As biological taxonomists have only recently begun to acknowledge, humanity is stuck in a tension between its myriad social, cultural, political and religious cosmologies – its various umwelten – and the desire for rational, scientific classification. This is a tension that cannot be effaced but only recognised and addressed directly. What does it mean that the rational logics of classifications that we so readily employ in order to recognise the reality before our eyes – for example, to classify a person as either male or female, or as part of a particular racial or ethnic grouping – cannot account for the passionate attachments that exceed any categorical identifications and actually make us who we are, because these are the lives we live beyond our ability to define them? What does it mean socially and politically that we cannot make space in our discourses and arguments regarding equal recognition before the law for the irrationalities of love, connection and intimacy?
What our focus upon the politics of recognition often misses is that intimate connections between persons – what we might call a more authentic form of recognition, a true seeing of the other – often goes ‘beyond recognition’, as Kelly Oliver (2001) has noted, beyond any classifications or legal designations that society foists upon us. What does it mean, then, to achieve intimacy beyond political forms of recognition while also realising the unending significance of being legally recognised within a given normative ordering of our world? I will explore this question directly, pointing to a variety of possibilities for better recognition of this tension itself, and how such recognition has the power to reform society.
The Uniqueness of Humanity
It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone” (James 1987: 17).
The context in which William James (1987) made these observations on recognition and classification was in his historical-critical study of religious phenomena within their diverse variety. Those, he suggests, who are passionately attached to their religious identity – and hence to their scripture, tradition, community and deity, or deities – are likely to balk at the rational classification of what they hold to be utterly unique and in a class all its own (sui generis).
To be sui generis is to be more than just unique: it is a legitimation of an autonomous and so ultimately sovereign position, since to be in a category all to oneself indicates that which stands outside of the normal laws of classification. It is to be an exception to all those measures that reductively divide up a relatively complex world, so that we might establish some basis of discrimination amongst all the things that otherwise ‘look alike’ to us. This is the key to the traditional religious identity: we are granted a sense of self in so far as the deity who grants it stands outside of all categories and worldly divisions. A touch of sovereignty is given in turn to those individuals mired in a sovereign deity's existence through the categorical ordering of our world – the various cosmological umwelten that humanity routinely inhabits and defends.
All of our passionate attachments from the religious to the familial, then, act as extensions and legitimations of those initiatory sacred sovereign gestures, each one asking us to treat an umwelt as if it was unique unto itself, without a category or class needed to define it, even though such claims immediately prove themselves to be comparatively problematic when surrounded with a large variety of similar traditions, scriptures, communities and gods.
What we quickly discover in all of this, however, is that each passionate attachment that serves to legitimate a particular umwelt is utterly unique, even if, paradoxically, it is not. All of our loves are wholly unique and make demands upon us that cannot be superseded by the demands of another love, even when multiple loves are involved, such as with one's children. We need to be grounded in our passionate attachments because they are what ground and legitimate our singular worlds.
To see things this way is to demonstrate how each of us understands ourselves to be: a unique identity that cannot simply be reduced to a label so that others can easily ‘recognise’ who we are. We are sovereign over ourselves as the fundamental condition of our subjectivity and so in some sense unrecognisable in our uniqueness to others, strangers even to those close to us. As such, to ourselves and to those closest to us, there is no external, objective criteria by which we can truly be measured and so too understood, even if we fall all too easily into any number of categories which are placed upon us every day. Every true friendship indicates as much through one's ability to simply accept a friend ‘as they are’, as one might accept one's own self.
To proclaim one's own subjectivity as the condition by which one calls oneself into being, in our absolute uniqueness to ourselves, is not simply how humanity has envisioned its relationship to the realm of the gods; it is likewise how humanity has defined the human being in relation to all other existing animal species: the human is the animal capable of recognising itself as a human being, hence its unique consciousness but also its proclaimed right to be sui generis as no other species appears to be able to do (Agamben 2004). This is more or less the same reasoning that Western metaphysics utilised to describe God's being: God must be one who is wholly unique, that which fundamentally recognises itself as a being preceded by no other beings. Only God could call God's own self into being, which is to say that God never has to call God's self into being because God's sovereign position entails that only God could precede God's own existence. This circular tautology must remain complete and unchallengeable.
