The circular reasoning prompted by virtual identification of morality with social discipline makes the daily practice of sociology well-nigh immune to the 'paradigm crisis'. There are few occasions, if any, when the application of the extant paradigm may cause embarassment. Programmatic relativism built into this vision of morality provides the ultimate safety valve in case the observed norms do arouse intinctive moral revulsion. It therefore takes events of exceptional dramatic power to shatter the grip of the dominant paradigm and to start a feverish search for alternative groundings of ethical principles. Even so, the necessity of such a search is viewed with suspicion, and efforts are made to narrate the dramatic experience in a form that would allow its accommodation within the old scheme; this is normally achieved either by presenting the events as truly unique, and hence not quite relevant to the general theory of morality (as distinct from the history of morality -much like the fall of giant meteorites would not necessitate the reconstruction of evolutionary theory), or by dissolving it in a wider and familiar category of unsavoury, yet regular and normal by-products or limitations of the morality-producing system. If neither of the two expedients measures up to the magnitude of the events, a third escape
as a set of rules rather than norms (much less as inner propulsion); rules that are naturally resented, as they reveal other humans as a hostile externality of human condition, as a constraint upon freedom.
There is, however, a third description of the existential condition of being with others' - one that may provide a starting point for a truly different and original sociological approach to morality, able to disclose and articulate such aspects of modern society as the orthodox approaches leave invisible. Emmanuel Levinas,7 responsible for this description, encapsulates its guiding idea in a quotation from Dostoyevsky: 'We are all responsible for all and for all men before all, and I more than all the others.'
To Levinas, being with others', that most primary and irremovable attribute of human existence, means first and foremost responsibility. 'Since the other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard.' My responsibility is the one and only form in which the other exists for me; it is the mode of his presence, of his proximity:
the Other is not simply close to me in space, or close like a parent, but he approaches me essentially insofar as I feel myself - insofar as I am - responsible for him. It is a structure that in nowise resembles the intentional relation which in knowledge attaches us to the object - to no matter what object, be it a human object. Proximity does not revert to this intentionality; in particular it does not revert to the fact that the Other is known to me.
Most emphatically, my responsibility is unconditional. It does not depend on prior knowledge of the qualities of its object; it precedes such knowledge. It does not depend on an interested intention stretched towards the object; it precedes such intention. Neither knowledge nor intention make for the proximity of the other, for the specifically human mode of togetherness; 'The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility'; and this moreover,
whether accepted or refused, whether knowing or not knowing how to assume it, whether able or unable to do something concrete for the Other. To say: me void. To do something for the Other. To give. To be human spirit, that's it ... I analyze the inter-human relationship as if, in proximity with the Other - beyond the image I myself make of the other man - his face, the expressive of the
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Other (and the whole human body is in this sense more or less face) were what ordains me to serve him ... The face orders and ordains me. Its signification is an order signified. To be precise, if the face signifies an order in my regard, this is not in the manner in which an ordinary sign signifies its signified; this order is the very signifyingness of the face.
Indeed, according to Levinas, responsibility is the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. Responsibility which means responsibility for the Other', and hence a responsibility 'for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me'. This existential responsibility, the only meaning of subjectivity, of being a subject, has nothing to do with contractual obligation. It has nothing in common either with my calculation of reciprocal benefit. It does not need a sound or idle expectation of reciprocity, of 'mutuality of intentions', of the other rewarding my responsibility with his own. I am not assuming my responsibility on behest of a superior force, be it a moral code sanctioned with the threat of hell or a legal code sanctioned with the threat of prison. Because of what my responsibility is not, I do not bear it as a burden. I become responsible while I constitute myself into a subject. Becoming responsible is the constitution of me as a subject. Hence it is my affair, and mine only. 'Intersubjective relation is a non-symmetrical relation ... I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair.'
Responsibility being the existential mode of the human subject, morality is the primary structure of intersubjective relation in its most pristine form, unaffected by any non-moral factors (like interest, calculation of benefit, rational search for optimal solutions, or surrender to coercion). The substance of morality being a duty towards the other (as distinct from an obligation), and a duty which precedes all interestedness - the roots of morality reach well beneath societal arrangements, like structures of domination or culture. Societal processes start when the structure of morality (tantamount to intersubjectivity) is already there. Morality is not a product of society. Morality is something society manipulates - exploits, re-directs, jams.
