My death called summer school

Reflection on Indonesia, pluralism, Human Rights and development

When you are new to the studies of humanistics and philosophy like me, things tend to get very exciting. You don’t know what to expect and more than that, you are not yet able to know what to expect, also because of the at times incoherent thematic approach of our education. Whether or not this excited state of being is the fundamental state of life or a state of confusion (or both!) I will hopefully get to understand at some point. The point is that there is a given context - namely the university and its discourse - and there is you, the newbie who is amazed at everything life throws at her. This amazement or other esthetic feeling you experience and how intense it feels, is in my opinion the fundamental drive to get to know the discourse of a place and to participate in it, in your own way. So, after a while – or rather all the while – you start to live the discourse and to fit into the existing structure, obviously including changing the structure, because with you it just is not the same as without you.

Well, summer school was a totally new context for me, which threw me back onto my safe behavior of dealing with strange and Other ways of being. In a sense, I rediscovered my Christian roots and concluded that however much I felt and interpreted when reading Nietzsche, I just cannot help having a deeply imbued Christian soul, which is of course his point as well. I felt again the resentment I so often feel in the realization that there is some Other which complicates every truth I know. “I know who I am, right!?” say I, “No, you are a colonialist son of a bitch with your Eurocentric Greek-philosophical thinking!” says another. Let it be clear that this resentment is in no way directed at the other, but at myself, so I am at my very best when left alone with my thoughts. Even books should be gone because of their containment of other modes of thought! Then again, that might be just my Eurocentric Christian mind speaking, which it is, most obviously, although it is mine and I have to make peace with it.

Recently, a good friend told me that I am like a sprinter running a marathon. And we all know what happened to the runner who ran from Marathon to Athens back then, right? Not to say that we won’t all drop dead at the finish line, but I guess the way you live your life in a search for beauty or happiness elevates you from certain nihilistic and pessimistic modes of thought, without denying the influence of these perspectives. When sprinting through life, one might miss that piece of art hidden next to the road, without the sureties that there actually ís a piece of art there. First moderate your psychoses and look: See if there is anything and what it is worth in response! Eventually, this moderation might lead to the choice (or even the Right...) to drop dead at the finish line in your own way, with a smile on your face and perhaps to be reborn again because of a certain someone you don’t yet understand, but you got to love very much; because of this immense desire to do just that: To understand the other and hopefully the other does the same. Who knows what dancing star will rise from this game of creation by influencing and being influenced?

What I found in this summer school is the belief that things will change and things will change fundamentally. More specifically: even the belief, that resentment to change or to other ways of living is essentially against our own interest, got stronger. This means also hearing some other speak in a language you don’t yet understand and don’t need to understand, but to still be able to answer him or her, finding bridges in the process. To say Yes (so to speak) instead of anaesthetizing by turning off and losing contact, “because I have better things to do then to listen to your pathetic/difficult/abstract/poor/complicated/other stories”. Of course this is very hyperbolical, because no one is able to achieve this 168 hours per week. The possibility to close off is something which should be upheld at certain times. But the possibility to accept a difference on your path as a way of growing or learning should be obvious as well, at more times than we are now accustomed to. It should be clear that this has to be done with a critical mind though; how else can we interpret something different in our own way?

The problematic point – at least for me – is that arguments for critical thought in evaluating difference can only be founded on a (ethical) socio-political basis and perhaps still a religious one. In fact, the entire point of being critical only emerges when in contact with difference, which is never a purely personal difference. The very ability to act or own responsibility for your autonomous actions is embedded in a culture which provides the space to be autonomous, or to be responsible for your own actions. The illusion of personal autonomy only gets meaning in a society like ours, where we don’t need to think about the clean water or electricity coming from our walls, but are able to think of many ways in which we are different from the ones who are most like us Apply this concept to office employees who are all working individually, each behind a computer and we see that they are still part of the beehive: the network which feeds the individual computers. With our use of language and thinking, it’s the exact same thing. There is no such thing as a private language. Personal autonomy is thus a very communal concept.

Of course this ability to be autonomous can be interpreted very optimistically. But the implications of it in our globalized world are relevant to reflect on more deeply. We created this much space for our egoistic individual autonomy and I guess it is something to be proud of. However, this space can create a feeling of weightlessness, in which we try to find concrete grounds to find stability, which in fact means finding something to demarcate our essentialities in contrast to ‘the’ other. We need to feel solid again, so we eat, we have sex, we drink and we get drunk, when perhaps the real challenge is to live with the lightness of our being. It should be obvious that this does not imply leaving the aforementioned activities behind.

One of the most important things I learnt at this summer school is not all of this. All of this came back in a Socratic way of remembering what is lost at birth. Even the fact that this is not a one man job, but a socio-political striving, which is not beginning in four years when I finish my studies and get to work until I am 65 years old, but which has happened from the beginning of time until the hypothetical end of time and which has shown itself in the process called globalization. The real part of the learning process – still – is to abandon the anthropocentric mode of thought. Whether or not we are born with certain essentials or whether these essentials are socio-culturally determined (the tabula rasa/blank sheet question) is an obsolete way of thinking, because of the realization that we are not born in a vacuum, which makes even the question itself absurd and unanswerable; the meaning of the word “blank” is in no way a priori given but is interpreted after existence comes into play. For the question of tabula rasa ontological pluralism means that some people might be born as a blank sheet and others might not, with equal right. Who am I to demarcate and on what grounds? Perhaps it’s time to stop thinking in dualities. When thinking, the world around us is already there, although it might not be clear in what way the world influences thought at the moment of thinking. To clarify the meaning of the world, we will have to search for ourselves inside the gates of the Other on an ontological level of being different, if we have any hope of not dying alone. In this regard I do not want to express that I belief in dying together or even life after death, but rather in dying at peace and at the right time like Socrates and perhaps – when considering a metaphorical interpretation of death and rebirth – to truly risk yourself and thus to be reborn again and again in this one life which is yours with ever increasing complexity.

Kevin Pijpers
Participant International Summer School on Pluralism and Development, Yogyakarta, 2009.