Ethics of Hospitality

Daniel Innerarity

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317210368
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

The source of hospitality lies in the fundamental ethical experiences that make up the fabric of the social lives of people. Therein lies a primary form of humanity. Whether we are guests or hosts, this reveals our situation in a world made up of receiving and meeting, leaving room for the liberty to give and receive beyond the imperatives of reciprocity.

This book proposes an ethic that promotes the possibility of stirring emotion before that of protecting ourselves from unexpected encounters. Fundamental ethical competence consists of opening up to the wholly other and to others, to be accessible to the world's solicitations. There is moral superiority of vulnerable love over control and moderation, of generous passion over rational prudence and of excess over exchange.

Constructing an ethic of hospitality is essential at a time when we are torn between the imperatives of modernization and growth and the demands of concern and protection. The experience we all have today, that of the fragility of the world, is giving rise to a powerful tendency toward solicitude. From such a perspective, the duty of individuals no longer consists of protecting themselves from society, but of defending it, taking care of a social fabric outside of which no identity can be formed.

p.1

Taking care of others

Philosophers who wonder about what is good and desirable are not members of a mystical religion or conscientious administrators of the sublime, but rather they are those who show us a little more clearly the purpose we were looking for. Theory must not abandon its commitment to the way people live and act, i.e. with “customs” in their broadest sense. Kant wrote some of his moral reflections as a theory of customs, expressing what turned out to be a very good moral theory: reflection on our usual practices and our common value judgments, one that is rather associated with them so as not to end up with unusual conclusions and from a sufficient distance from life to be able to clarify and correct it.

Philosophical reflection on morals assumes moral experience. Like any knowledge, ethical knowledge takes hold in horizons opened by perception. This is why it is impossible to make spectacular moral discoveries through sudden flights of fancy. What ethics does is show how any new conception must be brought to our attention: by showing its relationship with our experience of the world and by acknowledging its ability to organize and structure our experience. Nothing can teach a lesson unless it has been previously prepared in its association with good things. Virtues such as respect, responsibility, gratitude, magnanimity, constancy and compassion cannot be anchored in argument; rather, argumentation can only strengthen them. It can be put forth that we should always be able to justify our value judgments by reason, and that this very defense already comprises a value in itself. However, this does not necessarily mean that we have already created our values using justifications and arguments, or that they would crumble if their justifications should weaken.

The teaching of ethics must be able to recall the essential moral experiences of each of us, and to direct our reflective attention to our primary experience of what has value. The best starting point for ethics is that of the obvious beauty of fundamentally ethical situations. Relativism is a mere theoretical game. I do not entirely agree with those who emphasize that our time period is characterized by complete uncertainty in terms of values. It is true that many of the certainties that have allowed us to prepare ourselves morally have disappeared. The fact that many values have shown themselves to be weak or that they are secret accomplices to unacceptable situations speaks little against their plausibility. This is part of the nature of values: that they are able to resist abusive attacks and undeserved scrutiny. Furthermore, we no longer have the full certainty of living in a time of complete uncertainty either. This point of view is extremely theoretical and contradicts the credibility we grant to many of our usual practices, whose power we confirm implicitly. The thesis defending the end of certainty or the loss of a common vocabulary underestimates our societies’ implicit consensus. We only need to think of the quantity of things we may not be ready to accept and of everything that we spontaneously revile or admire. All over the world, people admire gratitude, despise pride and cruelty, respect guests and we thank our hosts, even though the codes to accurately measure these values vary from culture to culture, and even over the course of our lives.

p.2

This is why it is possible to have a very high sense of morality without being able to justify it. Obviously, this ignorance is no excuse for anyone to write a book about ethics for they would need to justify what they support yet keep in mind that rational justifications are not the only source of moral wisdom. There exists a sort of wisdom without arguments in the practices of human life, in its customs and institutions. We are living on a tacit basis where certain common values whose justification very often cannot be found in the vocabulary we have available. Through custom, we know what is right before knowing the rule from which this all may derive. Ethics is nothing other than reflection on an already effective ethos. What Merleau-Ponty said about the body (that it knows more about the world that we do) can apply also to our customs: they know more about morality than we do (1945, 276).

I wanted to begin this reflection by highlighting the parasitic status of any moral theory, which always “sucks” from the sublime. As in so many other dimensions of human existence, the worth of value is one thing, and its explanation or theory is something else completely. This distinction is present in all domains of life and it brings reflection back to the vital sphere that feeds it: philosophy lives through common sense, morality through virtue, political theory through prudence, theology through sanctity and literary critique through poetry. Similarly, immigration laws merely translate hospitality, manuals of protocol channel amiability and tax laws give economic worth to compassion. There is even a parallel division of labor that can sometimes become slightly tragic or comical. Some may fall in love and others may manage wedding agencies, there are poets who suffer and professors who teach suffering to others, some may live without thinking and others think without living in the same way as those who say what should be done and those who do it are not necessarily the same, either. Commentary and theory will follow, in the order of time and in ontological rank, in the same way as that in which theory comes after life.

p.3

Hospitality responds to the characteristics of these fundamentally ethical experiences that make up the life of men. From the Bible to contemporary literature and through a wide variety of cultural events, hospitality is present as an exhortative pattern or as a theme for literary recreation. In hospitable exchange, which exceeds the very reciprocity of people, there appears the primary form of general humanity. A series of duties lies around this relationship, where transgression is particularly reprimanded. Hesiod and Plato, for example, considered the fact of betraying visitors to whom you offer lodging particularly unkind. Dante reserves the deepest, most glacial circle of hell for spiteful hosts. Guests too may infringe on their obligations, such as the well-known Trojans whom Menelaus scorned for having kidnapped his wife when he welcomed them hospitably into his home, as told by Homer.

