My Attachment Disorder with Truth

First, Levinas knew suffering. And, his philosophy contends with this “knowing” by never letting it disappear behind protections and assurances. His work is a challenge to Western philosophical traditions and disciplines that abstract experience and define realities that reduce our exposure to one another. He is known as one of the great philosophers of the “Other”—ever concerned that we remain exposed, vigilant, and proximal to the experience of one another; never losing to category, theory, or egoism the face of the Other, in all of its nakedness and all its address. Levinas lost the majority of his family in the Holocaust at the hands of Nazi collaborators in Lithuania, his home country. He witnessed “advanced” Western philosophical and technological systems reduce bodies into bars of soap. This remained a “tumor” in his memory and work (as he described it)—much as Eastern European anti-Semitism may have been a forgotten “tumor” in my Bubbie’s history. In one of his most powerful essays titled Useless Suffering, Levinas denounces as violent all explanatory systems that make sense and usefulness out of suffering. He was highly critical of theodicies, ever around us, that explain and justify how there can be immense suffering in a world where there is a loving and sovereign God. Levinas makes clear how these theodicies promote a type of relationship with the Other that is mediated by categories and propositions; and how in this we achieve a type of distance and non-proximal relationships that are forgetful of ethical address. As I worked with Levinas’s thought, I started seeing theodicies everywhere. And, these were not just theological and religious in nature. They also took the shape of cognitive, scientific, neoliberal, and socioeconomic explanations of what causes suffering. I found in my clinical placements and training as much temptation to utilize easy, quick, and shorthand versions of truth as I had in the church community in which I grew up. Neurotransmitters. Sin. Irrational beliefs. Lack of faith. Maladaptive learning. Willful disobedience. Self-regulation issues. Language and words often are pulled into guild-bound axioms and don’t always facilitate an openness and exposure to the particulars and wonder in front of us. Ultimately, theodicies (or whatever name we want to give them in their secular forms) are reductions of the Other. Levinas argued, throughout his entire corpus, for the irreducibility of the Other. And, this is not because the Other is bigger and greater than we can conceptualize and that we are supposed to be true to that reality. No. It is because reduction

is a type of foreclosure that is violent and that cuts off the voice of the unrepresented. He did not view language as inherently reductive. Certainly not. Actually, he put enormous weight on language, reminding us that language isn’t merely a signifier for “reality.” It is the medium of expression that exceeds itself-the attempt of the Other to bring the nakedness of need and the exposedness of request. And, the responsibility to listen to language in this manner provides the possibility of language performing on the ethical plane to which it belongs. Second, part of my attachment disorder with truth was that “truth” was first and foremost an assent to particular propositional claims and affirmations. If I believed that Jesus was the Messiah, then salvation was available to me. Or, if I believed that the Bible was an inerrant document that conveyed God’s truth to us, then by knowing it and abiding by its pages, I would know God’s will and hope for my life. The goal was always to have a direct line to true knowledge and there was always a pressure and anxiety about whether this was being achieved. However, Levinas, coming from the long line of Talmudic scholars and as a student of Midrash, would have a different take on all of this. “Knowing” is never merely a correspondence to truth as it “really” is. Knowing is an invitation. It is two persons, or a community, addressing livedness together and inviting God to pass between them. Midrash involves two people studying the same text and bringing their studied interpretations to bear on it with one another. Neither has the corner on truth. Both struggle with one another’s interpretation and, in so doing, invite the Divine. It’s messy, but we invite something that transcends and calls us to a revelation beyond ourselves. Levinas contended that conversation is a marvel and a miracle. And, in his thought, each person’s eyes are understood to be revelation of truth that would otherwise not be invited into this world. In this simple yet impossibly radical shift, I found myself struggling to relate to truth as the hard and wild work of invitation, listening, and exposed learning rather than the seeking of assured definition and clarity. Donna Orange reminds us that this fallibility gives rise to a freedom for more profound attention and generosity. Yet, I wonder whether the institutions that we have that address suffering and identity are moving closer or farther from this recognition of fallibility and this exposed and dialogical invitation? With the rise of neuroscience, our reliance on numeric and aggregate claims in research, the metric of therapeutic success being