Humanity asserts its sovereignty over every other thing in this world solely by playing God – that is, through its ability to call itself into being and through the removal of itself from the classifications that identify every other thing that exists on this planet. Such anthropocentrism certainly is the inevitable result of simply being human, of seeing ourselves as unique because we are passionately attached to ourselves and despite the fact that we increasingly need to learn to reassess and revalue our interdependency upon other life forms. At the same time, humanity needs to ‘learn its place’ by de-emphasising its uniqueness amongst all other things, both living and inanimate, though we also need to recognise how we will never fully be able to detach ourselves from the uniqueness that we attribute to our humanity, a uniqueness that can never be fully recognised. The monotheistic label of imago dei placed upon the human being is a historical reminder of not only where ‘human rights’ descend from; it is also witness to the specialness that we ascribe to our very existence.
The Struggle for Recognition on the Margins
That which is ‘infinitely important to us’ and which ‘awakens our devotion’ – what I am referring to as a passionate attachment, and what the theologian Paul Tillich (2009) had once called an ‘ultimate concern’ – cannot simply be classified amongst a host of other objects or persons. To do so would be to ‘dispose of it’, as James had once put it, to reduce and so devalue it, and thus also to potentially damage our relationship to it.
I am reminded on this score of Paul Kahn's (2005) distinction between the rationality operative behind liberalism – a rationality that very much encompasses scientific reasoning and those acts of classification that inevitably follow – and the passionate attachments that cannot be justified by liberal reasoning, despite the fact that such attachments lie at the base of our political and communal associations. Political conservatism, he argues, is much better at demonstrating how we bear such attachments foundationally, as the cornerstones of our identity, even though we cannot rationally justify our commitments to them. Patriotism, religious belonging, familial preferences, aesthetic tastes, sports team loyalties – none of these choices can be legitimated under the scrutiny of critical reason, though each is yet essential to who we are. Such things are ‘special’ to us, despite our inability to rationally justify our love for them.
What does it mean, then, that the rational logic of classifications that we so readily employ in order to recognise the reality before our eyes – for example, to classify a person as either male or female, or as part of a particular racial or ethnic grouping – cannot account for the passionate attachments that actually make us who we are? What does it mean socially and politically that we cannot make space in our discourses and arguments regarding equal recognition before the law for the irrationalities of love, relational connections and intimacy?
To ask these questions is not to demean or dismiss the vital work being done to recognise those who have fallen outside of public displays of recognition, marginalised through a hegemonic violence that reinforces particular exclusions in order to legitimate the dominance of other, more recognisable persons and groups. Judith Butler's (2004, 2009) focus on those lives that are not publicly mourned due to their being outside of a recognised matrix of acceptable symbolic representations is one such valuable corrective. What Butler draws our attention to is our collective failure to recognise persons who are marginalised or occluded by Western patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist culture, as bell hooks (2003) used to collectively label the intertwining of these forces. Important, in this vein, are simply so many contextualised studies of how we have marginalised the almost infinitely complex realities and relations that exist before our eyes, from Simone de Beauvoir's (1996, 2011) studies on the marginalisation of women and the elderly to David Abram's (1997) call to listen to the non-human world around us, with so many additional voices on race-based, queer, indigenous and differently abled perspectives in-between.
For some time now, and despite the wealth of needed insight that such studies bring to our attention, I have been committed to the position that we, as human beings with our all-too-limited abilities, are only able to comprehend and represent so much to ourselves and to others. Hence, we will always exclude some things from our view, as our perceptions of reality must, by definition, be limited to some degree. As Paul Ricoeur (2004) had once described the inherent restrictions of memory and history, we have to forget things in order to represent a particular narrative. To have a ‘happy memory’, as he put it, means to exclude or forget certain things so that we might have a functioning memory at all. As in Jorge Luis Borges’ (1998) short story ‘Funes the Memorious’, an individual who cannot forget anything would be completely paralysed by their total recall. There is thus a ceaseless dialectic between remembering and forgetting, including and excluding, that we are unable to stop, only to endlessly negotiate.
