Today we celebrate the 300th birthday of Immanuel Kant. Embrace face-to-face encounters to live up to his motto Dare to Know!
We dread shame, fear losing face—our sense of self. To save face, we hide it, from ourselves, and others.
If you read this next to someone, lift your eyes to look at their face. For Lévinas, this moment is what it’s all about. By meeting the mortal face of another human, not the immortal faceless God, we are invited to transcend ourselves. Your bare, fragile face strips away my egoism, and while it may tempt me to murder you, it orders me.” Facing the other, “in the total nudity of his defenseless eyes,” I find that “to recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger.
Still, our main facial hideaway from responsibility is more volitional and elusive, the façade. We don’t need the burqa to hide our thoughts and feelings. We can use the faculties of our face, the very thing that can disclose our interiority, to disguise it. As any good poker player knows, a facial façade is the best deceit. Still, sometimes, the façade does not hide the face, but its lack; there’s no interior self to begin with.
“The face resists possession, resists my powers,” writes Lévinas, and explains in complicated words that resist my own meager power of comprehension. But this I know from my own experience: looking at someone’s eyes, I try to sense and seek their frailty and freedom, and my own. When we look at each other, at one and the same time we mirror each other face-to-face nakedness as well as the capacity to choose how to respond responsively.
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