Victims of Typhoon Sendong.
Top: A drowned family discovered under the waterlogged rubble.
Bottom: A father cries as he clutches his drowned child.
I live in the bustling city of Metro Manila, which at this point seems to be lightyears and lightyears away from the tragedy in northern Mindanao. It’s not something I can easily grasp right now. The pictures above have gone viral through reblogs on Tumblr and shares on Facebook. These are the kind of pictures that we either look way too long at, only to quickly look away. But, why is that?
Emmanuel Levinas observes that in our quest for Being - with a capital B, pertaining to the pursuit of own’s one existence -, we fail to remember the beings - with a small B - that surround us, the existents that make up existence, the human beings in front of us, the Other.
One could call the poor the mythical Other. I add the qualifier mythical because we talk about them like they exist in another plane, the figment of a bourgeois imagination with philanthropic fantasies longing to be fulfilled. Everyday life assaults us with a reminder of their existence, but in the rush of things, they’re relatively easy to brush off; one can easily pretend to text or nap when a beggar comes knocking on our darkly tinted car windows, or look in the other direction at the sight of a family on a cardboard box, or stare unnaturally straight ahead to keep the street children that swarm you on the Katipunan footbridge on your peripheral vision as you make your way back to the safe haven of your blue and white campus.
These pictures became viral because they are such an affront to our modest, middle-class sensibilities. One does not open Facebook or Tumblr expecting to be greeted by such harsh reminders of the state of humanity elsewhere. It removes the safety net of anonymity, the same anonymity we relegate the Other to and the same anonymity we hide behind. Our phantoms have been unmasked, and while that which we have to face may not be pleasing or pleasant, face it we must.
There’s a Jewish story that talks about a mirror and a window. The mirror and the window are both made with the same basic material, glass. Through the window, we can see the others and are moved towards compassion and sympathy. But, covered in silver, the mirror reflects only one’s self and that which is self-centered and selfish.
Through these pictures, we are able not only to see the Other, but affirm the fact that the Other has a face, an identity, a life other than our own. Hopefully we see ourselves when we see the Other; after all, what is the good of Being if we are not being Good?
Ethics is not a reflexive activity, but an experience. It does not result from a line of reasoning. It is not deduced but experienced. With the perception of the Other, each one finds himself forced and obliged by the presence of the Other… The central fact - of ethics but also of humanity as such - is to be found in the presence of the Other who imposes himself in a mode very different from that of things.
The body of the Other signifies in itself in an originary manner. In its nakedness, its offered weakness, its incapacity to hide weakness, its capacity to hide its misery, the human body manifests at the same time that it is vulnerable and inviolable… The eruption of the Other by itself suffices then to found ethics and responsibility… This immediate corporeal meaning is what Levinas calls “the Face”.
It is not simply the human face, not even the expression of its features. The Face is the entire body of the Other insofar as human, insofar it directly addresses itself to me and bestows upon me a responsibility that I am not able by any means to cast away: “To see a Face is already to hear… ‘social justice’.”
According to Levinas, ethics presupposes that this experience is an upheaval: through the body, one approaches the infinity. This proximity is also a dispossession. The Face of the Other liberates me from myself, from my complacency, from the forms of closing up that make up for egoism, indifference, or even more radically, identity and subjectivity. The radical turning upside down develped in many ways by the thought of Levinas consists above all in affirming that the Other has priority over me. Ethics takes literally and seriously the banal formula of etiquette, “After you, please!”. Ethics takes this forrmula as the key of the world and makes it a rule of life.
“The Other Above Everything” by Roger-Pol Droit
Published in Le Monde on January 6 2006
Translated by Dr. Leovino Ma. Garcia
TLDR; Get over your face long enough to see the face of others.
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