My favorite philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, has much to say about radical exteriority. Not exteriority as neutral which is firmly engrained in our contemporary ontology (i.e., a pre-cognitive understanding of being based on occidental history) but as a he or a she, the face of the other. To take a step back, growing up or maturing is all about recognizing we are not stuck in an infantile fixation where the only thing that comes to the fore is our emotional need but where an ‘other’, something not-me¹, matters. We should not immediately jump to the notion of God as that ‘other’. God and religion have proven time and again that they can be the most fixated in an infantile regression where all that matters is an inferior mirroring of God which in the end is only a superego (Freud) or fantasy (Lacan…shall we say phantasm?).

At this moment in history in the U.S. we are seeing more and more folks clamoring for war with ISIS, an increasing hatred of Islam and an impatience with President Obama’s strategy for getting rid of the terrorist threat. Republican candidates are talking openly about ‘World War III’ and a ‘clash of civilizations’.² Capitalism and technology fuels the developing crisis as anger sells. Psychologically, anger is always preferred over anxiety and fear as anger holds the illusion of control. Babies learn this early on and find throwing a fit seems to get better, more desirable results…and then they learn the word, “NO”. Control gives boundaries. Even if control is an illusion, it makes one feel better. Anger forces an object, a Great Satan, an assumed reason for anxiety. It is assumed that if the evil object goes away the anxiety will subside. If mommy does not get the bottle fast enough watch out.

Facts matter. Certainly facts can be fantasized and created to suit infantile needs for security. Facts can be neutral or appear to be from an all too human history of infantile ‘ontologizing’. However, beyond these relative moments of facts there is another dynamic at play, reality (Lacan³). Unless you are a narcissist, a sociopath (psychopath), megalomaniac/egomaniac or solipsist you will intuitively recognize that there is a not-me. Facts can be a presentation of the not-me. The not-me is the face of the other. Maturity recognizes exteriority. Here are the facts: gun violence by our own citizenry on average since 2005 are 1,250 times more like to kill you than a terrorist.⁴ A drunk good ‘ol boy with a gun is much more likely to kill you than a terrorist. A recent study concludes:

Data from a US mortality follow-back survey were analyzed to determine whether having a firearm in the home increases the risk of a violent death in the home and whether risk varies by storage practice, type of gun, or number of guns in the home. Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4). They were also at greater risk of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different method (adjusted odds ratio = 31.1, 95% confidence interval: 19.5, 49.6). Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.⁵

You are more likely to kill yourself or a member of your family if you go out and buy a gun for the terrorist bogie-man. You are more likely to get killed by a drunk driver. To put it in perspective, you are much more likely to get killed by a bolt of lightning. The flu kills an average of 36,000 people a year as opposed to an average of 30,000 a year for domestic gun violence. These are facts not feelings. If you play feelings in the stock market or a poker game, statistically, you are going to lose. Sure, you could be the one that the murderous terrorist gets or the mythical NRA creature that shoots the “bad guy” but reacting from emotion will likely get you into much more problems…this is what ISIS wants. They know you are more like to do something stupid to yourself from anxiety and fear than they are likely to kill you. President Obama understands this and has fashioned a strategy to address the mature complexities of the issue. Yes, we will get the international thugs (less than 50,000 in Syria and Iraq) but we will not create more terrorists in so doing. G.W. Bush gave us the Wild West show in the ruins of the World Trade Center buildings and then went for the mass shoot out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, facts not feelings prove that the show down at the O.K. Coral created many more terrorists than it killed⁶.

The fact is that you cannot fight terrorists with a conventional war. Sure, you can kill a lot of people both terrorists, innocent civilians and our own young people but if you create more hatred, you create more terrorists. Islam is the second largest religion in the world, will soon be the largest religion in the world and the fastest growing religion in the world.⁷ If you want to make this about Islam and not a group of thugs, you are setting the stage for a religious, World War catastrophe. If you do and vote for what the Republican candidates are advocating, you are allowing your anxiety, blown way out of proportion, to start a real catastrophe that really may be the end of our country and perhaps civilization. Think about all the wars since World War II. While the 50’s anti-communist rhetoric got Eisenhower to start the Vietnam War and many after to expand it, we still have communism. Come to think of it we still have fascists growing in larger numbers in the world since World War II but we really had no choice facing the axis leaders of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Emperor Hirohito. Even if we kill all the thugs in Iraq and Afghanistan we will still have terrorists. We can go after organized crime all we want but it is here to stay. If we must face a nation or nations down for national survival, the framers of our Constitution gave us a mechanism for declaring war. They were fully aware of the infantile human tendency for knee-jerk reaction and unnecessary and frivolous wars. Over-reacting is just as dangerous, if not more so, than the original provocation. We need to be smart not emotional. If we as a country decide to ramp this up to the level of conventional warfare we will likely do more harm than good as recent history SHOULD have taught us. We will pay a bigger cost for that.

