The 300th Birthday of Kant: Dare to Know and Face Others

It is said that the origins of the game “Truth or Dare” go back to the early eighteenth century. In one confirmed incident, in early summer 1734, when the 7-year-old Maria Elisabeth took the first spin of the bottle, its mouth ended up facing her brother, the 10-year-old Emanuel. Upon asking him, “Truth or dare?” Emanuel muttered, collapsed, and never recovered.

Luckily, the incident was only confirmed by my own delirious mind that dared to lie. Young Emanuel was never disintegrated by his sister’s “truth or dare?” Instead, we get to celebrate the 300^th birthday of the German philosopher, who learned Hebrew, changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel, and crystallized Enlightenment’s motto, substituting the game’s “or” with “and,” its question mark with an exclamation point: Sapere aude! (“Dare to Know!”).

Do we? Let’s focus on the “dare.” What’s really there? The dictionary suggests the verb is about either “courage” or “challenge,” which the noun entwines: “a challenge, especially to prove courage.” To dare, therefore, seems to be less about having, and more about showing, courage, by defiance. I doubt that’s what Kant had in mind. His Aude was about boldly taking a risk, and his Sapere was about knowing the world of people.

And when it comes to knowing people, a key risk facing us is facing them. On this daring knowledge, we might learn from another Emmanuel – Lévinas, the French Jewish philosopher, who built much of his psychological ethics around the face-to-face encounter. While Kant sought infinite philosophical knowledge, Lévinas was after the emotional and moral knowledge that comes from experiencing infinity in its finite form: The face.

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 not to: “The first word of the face is Thou shalt not kill.” Facing the other, “in the total nudity of his defenseless eyes,” I find that “to recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give.”

This hunger is perhaps most intelligible in a baby’s big-eye clinging gaze. No other organism is as needy as the human infant. No other gaze better demonstrates, viscerally, what it means to be human; forever cast between being bonded and bounded. And while we may outgrow our egocentric infant phase (unfortunately, not all do), our hunger remains. Looking at one’s eyes—docile, demeaning, demanding, or otherwise—we face their hunger and our own.

A universal principle of accountability
For Lévinas, recognizing interdependency drives radical responsibility. While we typically read responsibility as a universal principle of accountability for chosen actions affecting others, Lévinas saw the face’s call for responsibility as infinite, irrecusable, and asymmetrical: “I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and all in the others, even for their responsibility,” and moreover, “I am responsible for the other without waiting for reciprocity.”

The burden of such responsibility seems unbearable. If that’s what face-to-face means, we can readily understand why we often look away. Psychopathology, à la Lévinas, is exactly that flight from face-to-face responsibility. Psychotherapy then should help people transcend their egoism to shoulder this radical responsibility.

Tellingly, the Hebrew “face” (פנים) also alludes to “interiority.” The Bible tells us that God kept his innermost even from his closest human ally: Moses, whose effort to emancipate his people from slavery, marks the Jewish holiday of Passover, celebrated this week. Like God, we too like keeping our innermost hidden; we dread shame, we fear losing face—our sense of self. And so, to save face, we hide it, from ourselves, and others.

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Unlike God, we can hardly hide our face to eschew our responsibility. Face is the hardest, and usually the last, to go undercover. Still, we try. Sometimes the facial cloak is literal and forced, like religious veils that reveal, by trying to conceal, how they treat women like dangerous objects of forbidden desire.

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 façade becomes a substitute for a face, a cœur lost in décor.

I see faces
Starting with a fictional tale and false confession, I might as well wrap up with a genuine exposure, of The Sixth Sense sort: I see faces! They are everywhere, even where there aren’t. Scientists call it “face pareidolia,” and nearly all of us seem to have it. The evolutionary mechanism is clear enough, we seek our own, but the variation puzzles. Some studies suggest high pareidolia results from high levels of creativity and oxytocin, being low on the autistic spectrum, but it can also be a hallucinatory indicative of dementia.

A face-to-face study is incipient. It should go historical: Do humans see more, or less, faces these days, compared to a century, a millennium, ago? It should also go socio-political: Do hikikomori (social withdrawal), pandemic hyper-masking, social distancing, or growing political polarization suggest a growing avoidance of face-to-face encounters and responsibility?

“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. Here the dare is not simply to stare, but to see, others and yourself. After all, if we dare not face others, how can we ever dare face ourselves? And conversely, without fully facing ourselves, how can we ever hope to understand others?

Truly trying both, I think, while falling far short of Lévinas’s “word of God,” is a joint responsibility we can, and should, shoulder. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” opens W. B. Yeats in his 1914 collection of poems. It’s in daring better dreams and becoming responsible for them, that we can imagine—nay, create—a world where we can not only stand side by side, but face to face, and then, if we’re braver still, hand in hand. This, indeed, will be a dare.