The category of hospitality may help to create a moral theory by virtue of its cultural universality and the fullness of its meaning. As a category, it helps to interpret the general situation of mankind in the world. The category of hospitality reattempts to interpretively appropriate the rich otherness of life, of others and of the culture we live in, which is sometimes opaque to the point of verging on incomprehensibility and hostility, yet which is the source of learning something new, the contact with that which is different and the harmonization of the disparity our lives are made of. The fact that we are hosts to each other (as Steiner so justly put it) means that our situation in the world is structured around reception and encountering, that mere existence is a constant debt, that there is freedom in the fact of giving and receiving that goes beyond the imperatives of reciprocity. In the ethics of hospitality, the guest–host relationship may take up the space that Hegel assigned to the master–slave dialectic.

Hospitality shows itself to be mostly a primary anthropological category once we understand that the things incumbent upon us the most are those we have not chosen and that passivity precedes activity. In a story by Kafka, a man inherits a strange creature with instructions to take care of it, which is what he does. He does not know why, but he has the impression that his life would be nothing if he gave up this caretaking duty, which is as incomprehensible as it is necessary. In particular, the figure of the uninvited or lingering visitor is a metaphor for human situations where initiative lies in the hands of others. The idea of hospitality recalls the meaninglessness of claiming to establish definitive symmetry between what belongs to us and what belongs to others and between doing and enduring. We could understand the ethics of hospitality as an ethics of events; this is more of a theory of passion than action because it relies on the experience that human life is less a set of sovereign initiatives than a set of of replies to the invitations the world gives us, often without our consent. In some way, these are the ethics of responses confronted with the ethics of initiative I am putting forth, while focusing on an idea of the good life more concerned with leaving open the possibility of commotion rather than with protecting itself against unexpected barging-in. With the category of hospitality, I claim to offer a conceptual refuge to the unpredictable events against which our true moral stature is measured. This receptiveness is not an abdication of reason; it is its antechamber, if we deem it reasonable to give into whatever may come along.

p.4

The ethics of hospitality is learning the productive commerce with alterity, the ability of being within the scope of reality, so that, like a self-sufficient guest, it may contradict our own knowledge and exceed our own desires. Fundamental ethical competence consists of opening up to the wholly other and to others, being accessible to the demands of the world and attentive to what is different from ourselves. Moral experience is not properly described by the categories of subjectivity and objectivity; it can be better expressed by the constellation formed by encounters and in the categories that govern the domain of reception. In moral experience, some situations may often be discovered and described as situations where “nothing else could have been done; this was the only thing to do,” with the particularity that we do not experience this constraint as something opposing our liberty, but rather as something that is intensely voluntary. We feel obliged to hold values that do not seem to offer any choice, yet which do not contradict our freedom either, even when they demand effort from us or when we suffer their negative consequences.

In things they consider as extremely precious, subjects do not experience them as proper positions or sovereign provisions such as propositions, ideas or inaugural declarations, but rather as being independent from them, commanding their respect and able to be defended with good reasons. It is not true that we only find what we have previously hidden in things as Nietzsche proclaimed – at least, not all the time. Sometimes, perhaps in the happiest and most precious occasions, we find more than what we put into them. Human beings are not sovereign to the point of being able to control even what is supposed to surprise them. Usually, the reality is a failure of certainty, disillusion or betrayal. However, without the possibility of disappointment, things would no longer offer these surprises and the newness that make up normal human life.

There is a certain moral superiority of mania over self-sufficiency, of vulnerable love over control and moderation, of the generosity of passion faced with rational prudence and of excess confronted with mere reciprocity. Haemon suggested to his father Creon, the protagonist of Sophocles’ Antigone, that one should cultivate receptiveness (to other people or to the world of nature), which is not necessary debilitating, and which may even lead to subtler, more flexible movements. His advice shows that in order to be civilized, we must conserve the mysterious and particular nature of the outside world and cultivate the passions in ourselves that lead us to these mysteries. Only those who manage to find a balance between the protection of self on one hand, and vulnerability and openness on the other hand, can be lovers or friends because the sovereign agent is blind when faced with alterity. The trait of miserliness is generally more stable than generosity, that which is closed is surer than that which is open and that which is simple is more harmonious than that which is complex. Insofar as it involves generosity, openness and a situation that promotes a move to more complexity, the ethics of hospitality are necessarily the ethics of instability, like the vulnerable situation of a host whose anticipations are always threatened by an untimely visitor.

p.5

Levinas criticized the position of self-sufficient subjectivity, which is always “at home,” and of which hospitality can only be a reception appropriating otherness and does nothing to change subjects focused on themselves. In this case, visitors are rather hostages, and hosts are kidnappers. Yet humanity is only presented to us in a relationship that is not force, one might say. Relationships that achieve freedom are not causal relationships, but rather those where there is asymmetric intersubjectivity. These relationships, such as with fatherhood, leave room for transcendence; they are relations where subjects, while retaining their structure as subjects, may finally come out of themselves and be fertile.

