care about, challenges and questions us. We see a brother as having become another who no longer thinks like us, as a threat or a betrayal that gives rise within us to violence, hatred and a desire to massacre. Once the unbearable and eternal period of violence is past, the bitter lesson of that conflict is its total pointlessness. If, a little at a time, we slowly learn that the path of fratricide is useless, the existence of the other, a forced coexistence with him will result in a reflection addressed at ourselves, at our own centre. The rights of the ‘other’ induce me to address the responsibility of having to think and live from my own point of view. Accepting those who think differently and conferring upon them the right to their diversity results in those accepting this as having the burden of emulating their courage and their strength. Acknowledging the other, the difference of the other, is the driving force behind our autonomy. I no longer only see the ‘other’, the brother who is already different: I see myself through his eyes. I see my own identity as different to how I see his.
Another form of alienation is stimulated by this process, in addition to accepting and acknowledging the very burden of autonomy – tolerating and bearing the burden of the ‘other.’ When Montaigne addresses the diversity of customs in different societies, and as a starting point expresses himself on the degree of extraneousness that some of these diversities cause in us, he immediately auto-alienates himself, and perceives how strange, and at times trivial, the form of our own lives is. That auto-alienation is the foundation of tolerance; it is the event that makes its birth possible, and, in turn, is also its most immediate effect. The fact that the ‘other’ exists and that one recognises oneself in him, introduces the seed of otherness within us. In facing the ‘other’ whom we manage to accept and acknowledge, we ourselves, to a certain extent, become ‘other’ unto ourselves.
The new “Other” and welcoming immigrants
During the same historical period as the creation of modernity, the figure of even more extraneous ‘others’ appeared, people even more foreign; those living in recently discovered continents, America, Asia, Africa and Oceania. These new “others” present themselves in different ways and, over the centuries, suffer brutal forms of western domination and exploitation so well-known to us such as the various form of slavery. If the rejection of violence within the European environment has resulted in the movement of tolerance, then the rejection of external violence in the world will set off the movement of acceptance. The discovery of this ‘other’, the foreigner, gives life to different dynamics of acknowledgement. While the process of tolerance will take shape within a system of rights – those based on freedom of conscience – the process of acceptance will appear within a cosmopolitan perspective.
This trustingly cosmopolitan vision indicates the possible path of humankind’s moral development. So-called positive globalisation, referred to by Kant in Perpetual Peace, has in spite of everything had important results, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved almost sixty years ago. However, it has also suffered, and continues to suffer, no less important mystifications. One cannot think of globalisation only as a positive phenomenon, forgetting the negative aspects of the past and those still affecting the lives of many members of the human race. Kant himself acknowledges this stating that violations of human rights, wherever in the world they may take place, affect us all. It is within the negative and not only positive framework of globalisation that one must today readdress the issue of acceptance.
Being hospitable to others means accepting them, opening the doors of our homes to them. We are hospitable with those who come to visit us or need our help. We are hospitable with those who do not “belong.” We are not hospitable with our families and we are not, as a people, hospitable with our compatriots. On the contrary. With them we impose other rights and other obligations. Those who visit us have a particular status. They cannot demand a welcome because they are visitors, foreigners. Perhaps they are only passing by, or perhaps they will return to their own countries. However, for as long as they may remain, and hence are no longer “on a visit” – because they have become part of our families or our cities – they will be acknowledged not from a welcoming viewpoint, but one of shared rights and duties, one of political co-participation.
The grammar of welcoming
Basically, welcome is a temporary and passing mechanism. It is, however, a mechanism that is easy prey to misunderstandings. What happens when the visitor wishes to extend his status, when he does not accept that he belongs to our family or our nation and in spite of this demands to be given hospitality? In Europe we experience this situation when groups of immigrants refuse to accept elements of our culture considered fundamental for social and political integration. What would happen if someone asked for asylum but also wished to remain in our country permanently without accepting our rules? Once again we cannot allow ourselves to be overcome by the intoxicating illusion of being able to provide one single definite answer. I believe instead that one must proceed with great caution and common sense. One could in fact consider as an invasion what is a simple and reasonable (in the sense that it is acceptable to both parties) establishment of a difference we could address. We could interpret as a refusal to become part of our family, to use a metaphor, what is on the contrary a request to accept a different cultural identity.
Once again, we must analyse each case in context, and, perhaps make do with the formulation of a basic grammar of welcoming. Such a grammar could contain the following principles; we must accept and welcome all those who do not impede or restrict our nature as an hospitable people, those who base the possibility of creating a cosmopolitan society on the concept of welcoming. This principle is merely formal. It is specific elements that cause unease (the Islamic veil, the Christian crucifix) that can be reasonably interpreted only within specific cultural and social contexts. For example, the Islamic veil in state schools has a different meaning in France – where there is a strong secular tradition in state education – or in Spain, where this concept is more flexible and less militant. The Islamic veil has different meanings depending on specific contexts, just as it assumes different meanings for the individual women who wear it. One must therefore state that, at least conceptually, the limitations of hospitality depend on to what extent we can define invasive or offensive or damaging forms of requests for hospitality. In some cases wearing a religious symbol can be offensive, in other circumstances it can simply be seen as a mark of identification.
Once again, the moral semantics of what affects us, hence what we perceive as harmful, defines the limitations that in turn define the application of our principles. Perhaps from a philosophical perspective one cannot add much more; nonetheless, as citizens we deal with all this on a daily basis and a great deal remains to be said. However, regardless of its limitations, philosophy can perhaps help us to focus on these problems with greater clarity.
Tolerance and Acceptance
As stated, tolerance began as a movement of acceptance of the ‘other’ as different. Initially this ‘other’ was close to us, a brother or a neighbour. Tolerance now seems to be problematic because it refers to immigrants, to foreigners who lay claim to their own lifestyles, their own way of being and behaving, which we consider extremely distant. Tolerance, the problems of tolerance, has permeated reception, and reception, or the problem of reception, has become the social fabric within which a paradoxical demand for tolerance arises. Or rather, tolerance – accepting the difference of the ‘other’ within the same political area – has become a problem because we do not know how to manage this request for hospitality. The ‘other’, the sibling, the neighbour, has become different since becoming a foreigner. And so our countries, our territories have been transformed into places of need, of necessity, of tolerance and acceptance as proven by growing immigration. Simultaneously, the entire world is a land of these same needs as symbolised by the shocking and extremely clear images of refugees and the no less shocking images of the victims of war.
Welcoming immigrants on the other hand rejects the concept that a people can invade another population and make them slaves, as the Europeans did in past centuries. The objective is to experience the world in a cosmopolitan manner; to be citizens of the world minimises the importance of the different ways we have of experiencing it and exalts the idea of a shared space. If tolerance and hospitality are the most deeply-rooted principles of the democratic tradition, we can conclude by suggesting that democracy is the political form of what I have defined as auto-alienation. Perhaps it is not just that (seeing that it also the sympathetic and positive putting into practice of our reasons, our decisions and our actions). One must not, however, forget that it is also this: a practice that states and doubts simultaneously, that learns and rejects what it considered certain, that renders us profoundly naive compared to what we have become. I believe that perceiving democracy in such terms is a great advantage especially in these dark times. This means never taking anything for granted or as guaranteed forever. Not even democracy itself.
Translated by Francesca Simmons