One of the many faces of contemporary philosophy expresses at least three interdependent emotional states which interchange depending on the occasion: a concern about how to relate to the Other, a repulsion against any kind of concepts, and a sincere fascination with the non-philosophical. It can all be said to begin with Levinas and Derrida, both of whom argue that the Greek logos suffocates the Other before even seeing it: to say that things are is to grasp them, cross out their alterity, and perform a perverse cannibalism by making of what is other the same. Therefore, Levinas’s and Derrida’s philosophical offspring tend to practice “[n]on-ontological philosophy – one is tempted to write ‘non- philosophy.'”(*) The question is then: what does one encounter when one enters the alleged non-ontological realm of the Other? The answers are usually clear: the non-conceptual, unintelligible, unthinkable… And the concern is understandable: the West has excelled at inventing different kinds of cultural prisons, nazism and Stalinism being just two recent examples. Levinas, who suffered the former, diagnoses human (we would say, ontological, as we shall later see) myopia and theorises an ethical way in which the Other may enter this narrow picture expanding its horizon thereof. He does so, however, at the expense of the concept, of philosophy, and, it could be argued, of human thought itself.
But what are concepts? To cut the matter short, concepts make things (material and immaterial) visible before the mind. They are intrinsically connected to being, understanding, knowledge, representation – and therefore, some might postulate perhaps too quickly, to fixed facts.(**) One may conclude then (1) that concepts are the product of a drive toward stability, certainty, and a secure future,(#) and (2) that, in consequence, they reflect a tendency to get enclosed in an unnatural shell lacking any opening to the outside.
Is such drive restricted to the human alone? And are humans the only ones who understand, have knowledge of things and semiotically grasp. In How Forests Think Eduardo Kohn writes: “We humans […] are not the only ones who interpret the world. […] Life is inherently semiotic.”(¥) He adds:
Giant anteaters feed exclusively on ants. They do so by inserting their elongated snouts into ant colony tunnels. The specific shape of the anteater’s snout and tongue captures certain features of its environment, namely, the shape of ant tunnels. This evolutionary adaptation is a sign to the extent that it is interpreted (in a very bodily way, for there is no consciousness or reflection here) by a subsequent generation with respect to what this sign is about (i.e., the shape of ant tunnels). This interpretation, in turn, is manifested in the development of the subsequent organism’s body in a way that incorporates these adaptations. This body (with its adaptations) functions as a new sign representing these features of the environment, insofar as it, in turn, will be interpreted as such by another subsequent generation of anteaters in the eventual development of that generation’s body.(∞)
For a giant anteater ants and their tunnels cannot be incomprehensible Others because, if they were, the anteater would not know how to hunt and eat them. There is no Great Outdoors for a giant anteater because, for all anteaters, things are as they are and have been for many generations, and they do not wonder if things can be otherwise. The very body of the anteater with its corresponding sensations is a semiotising machine that maps the way its environment relates to it and vice versa. A stable map that is both accurate in its inclusion of certain external features and incorrect in the exclusion of others is, anyway, a proof that the giant anteater survived in the past and the guarantee that it will survive in the future. One may well call such map a multiplicity of corporeal representations of what is external and relevant to the body of the anteater, representations that capture particular features of reality so that things appear as such or such to the animal. Any abrupt changes in the environment that would question these representations will disorient the animal and cause, at least, stress and, at most, death.
Representational stability is preferable not only on a biological level but also on a psychological one. Take a cat, for instance. Pirata, our cat, is, like most animals, a ritual being. In the morning she always sleeps on top of her castle, in the afternoon in the guest room, in the evening on a yellow armchair of our studio, after one o’сlock in the night she comes to sleep on our bed and at six in the morning she necessarily needs to wake us up so that we give her food and let her out of the house. When Sofya danced butō for the first time in the garden, Pirata was so very puzzled and scared that she did not go out of the house for thirty minutes. When she finally did, it seemed as though she wanted to hunt Sofya. Finding out that the monster was too big, she bristled and shook her tail. In Pirata’s universe, Sofya could talk, walk, play, scratch… but certainly not be an immobile tree. Sofya-dancing-butō was not among Pirata’s representations.
Do not get us wrong: we are not defending representational prisons. An anteater adapts to environmental changes (whenever they are not catastrophic), and Pirata gets quickly used to Sofya-dancing-butō. What may be interesting to realise is that humans do not stand separate from the living world in their tendency to make stable the flux that life is. It may have been that language, the awareness of being, and conceptual invention have magnified what is already there, and pervasively so – that is, representations; they magnify that which is already there because, due to language, representations become more abstract, and we can then say that things are X or Y, see a mountain as a mountain and a sunrise as a sunrise (whatever their symbolic status in different cultures, or better, ontologies). Yet none of this does means that we are blind to change and difference. Conceptual stability is a point of departure from which change is actually possible (and vice versa). In the same way a good mother is a safe heaven for a child that allows him to explore the world, seeing a tree as a tree allows for additional precisions, for the expansion of one’s understanding, and for the (ex)change of opinion(s). Thus from conceptualising something as a domestic cat one can then distinguish different types of cats, see that a lion is not exactly a cat, or, if necessary, understand that one has mistaken a cat for a dog. That is to say, with sameness comes variation where the original image circulates among other original images. For in variation there is no centre, no supreme idea that defines all other ideas, unless one artificially establishes one idea to be a universal rule that does not admit rivals. Moreover, without stability, or sameness, one would not be able to notice and appreciate uniqueness, that is, those things that stand out among other things, be it for better or worse; hence, too, justice would become impossible. Finally, the act of questioning in general, and, more specifically, the conceptualisation of Otherness as the Great Outdoors are only possible thanks to concepts. Neither the giant anteater nor Pirata ultimately ask any questions. Without seeing a tree as a tree we would not be able to wonder about its otherwise, or try to see or perceive from its own perspective. Wonder itself would be inaccessible and the enigmas of this world would remain hidden forever. Therefore, being and change, stability and instability, security and uncertainty are not enemies but rather playmates or, better, twins who playfully deceive their audience about who is who. Indeed, philosophy, and not anti-philosophy, is a perfect tool to think being, concepts, the Other, and whatever else may come (tangibly or intangibly) to one’s vision. Instead of questioning the very basis of human thought, Levinas and Derrida should have asked perhaps what is it that, among so many human ontologies, has led the Western to deny so many differences and subsume and destroy the Other. This could open a truly fruitful discussion on the driving dynamics of culture and society and the dangers of rigid representations and absolute concepts.
(*) Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, p. 6.
(**) Cf. Bensusan, Indexicalism, p. 185, who is right, though, in denouncing the aforementioned Western tendency to subdue the given.
(#) Ibid.
(¥) Kohn, How Forests Think, p. 73.
(∞) Ibid., p. 74.
