Humanity, Abstract And Concrete

Suppose tonight I am sitting at The Anchor on Mill Lane, Cambridge, drinking a bottle of my favourite French wine (incidentally, the only alcoholic beverage that I drink; beer is disgusting!). The time is 10:50 pm, I am talking to one of 'me mates' from the Academy, and she introduces the above girl to me as her friend. Now even before I speak one word to her, I can already form the following 'estimate' of her :

(a) She is an attractive girl. (Why? Just because she is!)

(b) She is not a pious Muslim girl. (Why? Because if she was, she would not be here with wine-guzzlers.)

(c) She is not a practising Buddhist. (Same reason as above.)

(d) She is a not a card-carrying Left-wing Party member. (Why? Because the context would be too bourgeoise for her.)

(e) She is not one of those 'moralising' girls who think that wine and the academic life should be kept separate in two hermetically-sealed compartments. (Why? Because otherwise she would not be in this pub talking to people drinking wine.)

Now, I shall let you pause a while : perhaps you are extremely irritated, offended, shocked, frustrated, or angry with me for having made this confession. 'Surely, I thought you were a very unprejudiced man? How can you jump to such conclusions even before you have talked to a person? Is that what you did when you met me the first time ('outside' this blog, that is)? Did you form an 'estimate' of me too in this manner? And, by the way, doesn't what you said above reveal, once and for all, your carefully hidden sexism? Is this how you pass judgement on the women whom you meet?'

In the rest of this post, I shall try to respond to these questions by way of making a distinction between two (closely inter-related) notions of Humanity, 'Abstract' and 'Concrete'. (Yes, hold your breath, and the picture will, hopefully, become clearer very soon.)

First, Abstract humanity, the regulative principle of which is a formalised equality so that when I meet a woman, the norms of our resulting interaction are public, civic, and (potentially) universalisable. So by abstracting from her specific individuality, I confirm that she is a rational and moral agent with a certain worth and dignity (these comprise our common 'Humanity'), and that I have some duties and obligations in responding to her. Therefore, I assume that she has the same set of rights, duties, and obligations towards me (and, potentially, towards 'Humanity') that I have towards her (and, potentially, towards 'Humanity').

However, a moment's reflection on this matter will also make it clear that we rarely, except in highly ceremonial and institutionalised contexts, reach out to people in this 'abstract' manner; quite often, we also want to meet human beings with all the 'brute' specificities of their socio-cultural-historical baggage that they carry around them. (Or, to use the offical jargon of these days, we may aspire to meet and know the Other in its inimitable and intractable Otherness.) That is, while affirming that I share with the girl who has been introduced to me an 'abstract' humanity which requires me to practise a stylised vocabulary of 'rights', 'duties' and 'obligations', I also want to know her as a singular individual with a concrete life-history, identity, and psycho-social background. At this level, it is not enough to merely know our commonalities (however important that might be), and I may also wish to know her as a unique being with distinct (and, quite often, irreplaceable) talents, capacities, needs, anxieties, skills, and aptitudes that make her who she is without 'reducing' her to just another statistic on the 2001 Census of Britain. (Note the manner in which I am emphasising the word 'also' in these sentences; this is because I am urging an integrative Both-And approach to these two levels of human(e) interaction.)

Consequently, while at one level the accent falls on the girl's ('abstract') humanity, at another it lies squarely with her ('concrete') individuality, and the point I am stressing here is that most of our interactions involve us in an extremely intricate interplay of these two levels between which we keep on shifting to and forth. For example, after I have come to know her for a few days or weeks (or even years!), and realised that we do live within the same horizon of an 'abstract' humanity, we need not keep on harping on this point again and again (unless, say, we are discussing Ethical Theory or, say, have got involved in some legal dispute). However, no matter how closely I get to know her in a relationship of friendship, empathy, solidarity, sharing, and care (and not just as an 'abstract' human being), this overarching horizon can never be elided, occluded, or forgotten for she remains at all times what she was the first time I met her : a moral and rational agent with some 'rights' and to whom I owe certain 'duties'.

At this stage, however, some readers might still be feeling uneasy at the manner in which I instinctively built a 'projection' of her the moment I saw her : is this not the classic illustration of how men get swayed by their 'first impressions'? Without denying that I am often under the spell of such impressions, I shall assert, somewhat dogmatically, that such impressions are necessary if we are to meet human beings as concrete individuals and not as ghostly, ethereal, disembodied, deracinated, and disembedded figures who have suddenly descended onto this planet from some unknown planet. To use a bit of technical language, there is no 'naive perception', and all human experience is experience-as : that is, I perceive a man or a woman as this man or as that woman and not as some abstract 'I-know-not-what'. Therefore, what is dangerous about our first impressions is that we so easily forget that they are our first (and not last!) impressions : that we must subject these corrigible impressions to a process of constant and even radical revision the more we get to know the person we are interacting with, that every individual is a never-ending fathomless enigma not only to those around herself but sometimes even to herself, and that every individual will defy the attempt made by others to encapsulate her within a comprehensive explanatory framework. (Note the word 'comprehensive' here, for I do not deny that we can 'explain' human beings to a significant extent.)

(So, to carry on with my example above, the more I get to know her, it might turn that out that she is, after all, an ironist like me who is simply pretending to approve of students of the Academy consuming alcohol while, in reality, she does not! Hehe, wouldn't that be awesome?)

One final point by way of conclusion. Am I then saying that relationships of care and bonding are superior to ones of duties and obligations? Some (feminist) writers have indeed jumped to this conclusion with the hackneyed notion that Care (which has to do with 'concrete' humanity) is a 'sensitive and context-dependent' feminine mode of being in this world while Justice (related to 'abstract' humanity) is a 'cold and impersonal' masculine approach to it. From my comments above, it should be clear that I do not accept such a dichotomy between Care and Justice (though whether women too can be 'cold' and men too may, sometimes at least, be 'sensitive' are intricate matters that I shall not dare to deal with here!). However, how do I conceive the relationship between these two notions, Care and Justice? I would reply that both care and justice are moral orientations, but that it is (impersonal!) justice that must provide the operating constraints within which we enter into relationships of (personal!) care with human beings (Perhaps that is yet another paradox for readers of my blog. No?). But why? Simply because some of the greatest atrocities have been committed by precisely those people who have claimed to 'care' for other people by flouting the rules of justice, for we are all aware (or are we not?) of what havoc can be (and has been) wreaked by parents who 'care' for their children, by psychonanalysts who 'care' for the 'mentally challanged', by politicians who 'care' for their constituencies, by husbands who 'care' for their wives, and by doctors who 'care' for their patients.

Therefore, to return to the point I emphasised above : what we need to do is to develop the ability to move in and out of these two levels, the one of 'abstract' humanity and the other of 'concrete' humanity, and the more effortlessly we are able to do so, the more that we shall become able to meet human beings not only in our shared humanity but also in their irreplaceable individuality.