Facts can and should help us wean ourselves from infantile regression, lashing out from fear and anxiety. We need to address the issue in an adult way if we want to solve the problem. We will only perpetuate an endless cycle of immaturity and exacerbate our anxieties further by listening to the war hawks. They have vested interests other than reason and facts for whipping us up a frenzy. We, the common folk, have the option to recognize the other, the facts and make a mature decision based on knowledge. Our system of democracy depends on the ideal of Enlightenment. If we cave to our lesser instincts we become the victims of our fears. As FDR once stated, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. There can be an ‘other’ in facts and knowledge which call to us to not be purely reactive but reflective of a reality other than our desire, our fear, our phantasms. I do not think we dare think as Jesus would have us, to turn the other check. However worthy, that is a radical ideology which flies in the face of our physicality. However, Aristotle and physics does teach us to act in proportionality, ‘ratio’. If our economic system thrives on reality distortions it is because we created it and allow it but there is still a possibility for acting with reason and not creating an equal, or perhaps far worse, opposite reaction. Externality beckons to us with facts other than ourselves not relative to ourselves. When we respond responsibly we learn about the other and adapt. When the other is the face of the other, as for Levinas, we have an absolute externality which cannot be mediated but lost in the murderous violence of ontology, our world-situated eradication of the other. This is the quintessential terrorist.

Anger is the desire to appease fear and anxiety. It is the desire for control and all too often settles for the illusion of knowledge, pretending to know the cause of our vexations even if the cause is imagined or way out of proportion. This kind of desire eradicates the possibility for knowledge based on something other than ourselves. Levinas thinks of this kind of desire as satisfying needs or wants. I have pointed to the possibility of facts that are external to our fears, anxiety and anger which give us pause from our infantile feelings of necessities and give us perspective, proportionality, circumspect to address real problems and allow maturity, knowledge and growth. Levinas would have us go further than our ‘plastic moulds we make of the face of the other’ to appease our wants and needs. He would have us think of Metaphysical Desire which has always faced us in the epiphany of the face of the other, a trace which murder and war cannot ever erase, essentially different from ‘totalizing’ desire.

I conclude with some rather lengthy and further provoking remarks from Drew Dalton, a scholar from Florida Southern College:

Metaphysical Desire, according to Levinas, is a desire unlike any of our other more quotidian desires. Desire has of course been traditionally defined as: (1) arising out of some determinate lack, (2) proceeding towards some determinate presence or object, and (3) concluding in the satisfaction or restoration of the subject in the absorption of that object. Take hunger for example. Hunger emerges out of a nutritive lack within us, corresponds to some determinate object, say a ham sandwich (which once consumed and absorbed by the body restores us to our normal functional state), and rewards us with pleasure or satisfaction. Note that in such a desire it is the object, as the end of the desire (both its goal and its cessation), which sets its limit, de-fining it as it were. So, a desire which seeks food as an object and is satisfied in that object we call hunger, a desire which seeks drink we call thirst, a desire for sexual gratification we call lust, etc. The object, as the end of desire (both conceived as telos and peras) is what has traditionally been seen as what establishes its parameters as a definite and singular phenomenon. Its object, conceived phenomenologically, appears to be what allows a desire to emerge as it does in a particular form.

Interpreted along these lines, it would seem that what would distinguish a particularly metaphysical desire would be the peculiar nature of its object, that it would lie outside of or beyond (meta) the realm of finite being (physis). And, indeed, many have interpreted Levinas account of metaphysical desire in this way, as what has traditionally been termed a kind of religious desire, a desire which finds its object in the divine. After all, Levinas says himself that metaphysical desire is distinct in as much as it “tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other.”…

Levinas goes to great lengths to distinguish between what he calls desire and what he terms need or hunger which seems to function much more in line with the traditional account of the dialectical progress of desire….

Metaphysical desire, understood as the movement towards this absolute Other who appears with a face, though definitely a religious or spiritual phenomenon, nevertheless remains inexorably bound to the human. Thus, though perhaps a religious phenomenon, metaphysical desire is an experience which is, for Levinas, fundamentally articulated in the realm of the social. It is a phenomenon which speaks in the language of ethics. Or, as Levinas puts it, using a visual metaphor rather than an auditory one, “Ethics is the spiritual optics,” – ethics is the lens or window through which we might perceive the transcendent (God).

Put another way, the finite face of the Other shines with the infinite light of the divine. It is in the face of the concrete other (the human) that we see the absolutely Other (the divine). The movement of metaphysical desire is thus for Levinas simultaneously vertical and horizontal – or to put it strangely, it moves upwards by moving laterally, by reaching out towards the neighbor….