This means cultivating this receptiveness in a struggle against the natural tendency towards our own redundancy and to look a bit too much like ourselves. When understood like this, ethics is a fight against aging, which makes us predictable and inertial. It also makes us grow in openness, in indetermination and in critical sense. There is no learning without habits, nor is there any learning without fighting against inertia and routine. The invulnerability that results from the atrophy of our habits and that causes them to degenerate into automatic gestures reinforces the natural tendency not to see everything that does not fit into our prior schemas. Despite its apparent self-sufficiency, this invulnerability plunges us into the particular situation of a lack of freedom, from which all those who retain nothing of their soul by protecting it from the inertia of its own degradation will suffer.

p.6

In a complex world (since everything people do becomes irremediably more complicated), being yourself is a task that requires much imagination and a balance between tautology and alienation. Identity is a task that cannot be solved by letting things happen by themselves, and that cannot be gained by an emphatic act of self-affirmation either. Identity is built between the extremes of ratification and disapproval; the way we make ourselves depends on the balance we achieve between the experiences that give us reason and those that contradict us. It is highly possible that it is impossible to live without a space where we are recognized without any questioning, just as the opposite may be just as true: it is not desirable to live in constant confirmation without criticism or exclusively surrounded by cheerleaders. Our mental balance needs confirmation from “the other”: as a retort, discordance, correction or questioning. Fear may precisely be an absence of points of reference that ratify what we know or who we are; by contrast, stupidity may be defined as an enormous tautology. The human condition is found between these two extremes, on a line running between the victorious and the spineless. The natural tendency of a being, which just like mankind, fears the feeling of foreignness more than ridicule, consists of creating its own choreography of self-confirmation. In general, we tend to align our heartstrings with reality, so that it confirms what we already know, want or expect. This is why we see so many people spending their time congratulating themselves, focusing on themselves, making themselves noticed, people who very well match the poetic image of Paul Celan:

Fragments of dreams, wedges

driven inside nowhere:

we remain equal to ourselves,

the round star

shines everywhere

giving us its approval

(2011, 86)

The ethics of hospitality is particularly appropriate in a cultural period torn by conflict between the imperatives of modernization and growth on one hand and, on the other hand, the demands of the ethics of conservation, care and protection. Faced with the general fragility of the world, we are witnessing the birth of a powerful tendency promoting solicitude and concern for the other, striving to stop the forces of destruction, negligence and excessive modernization. Fragility begins with us: subjects who feel less protected, more exposed to perplexity and confusion in their various forms. The fear of becoming disenfranchised seems to have replaced the enthusiasm of breaking away from the past prevalent in other times; once the roar of transgression at any cost has subsided, loyalty to heritage appears as a condition for personal development, just as environmental conservation makes economic progress possible and as memory serves to support the identity of individual and social groups.

The total sum of efforts invested in transforming the world and to build again and start over is lower than the effort people spend on repairs. After the movers and shakers and revolutionaries, it seems that those who take care are those who are called to govern a new historical epoch. Nowadays, Marx’s famous thesis can thereby be formulated: revolutionaries have dedicated themselves to transforming the world; now we need to preserve it.

The duty of individuals is therefore not to protect themselves against society, but to defend it, to take care of the social fabric outside of which their identity could not be fulfilled. We might define the spirit of recent years as the gradual awareness of the fragility of the civilized world. The famous quote by Paul Valéry after the First World War, “We civilizations now know ourselves mortal,” has become a commonplace, a general, everyday experience, although it has a less dramatic tone than before (1957, 988). Yet the danger is not with barbarians or with the threat of any war whatsoever; rather it lies with the weakness comprising what the sociologist Ulrich Beck calls “the society of risk” (1992). The fragility of society is represented by the fact that uncertainty is an obligatory part of individual destinies. Life’s trajectories are increasingly chaotic and fragmented, cut short by unsettling events: immigration, family breakups, professional degradation, job loss, vulnerability, solitude, and so on. Moreover, the economy is governed by the unwavering law of competition, industrial sectors disappear completely, solidarity seems to be buried underneath particularisms, social ties are weakened and poverty and exclusion become the fate of a growing number of people. This is how a general feeling of uncertainty and vulnerability has spread.

p.7

This general vulnerability modifies the panorama where subjects must act freely and assert their identity. The fragility of institutions, democratic habits, sociability and the mechanisms of integration is becoming increasingly evident, so that individuals feel far from oppressed ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Ethics of Hospitality
• Law and Politics: Continental Perspectives
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Taking Care of Others
• Part I The Domain of Receiving
• Part II Dimensions of Piety
• Index