On Relationships with Others

The key term here is not 'relationships' but 'others'.

I am that I am

> And God said unto Moses, I am that I am

> - Exodus 3:14

- Who are you?

- I am that I am, let me be, go on with your business.

This is the correct way to interpret this I think. It's God saying that what she 'is' is already established through simple existence. We should apply this well to both our attempts to 'know' God (i.e., don't attempt it), and to our attempts to 'know' others. The other is knowable only in part to us, any attempt to fully 'define' them is a kind of violence. This may sound frustrating at first. After all, if it's our wife, our child, our father, we may really feel the need to 'know' them fully, we may expect them to always act in a familiar way. Really, though, the impossibility of fully knowing the other, what they're thinking, feeling, doing, is a form of freedom.

God is saying you can never know me beyond knowing my existence. This means that we can never fully know what God really 'wants' of us. Similarly, we can never fully know what the other person expects or wants of us. In this way, God gives us the freedom and responsibility of interpretation. Our relationship to God/others shouldn't be one of 'calculation' but of spontaneity.

Hospitality

In a similar vein to the above point, Jacques Derrida has written on hospitality in relation to the unknowable other. Hospitality only really becomes hospitality in the absence of 'calculation' about the other person's desires, motivation, etc. He famously says that the guest who arrives at your door may be coming to shower you with gifts and gratitude, or may be coming to murder you. Hospitality can only exist against this background. This is why it is one of the most difficult practices, and one which should be celebrated when done well.

In a Different Voice

I don't really know why, but the book "In a Different Voice" by Carol Gilligan has always stayed with me. It's a book on moral psychology, and is notable, scientifically, for how it countered a prevalent theory of moral psychology at the time. This theory was by Lawrence Kohlberg and claimed there were six 'stages' of moral development:

1. Obedience and punishment orientation - How can I avoid punishment?

2. Self-interest orientation - What's in it for me?

3. Interpersonal accord and conformity - Social norms, good boy/girl attitude

4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation - law and order morality

5. Social contract orientation

6. Universal ethical principles

Your moral psychological 'development' is reflected by which stage matches your motivations for action, with 6 being the highest.

Anyway, in Gilligan's research, she found that women consistently scored 'lower' on the moral scale.

This wasn't because women were less psychologically 'developed' than men, it was because the scale is ridiculous. (there are lots of other actual reasons too, just read the book)

It's a beautiful scale, in its own way, and I would love if moral psychology could be so elegantly mapped out, defined, taught, and so on.

But it can't. There is no map or fixed guide for navigating our relationships with others or for codifying our motivations.

The alternative 'scale' proposed by Gilligan is vague, but also that's probably the point:

1. self-oriented

2. other-oriented

3. self-other balance

These aren't the exact terms Gilligan uses, but it's how I think of it. The first 'level' of moral development is self-interest. We put our own values and opinions before others. Think of the husband who demand his wife stay home and mind the children so he can go out and become the best architect or whatever - very morally under-developed.

The next 'level' is prioritizing the other *too* much. In the same scenario above, the wife who loves and cares for her husband, and who decides to sacrifice her own needs to serve his, is more morally mature than him, but we can still see there is something wrong here.

The final level is a balancing of the self-other relationship, but I don't really know what that means.

That's why I like it as a theory of moral development. It leaves it up to you, but it does advocate working towards a 'middle' position, which I think is the foundation of morality. Sometimes people scoff at the 'middle' ground, seeing it as akin to 'sitting on the fence', but it is precisely in the middle, on the fence, where you have the best view of the whole field and can therefore make the soundest judgements.

Back