To suggest as much is not, of course, to grant licence to those who would seek to repress or do violence to particular persons, groups, memories or histories. Ricoeur had himself suggested that a ‘happy memory’ was one that had no problem recalling the things it had forgotten should it need to do so – in other words, if someone else should bring a particular, forgotten memory to its attention, asking for it to be remembered, or ‘heard’ once again. A ‘happy memory’ makes no attempts to repress or ignore such marginalised memories, though it does inevitably have to prioritise some over others in order to construct its own (unique) narrative, as we construct our sense of self. Politically speaking, such a configuration raises interesting questions about how a given society does or does not listen to its marginalised voices, how it does or does not hear their cries to recall suppressed histories, life stories and those violent traumas which so often lay at the base of national identities.
Whose stories were repressed so that others’ stories might be heard? Whose lives were ended so that others’ might be extended? These are questions as old as time, and they are not ones definitively answered, as every repressed or marginalised narrative or people within a given society runs the risk of having previously marginalised other elements, other persons, in an even more distant past, within histories that have already been forgotten. These cycles endlessly repeat because they are the cost of having any unique identity at all, both personally and communally. They make our records of history, our museums and the archives we maintain rightly sites of unending political contestation.
To discuss the complexity and difficulty of these matters is nothing new philosophically speaking. The critical hauntology given life by the deconstructive efforts of Jacques Derrida spoke directly to these domains of enquiry. In essence, as he would repeatedly claim in a number of contexts, for every point of view that is constructed and utilised, there will always exist the possibility of its deconstruction, as every existing sovereign logic can be undone from within. There will always be canonical representations, and they will also always risk being undone by those spectral, messianic forces within them that see to their undoing (Dickinson 2013). A more just representation of reality will always be possible, even if we can never fully achieve it.
Derrida (1998), for his part, wrote on the issue of monolingualism, or the inherently narrow point of view that each language assumes and the antinomy of our existence that language presents. In a nutshell, we can only ever speak one language at a time, though at the same time we never only speak one language, as we are caught in an antinomy that involves recognising where translation fails but also how it is always necessary too. Translation, in this sense, is another paradigm from which to consider the issue of recognition: we have to translate from one idiom to another, even though some things are harder to translate than others, just as we have to recognise diverse peoples and groups, even though some are harder to recognise than others according to the given configurations and histories we have received (and which are certainly not all ‘just’ in their portrayals of reality). Some translations will take more time and be more difficult to perform, and this is a result of the complexity and messiness of the contexts that we have all inherited. Humanity must learn to treasure those untranslatable terms that we still always try to translate, and need to translate, even if there is a core to them that will always resist being translated.
As a good many professional translators have been rather quick to point out, so many words, because they are part of a complex culture, history, literature and socio-political context, are ultimately untranslatable, unrecognisable in some sense, even if we have to learn how to recognise the reality underneath them in other ways. The passion with which some regard their language, and their desire not to betray the meaning and significance of a given world, is an exercise in preserving the uniqueness of a heritage that one loves. The person unwilling to recognise the sufficiency of a given translation is always at the same time defending a sovereign gesture of some kind.
With this insight, we are brought back to this essential tension: there is an intimate core that cannot be described or recognised but which we desperately want to access and see, and there is the public face that can be described in language, classified and categorised, despite the limitations that such exercises inherently entail. The latter is always an inexact science, one that may bring about a number of reductive violences (even if they are ‘bloodless’, as Derrida [2002] once suggested they might be). The former will always entail an almost mystical devotion to the unnameable and unspeakable core of whatever it is that one loves. Each of us is always already caught within a precarious tension that we cannot escape and which defines us as caught up already in a ‘struggle for recognition’, as Axel Honneth (1995) has put it, that places us all in a never-ending battle between law (as classification and ultimately recognition before the law) and love (as passionate attachment and so as recognition beyond the labels we politically and socially adhere to).
Science versus the Umwelt
So many struggles for recognition are at the same time, as Oliver (2001) has convincingly demonstrated, the result of a variety of ‘pathologies of oppression’ that typify hierarchical domination, causing many to cry out to be seen and for political, cultural, social, religious and economic forms of recognition. What the focus upon a politics of recognition misses in this dialectic, however, is that intimate connection between persons – what we might call a more authentic form of recognition, a true seeing of the other – often goes ‘beyond recognition’, beyond any classifications or legal designations that society foists upon us. We yearn to see the beloved, and so to embrace them through our recognition of them, beyond any attempt to name or classify them, so that we might respect their singularity all the more. As Oliver's (2001) work implicitly reminds us: we miss out on the nature of real connection, real intimacy, when we strive only for public recognition.
