Ruminations on otherness, gazes, dialectics, and love.

I’ve been thinking lately about the constant flood of “memes” in my social media telling me that I should be emotionally self-sufficient, that I should find my sense of peace and meaning entirely on my own, that I should never depend on others for my happiness.

Ever since the pandemic, but especially in the last few months, I have come to think that there is something very wrong with that message.

For one thing, there are mountains of evidence in psychology, sociology, and related fields, showing how we human beings lose our minds when cut off from the company of others. As Aristotle said, someone who has no need for others is “either a wild animal or a god”; that is to say, such a person is the exception, not the rule.

Lately I’ve also been thinking of it in terms of otherness, gazes, and dialectics.

Consider the following: though I offer this with the caveat that it’s a bit “stream of consciousness” and not yet worthy of an academic publication!

[Image: Fernand de Canne, unsplash dot com.]

I meet someone. Maybe they’re a colleague at work, or a student. Maybe they’re an old friend or a new friend. Maybe they’re a delivery person at my door.

We look at each other. We also take in our surroundings, our clothes, our gestures, our voices, our general postures.

I meet that person with a sense of my reasons for meeting them, with a sense of the history of my life leading to this moment, and a sense of my wishes or hopes or expectations for what will come of the meeting. I meet that person with a sense of hope or fear that my wishes will be met, or exceeded, or dashed.

Some of that is communicated in my gaze, my posture, my tone of voice, my face.

In that sense, no gaze is neutral, no gaze is “mere”. Every gaze is an intention. Every gaze is an expression of a world, and a movement from out of my world and toward another. Every gaze is a communication: it is an “I am here; I see you; I offer some of my reality to you.”

A gaze can also communicate measuring, evaluating, judging, perhaps rejecting: it can be an imposing of some of my reality upon another. Which is why, for so many people, a gaze is uncomfortable, unnerving.

I’m told that some neurodivergent people find the gaze of others physically painful.

And I was teaching Simone DeBeauvoir today, who talks about how there is an oppressive power relation in the way men look at women. (I say this, acknowledging that I’m a white able-bodied educated and affluent man. So I have to be careful how I look upon the women around me. I can hurt someone just by looking at her!)

And yet the gaze which judges is also the gaze which searches; the gaze can judge only insofar as it searches for something to judge.

The gaze which searches eventually discover the gaze of the other person, gazing in return. From out of these two gazes emerges a realisation, in the sense of a crafting of the real. I realise this other person has her own history, her own reasons, her own wishes and hopes and expectations for this meeting. She is another world. She brings part of this world to the way she gazes upon me. Her gaze upon me makes this realization necessary, unavoidable.

Her gaze can also respond to my offering of some part of my world with my gaze. I can offer part of my world to an object, to a statue, a painting; it is not the same as offering some part of my world to another thinking feeling seeing being with a world of her own, who could respond in kind. The possibility of a dialectic emerges; the possibility of conversation. An expression and response; a response which becomes an expression in its own right and calls for another answering response.

And this is the place where a dimension of ethics enters the meeting. For now that I know I am facing another world, facing the possibility that my gaze will elicit a response, I have to decide what element of my world to offer. Which of my thoughts, my feelings, to express? Shall I offer thoughts on trivial things, on the news or the weather, or on the gods and the meaning of life? Of my feelings, should I share my simplest hopes, or my deepest? Should I offer my fears, my sadness, my passions, or my mere curiosities? Should I trust my instincts, and say what comes unbidden? Or should I watch the gates of my unconsciousness more carefully, lest I say something too private, or offensive? If she offers part of her world which I find surprising, how shall I reply? Does her surprising expression call for compassion, or laughter, or intellectual analysis, or curiosity? If she offers me something that makes me uncomfortable, should I say so? How much discomfort should I accept before I walk away?

And I am also led to worry: how shall she respond to my expressions? How shall I be judged? For my searching gaze searches in her gaze for validation. (This is the point which those aforementioned memes deny.) The searching gaze searches for a sign that the other recognizes and acknowledges that I am who I say I am, or that I am who I want to be.

And the deeper we look, the more the searching gaze searches for love.

I might not receive the recognition I’m looking for. I might not find that love. I might instead recieve a gaze that judges me, and finds me unworthy.

For the gaze of the other person upon me is also never “mere”. Her gaze might find in me something foolish, or dangerous, or disgusting, or for some other reason unworthy of being welcomed into her world.

Again, for fear of that kind of judgement, we might avoid the gaze of others. We might climb into solitude, or immerse into a social media network where all gazes are mediated by cameras, microphones, images, fantasies, algorithms, and follower-counts.

But I think one must risk being gazed upon by others like that; one must be willing to receive the searching gazes of others. For the reason that: there is always a chance that the next person whose gaze falls upon me, might find something in me that they could love.

To be looked upon by another with love; to be seen and spoken to and touched with respect and compassion and shared pleasure; to be welcomed into another person’s world and to have one’s own world explored and found beautiful; to be gathered-in and admired and trusted and treasured; there is unique meaning in that, and no other feeling like it. Love affirms the absolute goodness of the two who love each other; it affirms their absolute right to exist; it blesses all the world and renders all their struggles worthwhile.

And so we seek it everywhere. We crave it. We give up kingdoms and fortunes for it. We change up, transform, dump out, and wreck our lives for love. We waste away for lack of love. We sing songs, write novels, build palaces for love. We fight for love. We die for love. We kill for love. There is simply no other force in human life which compares to the will to love and the wish for love.

And there is no replicating that kind of love in solitude. You can love yourself, you can also be a mystery to yourself. But you cannot give to yourself that which only the gaze and voice and touch of another can give.

Which leads me back to the point I started with; the point about those “memes”. One who declares that we should never look to others for completion, or that we don’t need other people in order to be happy: where does that will-to-isolation come from? Are the people who say such things justifying a refusal to risk being judged by others? Are they looking for ways to comfort themselves in the absence of love? Have they been hurt all too often by those who claimed to love them, and now they’re too exhausted to try again?

When was the last time someone looked upon you with love?

What will you risk to be seen that way again?