Kindness and the Good Society: Connections of the Heart

Chapter 1 Acts and Omissions

Chapter 1 Acts and Omissions What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? —George Eliot, Middlemarch Kindness and the Body: The Epoché All of us have a “perceptual faith” in the world as we perceive it, and our beliefs about this world “rest on a fundamental basis of mute ‘opinions’ implied in our life” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 3). In a similar fashion, we assume kindness as a given in our cultural world. We believe that it exists, at least sometimes, and we also hold “mute” as well as, very occasionally, explicitly formulated opinions about it. Given the exclusive function of the epoché, none of these beliefs will be appealed to here. For the reasons given in the Introduction, we will begin with as few presuppositions as possible in describing the manifold ways in which kindness appears to us—its unique manner of existing—through bodily actions and omissions to act. Kindness emerges in our relationships with others and their reciprocal relationships with us. Kindness is, therefore, one modality of our primordial situation , I-in-the-world with-others. Just as Sartre demonstrated that no one can be obscene or ashamed all by herself, so also no one can be kind by herself, though she could be kind to herself. Moreover, this “I” is no Husserlian (or Kantian) transcendental ego—and still less a Cartesian cogito—any more than it is the other in whose existence I am enmeshed. Rather, it is what MerleauPonty described as the “lived-body” (le corps propre), “existence, that is to say, being in the world through a body” (1962, 309). (It is also true, though, let us remark in passing, that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the lived-body is greatly indebted to Husserl’s distinction in the Cartesian Meditations and other texts between Leib—“flesh,” “my body”—and Körper, the body as object.) I am in the world through a body by existing in a perceptual circuit with things and other people. It is a Hegelian concrete universal, a “thought-in-act,” 3 because it is a system of motor powers for exploring and making sense of the world as it presents itself to us.The lived-body is thus an “I can” as well as an “I think.”The mobile body and consciousness are like two sides of the same sheet of paper: they are mutually implicatory, because they comprise “two abstract aspects of one existence” (Merleau-Ponty 1970, 8). Accordingly, it is within this field of corporeal motility that we find our most evident, directly presented instances of kindness and unkindness, namely, actions and omissions to act. Of course, actions and omissions to act occur between persons in the context of social atmospheres and institutions, and these phenomena, distinguished here only for the sake of analysis, are the subjects of the following chapters. But the fact that actions and omissions are primordial presentations of kindness is why the epoché of the sick and injured body can have such revelatory power. When awareness and motility are disrupted, our relationships with others and the world around us change profoundly. We become more sharply conscious of power relations, dependencies, the reliance of our wills on all of the involuntary aspects of nature and culture that simultaneously support and threaten us, and finally of the capacity of others to help and harm us. The “gift of sorrow,” as George Eliot once said, is the “susceptibility to the bare offices of humanity that raises them into a bond of loving friendship” (1985, 269). Even when the consequences do not extend as far as Eliot conceives them, it is still true that, in suffering, there is the danger of self-centeredness and despair that can be conquered only by being liberated from myself. That freedom in turn requires “attachment to the other” (Marcel 1984, 201). Certainly not all acts of kindness involve sick or injured bodies, but those that do make us more keenly aware of how such acts occur. Hence, sickness and injury can function as an epoché. Throughout our normal perceptual and behavioral life, as phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty have shown, the rays of a motor-intentional consciousness stream out pre-reflectively to embrace objects and other people. The body disappears in these projects because, rather than being the focus of a thematic concern, it forms only the anonymous, prepersonal background of all of our acts.There is also a “depth” disappearance in that the...