Obversely, immoral behaviour, a conduct which forsakes or abdicates responsibility for the other, is not an effect of societal malfunctioning. It is therefore the incidence of immoral, rather than moral, behaviour which calls for the investigation of the social administration of intersubjectivity.
Social proximity and moral responsibility
Responsibility, this building block of all moral behaviour, arises out of the proximity of the other. Proximity means responsibility, and responsibility is proximity. Discussion of the relative priority of one or the other is admittedly gratuitous, as none is conceivable alone. Defusion of responsibility, and thus the neutralization of the moral urge which follows it, must necessarily involve (is, in fact, synonymous with) replacing proximity with a physical or spiritual separation. The alternative to proximity is social distance. The moral attribute of proximity is responsibility; the moral attribute of social distance is lack of moral relationship, or heterophobia. Responsibility is silenced once proximity is eroded; it may eventually be replaced with resentment once the fellow human subject is transformed into an Other. The process of transformation is one of social separation. It was such a separation which made it possible for thousands to kill, and for millions to watch the murder without protesting. It was the technological and bureaucratic achievement of modern rational society which made such a separation possible.
Hans Mommsen, one of the most distinguished German historians of the Nazi era, has recently summarized the historical significance of the Holocaust and the problems it creates for the self-awareness of modern society:
While
Western Civilization has developed the means for unimaginable
mass-destruction, the training provided by modern technology
and techniques of rationalization has produced a purely technocratic
and bureaucratic mentality, exemplified by the group of
perpetrators of the Holocaust, whether they committed murder directly
themselves or prepared deportation and liquidation
at the desks
of the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicher-heithauptamt),
at the offices of the diplomatic service, or as plenipotentiaries
of the Third Reich within the occupied or satellite
countries. To this extent the history of the Holocaust seems
to be the mene
tekel of
the modern state.8
Whatever else the Nazi state has achieved, it certainly succeeded in overcoming the most formidable of obstacles to systematic, purposeful non-emotional, cold-blooded murder of people - old and young, mer and women: that animal pity by which all normal men are affected ir the presence of physical suffering'." We do not know much about tht
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unthinking physical forces; he achieves this by opposing againsi them the great and intelligent force of society, under whose protection he shelters. By putting himself under the w ing of society, he makes himself also, to a certain extent, dependent upon it But this is a liberating
dependence;
there is no contradiction in this. These and similar memorable
phrases of Durkheim reverberate to this day in sociological
practice. All morality
comes from society;there
is not moral litfe outside
society-;
society is best understood as a morality-producing
plant; society promotes
morally regulated
behaviour and marginalizes, suppresses or prevents immorality. The
alternative to the moral grip of society is not human
autonomy, but the rule of animal passions It is because the pre
social drives of the human animal are selfish, cruel and threatening
that
they have to be tamed and subdued if social life
is to he sustained lake
away social coercion, and humans will relapse into the barbarity from
which they had been but precariously lifted by the force of society
This
deep-seated trust in social arrangements as ennobling, elevating,
humanizing
factors goes against the grain of Durkheim sown insistence that
actions are evil because they are socially prohibited, rather than
socially
prohibited because they are evil. The cool and sceptical sceptical in
Durkheim debunks all pretentious that there is substance in evil
other than
its
rejection
by a force powerful enough to make its
will
into a binding
rule. But the warm patriot and devout believer in the superiority and
progress of civilized life cannot but feel that what has been
rejected is
indeed evil, and that the rejection must have been an emancipating
and
dignifying act.
This
feeling chimes in with the self-consciousness of the form of life
which,
having attained and secured its material superiority, could not but
convince
itself of the superiority of the rules by whkh it lived. It was,
after
all. not society as such', an
abstract
theoretical category, but modern
Western society that served .is the pattern tor the moralizing
mission.
Only from the crusading-proselytizing practice of the specifically
modern and
Western
gardening society could
the self-confidence
be derived, which allowed the rule-enforcement
to be viewed as
the process ot humanization. rather than of suppression ot one form
of
humanity by another. The same self-confidence allowed the socially
unregulated
(whether disregarded, unattended to. or not full) sub ordinated)
manifestation s of humanity to be cast aside as instances of
inhumanity
or, at best, as suspect and
potentially
dangerous. The theoretical
vision, in the end, legitimized the sovereignty of society over its
members as well as its contenders.