Oliver's insights parallel those of Agamben (2016: 236), who has described a type of ‘intimacy without relations’ as the respect deserved for each singular form-of-life that exists on this planet, what he elsewhere calls a ‘whatever being’ which defies the law and any attempt to classify it but which asks of us, nonetheless, that we establish a form of intimacy with it that goes beyond all conventionally defined means of social and political recognition.
The evolutionary biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon captures in her writing the essence of this struggle for recognition within the context of contemporary battles raging between scientific taxonomists (2009: 295–296). There is, she posits, a significant tension between rational, scientific endeavours to classify all of the animal species that inhabit this planet and the variety of worldviews, or unwelten, of humanity. Yoon's powerful exposition of ongoing arguments between taxonomists in the modern period makes clear that there is an ineradicable antinomy between efforts to correctly identify the evolutionary tree of a given life form (the labelling and classification side of things) and the human umwelt that creates meaning and purpose for sections of humanity (the passionate attachment and intimacy side).
In what is perhaps the most striking example given in her book, contemporary taxonomy has done away with the category of ‘fish’ altogether, finding it to be nowhere near scientifically accurate in describing the diverse wealth of species living under the surface of the seas before us. But what science misses, she argues, is that its reliance upon reason alone actually undermines the important human structures of meaning we have built for ourselves, those cosmologies and symbolic universes that provide humanity with its sense of self (Yoon 2009: 293-295).
What at first glance seem like mistakes, like scientific blunders, are in fact distinct and meaningful views of life, each as valid as the fish itself. Even the quirkiest-seeming concept – such as the crocodile as an insect – is an expression of the human ability to see the living world and to find an order in it, orderings with fundamental universal aspects and sometimes wild and wonderful peculiarities. We must draw lines, and are bound to do so in certain human ways, but we needn't always draw the exact same lines, either as one another or as science does. (Yoon 2009: 295)
In other words, we are perpetually caught in a tension between an all-too-human umwelt and those scientific classifications that order our world. This is an antinomy that cannot be effaced but only itself recognised and retained, perhaps even utilised in ways we have not yet begun to imagine. Without saying as much, Yoon is arguing for the preservation of indigenous and religious traditions alike, in so far as it is precisely the domain of the mythological that humanity has utilised for centuries in order to construct its various shared symbolic worlds of what it is that we are most passionately attached to.
Yoon's wise suggestion is that we need not choose one umwelt over another but that we should allow them to coexist side-by-side with myriad other umwelten: ‘What we have made of life is a world full of glorious views, including those of science. Why not keep every one of these views and all the living things too?’ (2009: 296). Likewise, I would add, we have to recognise how the tension between the recognisable and the unrecognisable cannot be removed once and for all. It remains with us, a reminder of how we are all caught between our irrational passionate attachments that form our most intimate spheres and those rational, even scientific, operations that allow us to classify and to speak to one another.
The Universality of Not Belonging
Many questions persist after absorbing Yoon's account of this tension, however, questions that also linger in James’ account of those historical-critical enquiries made in the face of any alleged religious belonging in the modern period: should we readily embrace cosmological fictions that grant us meaning, and the religious traditions that often inspire them, even when they appear at times to erode people's faith in science? Or should we cling to the cold rationality of science, even when it critiques what many people hold most dear to them? Should humankind be more sympathetic to those religious believers who suffer rational critiques of their umwelt? And what should one say to scientists who are battered by those who feel that what they utilise to accurately describe processes within our world – the many cosmologies and religions that appear to be staying firmly in place – are being derided and dismissed by a hard, cold logic?
In addition, we might also ask: What do we do when two umwelten are in conflict with each other, as is often the case? What do we do when one cosmology says that gay marriage is acceptable, while another says that it is a violation of one's entire way of seeing and finding harmony in the universe? What criteria allow us to judge the differences between umwelten and the very real acts of violence they might inspire in their devotees?
Perhaps, to answer these questions, amongst others, we might reframe the argument around recognition through another philosophical debate, namely, that between the universal and the particular, one that closely mirrors that between the scientific quest for objectivity and a passionate commitment to the subjective.
