I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post, and now in this one, I am reflecting on the critical philosophical role of the mother, and the implications of that for integration.
Last time we saw that it is the enraptured smile of the mother which composes any human being in the first place. This has more than psychological and emotional import. It is foundational philosophically. It constitutes us as persons, the irreducible centers of personhood that we ourselves are. Mother addresses us, welcomes us, and in so doing gives us all that we need to respond in kind. She is the Thou in whose gaze I locate myself as the I. I am a self, irreducible to the little body that I all the while permeate.
Mothers contribute a second philosophical something, strategically complementary to the first. I want to consider that in this post. Not only are we integrated as personed selves, but we also grasp “the abiding otherness of the other.” This mysterious phrase has everything to do with our felt integration being safe and real and spacious and good—and not absorbing, depersonalizing, abusive, objectifying. I have suggested, from the outset of my Theopolis reflections, that in our longing for integration we can feel ambivalent, since we fear such absorption. The abiding otherness of the other that attends true integration releases us from this fear. Integration is not absorption. And we cannot expect to be integrated if we are being so absorbed.
To return to passages in Schindler I quoted before: “When the mother smiles at her child, she is in fact presenting him with a Gestalt in which she makes her person accessible to him as a loving gift. The gesture is not simply an opaque picture, which can adequately be read as it were ‘off the surface.’ Instead, the whole has a meaning because of ‘something’ that is both not any particular part of what she shows him and at the same time transparently present everywhere within it, namely, herself, i.e., her freedom. This freedom is what makes the smile radiant, or in other words genuinely beautiful.”[1](48-49). For Balthasar, the Gestalt is “concrete, brimming, a visible manifestation of nonappearing depths, an intelligible, irreducible unity.” (47)
Schindler underscores the importance of preserving the abiding otherness of the other. Important to what? We must remember that his agenda in The Catholicity of Reason is to offer an account of reason—that is, of knowing—which challenges the fragmenting self-destruction of modernist epistemology, one which also accords fundamentally with knowing God. He draws on Balthasar’s work to do so: “Balthasar’s deeper aim [—deeper than other contemporary philosophies—] is to preserve an abiding otherness in the completed act of knowledge even within the soul’s union with its object.” (45) Whatever is going on with the mother’s “other” is absolutely critical to a proper and effective account of human reason and engaging the world. If we are to know and live well, in a way that blesses the world, we must understand this.
What is this “other,” and what is so significant about it?
Mother is my other—not myself, not to be absorbed by me nor I by her. In that originary smile, she has constituted me as an irreducibly integrated self. She has done so in her welcoming smile, her generous self-giving. (She is not objectifying me, even in her gentle care for the undignified needs of my baby body.) I respond in kind, in surprised and delighted recognition. She addresses the irreducible me, and I respond to the irreducible her. My self gives way—not to objects, but to an other, another self. Together we instantiate union that preserves otherness.
She gives herself; but she does not (should not) give herself away. For Balthasar and Schindler, her form is utterly permeated by her freedom—meaning, her otherness. In that philosophically momentous smile, I, myself, respond to, and therein, acknowledge, the irreducible, abiding otherness of the other.
The other is not me. The other is not an alien utterly unknowable by me. The other is a self like myself. We are different but alike. And we are persons in a relation constituted by mutual surprise, delight, recognition and consent. Each requires the other person and is person in the relation. So we can say that integration involves essentially the integrated other who is in some way my own, but not owned by me. A less healthy relation of, for example, emotional fusion or codependence, should not be mistaken for integration. Integration affords the generous space of freedom for both knower and known, self and other.
How does this profound philosophical moment, humble and particular as it may be, bear subversively and healingly on the modern world? Schindler works in this passage makes the case that the abidingness of the other, as beheld by all human beings in their mother’s smile, is critically pivotal to an epistemology that both makes sense of being “surprised by truth” and that alone can be a true realism—committed to real things in a real world, pursuing us and giving themselves to us generously. No “other,” like us but different—and we would never be “surprised by truth.” No “other”—and there is no world beyond us. No “other”—and there is no way to account for theology, for humans’ understanding of the transcendent God.
Additionally, no “other”—and there is no regard for our world—for the personal face of Being, as Schindler says. (47) The modern era (1600s to the present) has reduced reality to objects. Objects possess no intrinsic meaning, but only the meaning humans attribute to them. As such they are eminently manipulable for pragmatic ends and human mastery. Knowledge, as modernity understands it, is domination and commodification, appropriate because of objectification. Knowledge is domination, power. All we know, and need to know, is how to put the objects in view to work. What we in modernity typically take to be knowledge is far from the intimate encounter of intelligible communion of “others.”
In modernity, objects are only objects for us. They no longer retain the ontological gravitas of abiding otherness—others like myself, with intrinsic, meaning-full, irreducible unity due my regard. Objects essentially reduceable to their components have about them nothing which approximates “the other.” Humans themselves, in modernity, it is easy to see, have also fallen prey to this assessment. Humans like everything else reduce to their tiniest most meaningless parts. Of course, the position is self-destructive: if you objectify humans, there is eventually nobody left to objectify everything else.[2]
And yet—we long for integration. There remains enough of our interpersoned selfhood not only to sustain knowing atypical of the prevailing paradigm, but also to bear quiet witness to the fact that we were born to more than this. This longing is deeply ontological; it is who we are. It is who we are because you and I, even now surviving in our thoughtful rationality (pondering deep matters on this Theopolis website!), were from the very beginning moments of our lives constituted within our mother’s radiantly beautiful, smile of generous self-gift and abiding otherness.
Recovering the philosophical gravitas of motherhood pierces the dome of the modernist, denatured, workday world. The regard due to all humans and things, has fallen, and may yet again stand, with this insight. Our epistemic involvement may be restored. And we may integrate and be integrated, in the mutual self-giving which preserves the abiding otherness of the other.
Esther L. Meek, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Geneva College, as well as a Fujimura Institute Fellow Scholar. Her books include Contact With Reality:Michael Polanyi’s Realism and Why It Matters; A Little Manual for Knowing; Loving to Know: Introducing Covenant Epistemology, and Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People.
[1]D. C. Schindler, The Catholicity of Reason (Eerdmans, 2013).
[2]This comment hints of my recent reflection on the similarly themed work of Robert Spaemann, translated by D.C. Schindler and Jeanne Heffernan Schindler, A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God and the Human Person (Oxford, 2015). Specifically, “In Defense of Anthropomorphism” (77-96).