One possible result of such an eclipse of the nature of longing is that we may try to subsume metaphysical desire into the realm of the finite and read it as any other determinate need or hunger as has traditionally been done. That is, we may try to satisfy this phenomenon which is, as we’ve stated, situated beyond satisfaction and non-satisfaction, beyond placation by any determinate object, with an infinite number of finite objects. The problem being, of course, that no amount of finitude can fill out the infinite. The result of a confusion of this sort is, sadly, all too obvious and apparent: a kind of reckless, endless consumerism – in a word, greed. Indeed, this attempt to reduce the infinite to the finite, to, in a word, totalize it, is the source, argues Levinas, of all determinate evil in the world. And don’t we witness precisely a link here, an immediate connection between our seemingly limitlessness consumer desires and evil in the world. What Levinas asks of us is to probe the true nature of our desires and ask whether what we want when we want some-thing is actually no-thing at all, whether what we seek therein is not actually some peace with the suffering Other who calls out to us in our desires? He asks us to see whether when we think we desire some-thing, we’re not really longing for some-one, an ethical relation with the neighbor, orphan, widow or stranger in whom we can perceive the divine and through whom we’re invited, according to Levinas, into the realm of the Good. This is an essential question to ask, especially in the capitalist West, where all sorts of charlatans, salesmen, politicians and priests are quick to convince you that the restlessness you feel is indicative of some lack within us; and, what’s more, that they can satisfy this lack so long as you give them your dollar, vote or faith.⁸

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¹ The not-me is highly suggestive of Hegel’s use of negation. I have written about this more extensively in previous posts but in a sense, the negation can give us a hint of something more than the negative of a term. Likewise, as I have maintained here facts have the possibility for something other than merely mirroring ourselves to ourselves in some kind of ‘relativizing’ haze. In dialectics, the negative of a thesis is the anti-thesis. Any thesis whatsoever will always find in itself its negation and thus open up the possibility of a transformation, a lifting up Hegel termed, Aufhebung. In this way the negative and the thesis return to themselves in their synthesis. For Levinas, exteriority in the face of the other can never return to itself. The other must always exceed and defy a term as terms apply to thought, concept and reason. The radical alterity of the other can never be brought in existence as Being or a being. The other cannot be captured but always transcends me, history and language even though the self, history and language have always been fatally and fatefully about thinking, knowing, understanding the other. Metaphysical Desire is not a need; it can never be fulfilled as other types of needs. Metaphysical Desire cannot be resolved in a term or its negation. Thus, the use of the trope not-me has a legitimate departure point in its inability to be able, its passivity beyond all passivity as Levinas informs us.

² Anti-Abortion, Anti-Immigrants, Republicans and Jesus

³ The notion of the real in Lacan is more nuanced than the allusion above lends itself to. Lacan famously characterized the real as “impossible” vis-à-vis reality. Early on Lacan wrote of the real more like Kant’s thing-in-itself. At this time Lacan portrayed the real as absolute fullness, a pure plenum devoid of the negativities of absences, antagonisms, gaps, lacks, splits, etc. The real in its dumb, idiotic presence is never more and never less than sheer, indifferent plenitude. Later Lacan would think of this in more Hegelian terms involving convergences of opposites as a register of volatile oscillations and unstable reversals between excesses and lacks, surpluses and deficits, flooding presences and draining absences. This is more like Hegel’s notion of pure being. It also has reflection in the Greek notion of apeiron often simply translated as infinite, unlimited or indefinite or perhaps better, the fertile void also reminiscent of sunyata in Buddhism. Many comparisons have been made with Lacan, the psychologist and Levinas the philosopher in the notion of the other. Superficially, they both have the appearance of some kind of radical exteriority which can never be brought into the light of reason, language or symbol for Lacan. For Lacan, language as symbol and fantasy are forever trying futilely to restore that connection to the real. For Levinas, the face of the other can never be brought into my understanding of the other. Understanding as such is only a violence in the form of the history of being (ontology) which can only murder the other in its reduction. However, for Levinas Ethics does give us some sort of proximity to the other. This is the major difference between Lacan and Levinas. The face of the other while infinitely exterior to me can be faced. The other is not a real which lends itself to dialectic as in Hegel. The other is a he or a she and need not echo the fallen history of metaphysics which only ‘ontologizes’ the other as capable of dialectic. For Levinas language and history are tokens of the failure to bridge the gap of the other. Thus Metaphysics while failing historically to come to grips with the face of the other has its legitimacy in its failure. Metaphysics Desires the other but as Sisyphus is eternally condemned to miss the other as the other can never be an object to a subject or an antithesis to a thesis. Hegel’s Aufhebung is impossible for the face of the other. See Jacques Lacan, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and also The Real

⁴ The Symbiotic Play of War Hawks and Terrorism

…30,000 domestic gun deaths per year / average of 24 terrorist per year in the U.S. since 2005 = 1,250 or 1,250 * 24 = 30,000
⁵ Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study, American Journal of Epidemiology, Oxford University Press

⁶ The Economic Cost of Violence Containment

⁷ Why Muslims are the world’s fastest-growing religious group

⁸ THE VACCINATION OF THE INFINITE: LEVINAS’ METAPHYSICAL DESIRE AND THE CALL OF THE OTHER

Please folks, DO NOT give them the war they want. Rather, let’s address the issue with reason to squelch the problem rather than create many more new problems.