As Todd McGowan has noted, perhaps we need not construct an antinomy between them as an impasse asking to be overcome through the battles we otherwise continuously wage (2020: 45). Rather, we might come to see how, as he puts it, universality is not simply the ability to classify everything that exists in our world, it is also ‘the lack in every particular’ (2020: 45). Rather than fall victim to the romanticised notion that we might achieve some state of ‘total belonging’ to either one side or the other – a war that is constantly fought, for example, between conservatives with their irrational passionate attachments and liberals with their reductive rational schemes – there might be a way to envision universality as a liberating experience from the particular identities that promote rigid boundaries between diverse things, such as with any number of sexist and racist ideologies, for example (McGowan 2020: 50–51).
What McGowan turns to, rather, is the concept of ‘non-belonging’ as what is most truly universal (2020: 63, 68). It is only in so far as we all are able to recognise how we do not fit into the labels that are foisted upon us that we might demonstrate solidarity with one another. As he frames things, ‘the universal does not appear in the act of imposing itself on people but in the failure of any regime to fully impose itself’ (McGowan 2020: 72). Rather than being a prescriptive endeavour, the quest for universality is only accessible through our failure to embody an abstracted ‘universal’ position as many often imagine it to be: ‘The nonrealization of the universal is fundamental to universality itself. The absence of a fully realised universal is the essence of universality because it is the result of mastery's failure. The universal is just another name for the impossibility of complete belonging. Consequently, we access universality through the struggle to realise it, not through proclamations about its future reality’ (McGowan 2020: 78–79).
By recognising our inability to ever fully coincide with our social, political, economic, cultural and religious identities, we are able to enter into a space of non-belonging that itself becomes universal in so far as we resonate with others who share in the experience of not belonging. Occupying this site of non-belonging opens up for us a space where we are rightly able to contest each and every identification that is placed upon us while also recognising that we need some measure of categorisation (and so too of language) in order to belong anywhere at all.
We consequently cease to cling desperately to the particular identities that impede us from crossing boundaries – or making the translations that we have to make – so that we might discover a freedom beyond being fixed with one particular identity. As McGowan puts it: ‘In a world of competing particulars, there is no possibility for an emancipatory breakthrough’ (2020: 211).
I think in this context of what had motivated some of James’ investigations into the varieties of religious experience at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rise of a historical-critical consciousness in religious studies that seemed to many people to undermine the passionate attachments of a good many religious believers. As we see often today in a Western, Christian context, this tension has not abated but has only grown more entrenched, taking on a hefty political toll as many religious persons deny scientific insights in order to defend established intimate relations in their many worlds. Religious fundamentalism is only one sad and absurd option for dealing with this reality.
What would it mean, however, to acknowledge that some traditions and practices may in fact die while the right of particular communities to live continues? What would it mean to see how even some members of a specific community do not actually ‘belong’ to it, and that no one in effect actually belongs by right to any given community, though we all more or less belong somewhere in the end? What would it mean too to acknowledge, as Yoon does, that no particular worldview dies forever but actually goes with us still, even if it changes and so no longer resembles what we had once thought it was?
Conclusion
Humanity as a whole is slowly crawling to a place of understanding wherein we are more capable of acknowledging that we must better recognise those unrecognisable parts of ourselves, some of which we will eventually learn to recognise and some of which must accept will never be recognisable to us at all. Though fights for political, social and religious recognition are undoubtedly at times extremely worthy causes to champion so that marginalised populations and persons experience less violence, it must also be acknowledged that what remains ultimately unnameable within us – what can never be fully recognised – becomes our ticket to a form of non-belonging that ironically becomes our access to truer forms of intimacy with one another.
In other words, we can only grow closer to another person, forming bonds of intimacy together, when we risk becoming vulnerable and exposing our inability to ever fully belong. Residing in a place where we can recognise the unrecognisable elements within ourselves and our communities actually opens us up to other marginalised elements in both society and the self that we must allow in, in order to demonstrate a hospitality conducive to a more peaceful existence on this planet. We welcome various umwelten into each world we inhabit, from the scientific to the religious, because they do not cancel each other out so much as they each perform valuable tasks that we need in this world more than ever.
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