Peter Gabel Responds

While I appreciate these serious, thoughtful responses to my book from Roger Gottlieb and Kim Chernin, I do not quite see myself reflected in their respective descriptions of the role of spirit (Gottlieb), or the role of hope (Chernin). My claim is that these are not abstract ideas that I attribute to human reality, but that they are concretely revealed by that human reality if we will but embrace “another way of seeing” that makes the presence of both spirit and hope visible in that human reality.

The central idea of my book is that human beings are not actually “individuals” in the liberal sense of our existing in separate spheres as disconnected monads, but are rather inherently united by a social bond, a “fraternity” as the present pope calls it, that seeks to make itself manifest in the world through the experience of “mutual recognition.” Because of the legacy of the Fear of the Other that has shaped our cultural conditioning throughout history thus far—a fear reflected in our own individual lives through the social formation of our individual egos—our cultural memory inclines us to see the other as a threat. But coexisting with this fearful impulse in every human interaction and at every moment transcending the fearful impulse, is an unconditioned, wholly original, spontaneous movement toward a new and sudden recognition of one another in which we would become fully present to each other, and in which we would more fully realize ourselves as the source of each other’s completion.

Please visit tikkun.org/bergman to see a full-color version of this cover photo by Robert Bergman.

If you look at the portrait on my book’s cover as it appears on this page of Tikkun, taken by the great photographic artist Robert Bergman (whose work has shown at the National Gallery and about whom I have an essay in the book), you can see this double dimension of the human encounter made present. On the one hand, you may at first simply see a woman, who may appear to you sad or wary, perhaps also resilient, but in any case in some way shadowed by her life history. On the other hand, if you allow yourself to look at her portrait for at least fifteen seconds, you may suddenly encounter the person that she is, because her interior—her indwelling presence—suddenly makes contact with yours in a way that involuntarily pulls you out of being a detached “viewer of a woman on the cover” and into relation with her. That movement toward contact between two beings transcends all conditioning; the desire to see and be seen and to become fully present to each other in such a mutual recognition pulses through us in every moment; and the ineluctable power and beauty of that longing in every human encounter is itself the manifestation of a spiritual bond that unites all of us and assures, in every moment, that transformation of the received reality, with its legacy of pain and suffering and enforced reciprocal solitude, is possible. To link my ideas with Michael Lerner’s, if God is the force of healing and transformation in the universe, then the transcendent movement toward mutual recognition is the manifestation of that divine force within our social being, in human social life.

My book demonstrates as best it can that, in its political dimension, this spiritual impulse is most fully realized in social movements—that it is actually what makes movements “move,” as we all surpass (not entirely, not yet) the constraints of our fear-saturated conditioning and begin to become present to each other so that we can at last (suddenly but not yet securely) each recognize the other as a Thou, to use the beautiful word Martin Buber gave to this experience of recognition.

And in this book, taken together with my prior book The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning, I present many examples of ways that the desire for mutual recognition in struggle with our fearful denial of that desire can help us to understand the...