defined by accountants and expediencies, the attraction to STEM disciplines along with a distancing from the humanities, and the disregard for philosophical and theological foundations within our theoretical and clinical approaches, I fear that psychology remains bewitched by a version of scientism and need for legitimization that calls it in the opposite direction. The allure of assured truth and foundational knowledge is not foreign to me and I see it hard at work in the clinical community. Entrenched, militant, and highly defended belief systems also quickly tickle my “spidey sense,” be they religious, secular, scientific, or political. My attachment disorder with truth is not merely my own-our institutions reflect some of these attributes as well. Perhaps I am a bit sensitized to its presence. How do we hear one another and create a context that invites truth? One of Levinas’s core goals was to upset the Greek heritage in Western thought wherein “love of wisdom” was made central. Instead, he proposed that the “wisdom of love” is an entirely different starting point, one that is crucial to being able to remain vigilant and awake to the Other. That is, the ways that we treat the “widows, orphans, and strangers” in our society is the very center of our identity from which all else emerges. Ethics-that is, visceral and responsive moral attention to the suffering of the Other-is the beginning of truth’s formation. Perhaps we don’t start with assured truth and then attempt to live it out, as I had grown up believing. Maybe in struggling to live justly by orienting my life to the subtle cries of the Other’s need, toward the outside of myself, and against the stream of a society that calls for fulfillment and individual gains, the possibility exists that a community of people inviting truth together can take form. But, without this justice, truth is merely a type of complacency and flows with the tides of the sociopolitical currents. For Levinas, love is the prerequisite of truth. And, to be clear, Levinas disliked the term love in his early work because of its frequent bastardization and co-opting. He ultimately understood love to be inexhaustible work of ethical attunement and moral attention. Levinas’s voice was my entry point into a conversation that remains very alive to me and lives as the heartbeat of my current work to create such conversations for others. It is important to add here that all of this exploration wasn’t merely a sidebar in life. There was and is a fire ablaze under me and my sense of purpose and vocation in the world is attached to this working through. Though I did not have a clear sense of what

form or shape it might take, I knew that the presence of cheap and thin explanations for suffering and identity that can abound in our society, in our communities, and in our disciplines was to be the focus of my work and my energies professionally. All of my Levinas studies were being done concurrent to my neuropsychological placements, in-patient rotations, Cognitive-Behavioral workshops, Object Relations Seminars, and long hours in community mental health centers. I was living in several worlds at once-psychology, philosophy, and theology. And, I hungered to see these disciplines intersect and interface as a means of enriching our responsiveness to suffering. I wanted to see these institutions upset each other’s easy truths and deepen their fidelity to experience and moral awareness. Despite my disillusionment, or perhaps because of it, I carried a deep concern about the condition of our society, the languages that we employ in our professions, the misshapen identities out of which we live, and our anesthetized responsiveness to one another. In losing my “home”—my God, my family, my way of knowing and orienting to the world-I have lived restlessly in several homes. Whether this references the bouncing around to various dinner tables when I was 16 years old, my Messianic Jewish heritage wherein I was neither Jewish nor Christian and simultaneously both, or my wanderings in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and theology, I have lived as a bit of a misfit and in a type of dispossession that makes it difficult to rest easy in any particular frame. Perhaps this has linked me to the suffering and to the dispossessed-to those homeless children who have seen what no child should witness. Levinas did not provide me a new home where I could once again feel the assurance of a type of truth or access to a truer orientation to life. His philosophy was one that spoke to my “homelessness of consciousness” (Levinas, 1989, p. 238) and connected me to a type of truth that is emergent from relationship, from our vulnerabilities, from shared meaning, from complex conversation with conflict, and from the frightening and beautiful ineffability of myself and Others. This path feels like my inheritance. If my ancestral ghosts are speaking through me, I don’t really know what they are saying, and it grieves me that I may never know. My Bubbie is gone, my mother is dead. I cannot ask them questions and I cannot locate myself in their transgenerational history. Their absent stories are another layer of loss, another kind of homelessness for me. I can only create from the place that I find myself now. It is my hope that my deluxe attachment disorder

provides an invitation for enduring conversations and a form of hospitality in our struggle for truth in love. One hope that drives my passion is that the tides of scientific commodification, ungenerous medicalization, and the sleepfulness of our consciousness can be re-channeled into more abundant possibilities. I end with three statements that represent something of the heart of this piece. The first is a Jewish proverb that is one of Levinas’s favorite sayings: “The Other’s material needs are my spiritual needs” (as quoted in Levinas and Kearney, 1986, p. 24). The second, a well-known excerpt from St. Paul:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.