Part II
Let’s linger for a moment with this subtle though piercing fear embedded in curiosity. I am not pointing to the terror of facing the unknown Other, the unknown terrains of wilderness out there, but rather an encounter with an unsettling beast of our own in here! Discovery does not merely unveil the silvery lands across the bridge, but it unsettles something in proximity: in me! Every encounter with what lies beyond the threshold gazes back at me. In the depth of its eyes, the ‘self’ once I knew, the articulated, reliable, familiar, begins to dissolve. What emerges instead is not a better or worse version of my ‘self’; rather, it’s a stranger, an unintended one, an unscripted one, or maybe the one I’ve spent a lifetime to tame. To tame its desires, quiet its longings, and contain its deviant intuitions within the secure enclosures of morality and ethical principles. Trying to dress it in garments of justifications and deontological imperatives, rehearsing every possible response, sanding down every unruly impulse, I shepherded the ghosts of the self, down the corridors of the ‘oughts’ and ‘ought not’. And now…gazing back at me, stood this newly discovered self, questioning all the possible boundaries, mocking all the cliffs I herded the ghosts of the self away, resisting all the hypothetical categories, not out of rebellion, but because it was never born within the walls of moral imagination. The stranger gazing back at me speaks in gestures I don’t fully register, and it demands a grammar that resists the commands of moral deductions.
The normative frameworks of motivation and inhibition, once promising orientation, directionality and identity, now seem like an overgrown map drawn before the terrain was known. An outdated design of assumptions and generalizations obscures the path ahead only to possibly mislead an astray person.
Confused under the weight of the stranger’s gaze in me, Can I even dare to tame such dear wilderness?! Maybe such appearance need not be corrected, tamed and dressed in normative garments of the classics; rather, it calls for attention, apprehension and attunement. What if ethics is not first a matter of judgement, but of bearing witness? To let this stranger be without naming it, evaluating it: Maybe this itself would be an ethical act… A suspension of the need to master and tame the stranger in me, so something truly genuine can emerge.
Part III
To cope with the anxiety provoked by the ambiguity of our own becoming in relation to the unknown we tend to take refuge in our habitual, internalised moral classifications, summoning the stranger to submit to the pre-existing order of our world. The urge to evaluate and judge what appears raw and unfamiliar according to the inherited [pre-given] moral standards might feel like a shield protecting us from the profound vulnerability that uncertainty and ambiguity evoke. Though we might act rigidly, foreclosing the very being trying to show itself, it seems that we tend to answer the world before it’s finished posing the question.
As a morally grounded discoverer and an observer, I inquire about the possibility of remaining open to the being of something, someone, or myself when an impulse of ethical judgment seizes the moment. How can I practice what Merleau-Ponty would call a ‘patient openness to ambiguity’? Here, as a witness, one demands a shift in my engagement with the appearance; rather than banishing the whole project of ethical judgment, we might practice a phenomenological suspension, an epoché, a suspension of moral impulse, a willingness to bracket judgment long enough to let the phenomenon breathe. Rather than imposing an ethical evaluation on the appearing phenomenon, one takes an attitude of ethical receptivity, shifting from pronouncing verdicts to holding space for the truth to unfold. This is not amoral curiosity, but a curiosity that honours the otherness of what is shown. Such a shift in attitude often arises from inquiring into the origins of this colonising impulse of certainty. Recognising the voice that constantly probes, the part in us that attempts to protect and to avoid shameful encounters and binds us to the idea of ‘the righteous’, does not necessarily silence it. Rather, it can be an attempt to relocate this voice, making a distinction between the voice and ‘I’ as the one who listens and attends. In detaching the ‘I’ from the inner voice, we tend to negotiate a new kind of relationship between the “I” as the doer, the experiencer, and the mere tendency that we call the internalised voice of the protector, the image of ‘the righteous’. Liberating the ‘I’ from the dominance of the voice allows the ‘I’ not only to engage with its demands and tendencies but also with other impulses and intentions; those which, as Steinbock and Levins would suggest, alluring the ‘I’ into deeper forms of participation.