On a cold December day, I walk in Manhattan. I see a man face down on the ground. As he turns, I see his rough, gaunt features. Unshaved and obviously unwashed, he lay alone on the pavement as others pass by seemingly not noticing hem. For some reason, I felt an urge to help this man.
Unresponsive to my queries, I placed some currency in his aged hand and moved on.
I am not renowned for compassion and have passed many such individuals in the past with no response. Why then did I feel an urge to help this singular individual? Compassion, maybe! But, perhaps something deeper such as fear- the fear of sliding down to his benighted state. Or perhaps from animosity, not for him, of course, but for a world in which such inequalities are tolerated. Nietzsche noted that caring may arise from many unworthy motives.
There might be a deeper answer: namely, a contempt for the indifference of all bystanders, including myself in the past, for ignoring the benighted state of others. I thought how do we interpret and survive in this type of a world? A world where those lying on the pavement in the cold are ignored by strangers.
A stranger is conventionally defined as someone one does not know or recognize. Yet, this should not necessarily suspend the basic obligations of civility and moral concern for others. Aristotle stated that whereas the state was formed to make life possible, so it endures to make life good. This, in turn, entails a network of legal, civil and moral obligations to all citizens. Devoid of that, we have a world of crass egoism and barbaric unconcern similar to Hobbes’ hypothetical state of nature.
An individual’s identity itself is formed in continuous interaction with others. Family, friends, formal or informal groups and organizational networks. The work of Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead demonstrates this fact. Sever those associations and psychological and social dysfunctions may occur and this is what is often happening today.
The urbanization of the world during the 20th Century mandates, no matter how gregarious one is, that most individuals are unknown to you. The size, complexity and heterogeneity of the city or metropolitan area necessitates that the majority of social relationships are impersonal or grounded in self-interest. In short, they are functional, not based on loyalty or true concern. In Buber’s terms, most relationships are not ‘I-Thou’, but rather ‘I-It’ associations.
A good part of this is caused by what sociologists call insulation or symbolic segregation. Since the millions in a city live in close proximity to each other, insulation is a defense mechanism which allows us to concentrate on a finite, manageable segment of the social world which otherwise might be overwhelming. The negative consequence of this is that on a city street, or for that matter anywhere, two dozen people could be within three feet of each other and yet, if it could be measured, be a thousand miles away. I’m here and your there, but symbolically you are not part of my world. In short, I have no obligations to you. We learn this though socialization. Don’t talk to strangers, we tell children.
That’s your problem is a common phrase. To some degree, we all live in different symbolic universes outside our immediate social milieu.
If you add to this the predominance of para-social interaction or socializing through images, the levels of symbolic indifference to the fate of others becomes intensified. Neighborhood associations are less necessary and fewer in number. Television, the internet and cell phones handle most communication needs. We often relate to images on a screen, not individuals of bone and flesh. Man becomes an image, a mere flash of light on a screen.
Thus, my Manhattan walk places me in the same situation as the man on the pavement: namely, we both are strangers to all others, not merely in being unrecognized, but also in the sense that no one has any obligation to either of us morally or civilly. Both of us share the feeling of being without, an essential disconnection with the totality, although not to the same degree. This feeling of ‘outness’ is also a feeling of ‘outness of being’.
Heidegger’s philosophy is instructive here. He was trying to define the universal aspects of being in the world. One of these was mitsein or being with. We are thrown into a world of human associations. Yet, it is ohne sein or ‘outness of being’ which is equally significant in the modern world. Symbolically, we are disconnected with the totality or from a sense of identity and a feeling of inclusion. The feeling content of ‘outness of being’ truly reduces us to a society of strangers where mutual obligations are negated and moral apathy is intense.
Existentialism is supposed to have died out in the 1960’s, the age of activism. A few ripples of the movement still survive. Yet, we need a major reconstruction of some of the existentialist’s major concerns. How do we interpret and how do we survive in this type of a world? A broken world, a seemingly inferior product of a lesser god.
As I walk alone among thousands, I think of such things, no doubt irrelevant to the vast majority and as indifferent to them as the man on the pavement. Yet, as an aged man, I think back to the early days when dreams were ripe and of an alternative world. Perhaps, one based on Kant’s grand conception of a ‘Kingdom of Ends’ where every person was regarded as an end in itself and not as a means or of a universal morality based on respect for persons. Kant stands high amid the apathy of the modern age and thoughts of his grand philosophy enrich me with hope.
Edward Delia
Edward Delia Is a philosopher and social scientist. His undergraduate work was at Brooklyn College and he has graduate degrees from both Hofstra and Fordham Universities.
