LIVING INTO* THE OTHERS

Ahmet Inam
(Ankara)

Damned "good life"! We are all looking for her. Where is she? The claim in this paper is that a good life awaits us in our inner life. We usually take our inner world for granted even ignore her. Historically speaking, the inner world has mostly been studied by mystics, idealists, theologians... But she should not be left to their monopoly.

So, what is the role of inner world in attaining a good life?

I live in an outer, public world. There are friends, enemies and their ongoing agon in this world. I have impressions, feelings, thoughts, expectations, "intentions" about this world. So I look at outer world from where I stand, through inner world, inner land. (Let us call her wonderland, wonderland of inner life!) Inner wold is necessary to live the outer. These two worlds are complementary to each other.

I come from my innerland! She is my home. In fact, she will be my home, if I can be sufficiently wise to make our inner world wonderland instead of a hell!

Most of the intellectuals today live their inner life as if they are in hell! They don't know how to live in their innerland, without interacting and communicating with themselves. They hide themselves, they are not sincere enough to confess their boundaries and faults.
They are so lazy and so pragmatically minded that they are not able to appreciate the richness of their inside. (This is also what most mystics say!) They search for money, fame, social status, and immortality; few of them seek truth (what ever it may mean!). They take the world at face value. Cost and benefit! Everyone becomes everyone's tool to reach a desired aim. Ethics becomes business, and aesthetics is a play! We make other people our own playthings.

Where is the innerland? She is where you have lost! Without her guidence you try to find a good life! No good life without inner life.

There is a full of life inside you. All psycho-therapical theories and eastern wisdom are after her. But she is so difficult to grasp. We are strangers in our inner life. "In" is not "in", in one sense, is not in our agenda, "in" has already been "out". She is gone! We usually think that under our skin there are only intestines!

Those who try to insist that life is one, in their mono-vitalistic attitude, suppose that we live altogether in one single common outer world. Sure. No objection. We live in this common world, in this Lebenswelt, by coming from our inner world. Inner world is our origin, this is our house (for some of us, home!). Making an allusion to Heidegger we may say that inner life is the house of outer life.

Inner world is partly constructed with the bricks of outer world, e.g., with body, culture...

The outer world is partly independent of the inner. You can change the outer world to a certain extent by your intentions, hopes, and passions. You can destroy your phantesies, but you cannot do the same for the external world. Topology between the innor and the outer should change! These two worlds are not mutually exclusive. They exhibit a strange topology, inner is in the outer, and the outer is in the inner!

The reason is simple : in perception, in the realm of aisthesis, in the aesthetical land, I am not alone, Aesthetics is not solitaire. We perceive the world through others! (This is one of the main thesis of the paper, which requires several books to defend it!) I begin to perceive the world through my mother's womb. (When gen-technology sufficiently developes, a child may be born without the aid of a mother; but in that case also, the other, as a technology, or a product of technology is still there!) My pain, my most confidential thoughts are all language laden, culture laden!

Following such an argument we may come to conclusion that others in my outer world are also in my inner world through my perceptual process. Others gain access to our inner world by means of perception. (Like Heraclitus' theory of perception: "the channels of perception" work as though a kind of window. See, A 16)

Ethics is related to others. How to live with or for others is a typical problem of ethics. Ethics is public. Care for and responsibility to others make us an inhabitant of the ethical world.

Ethics begins with the other. Aesthetics, too! So coordination of ethics and aesthetics requires consideration of others. Others are unavoidably tied to my inner and outer worlds.

When I aesthetically perceive the world, or create some works of art they are there, always around me always in me! They are in my aesthetical and ethical life. I am not alone. Not a monad. I have windows and doors open to others. Those who cannot discover the others in them may think that each human individual is an isolated other. We are not completely isolated nor seamless cells.

Yet, there is such thing as inner world, severally neglected, taken usually at her face value. Deep inside me, I am the only experienans (one who experiences), but not the sole experiendum (that which is experienced) I can perceive the others in me. They live under the "protection" or "destruction" of my power. I may love as well as hate them. I may take care of them as well as kill them.

So, I may achieve and become aesthetically ethical, ethically aesthetical. In fact, ethics is outer aesthetics, aesthetics is inner ethics. Sole ethics and sole aesthetics can no longer be defensible. Ethics in aesthetics and aesthetics in ethics should be developed. One way of doing this is to understand the relation of me to the others in me. Love, for example, is such a relation. It is aesthetically ethical relation: care and aesthetic excitement go hand in hand. My inner land is the land of rehearsal. I, by trial and error, may learn how to live "a good life" and become "a good" human being (Living and becoming should not be separated!).

Now 13th. century mystic Turkish Poet Yunus' following stanza may be appreciated:

As he passed by, Yunus chanced to meet the Friend
And remained at the Gate and the deepest end.

At the doorsteps of my friend's innerland, hopefully of her home, I am the visitor; careful enough not to intrude her, because she is so delicate, so fragile. There is an interaction between my and her inner wolds. No need to invade her, trespossing her miraculous world. (She is a miracle, because she is my friend. We all together try to learn how to be open to miracle - in Heideggerian or non-Heideggerian sense! - ) A caress (Thanks to my teacher Levinas!), an affectionate touch, is enough for her to take me her deepest end. Because I have a mighty respect for her (Yunus says: "I have a mighty respect for an ant!)

How can we achieve this wonderful, miraculous relation? (P.Feyerabend, in his autobiography, Killing Time - The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995 - claims that love is not an achievement but a gift. I don't believe it. How can we appreciate the gift if we are not well prepared?) Just seeing our inner worlds through our faces! "Innerization" or "to innerize", a word coined by me in order not to use the term "interiorization" which, in my opinion, is already worn out, is a kind of travel into others' world. This is not a penetration or invasion; this is just an invitation coming from others' voice!

Do you think that mine is nothing but a sheer wishful thinking? Then let us wish, let us try to visit a heart, probably this heart may tell aesthetically and ethically how to achieve a good life!

________________________________________________________________
(*) "Living into", a term coined by me, is a certain achievement in which one lives others without dominating, assimilating, expelling, abolishing, even "penetring them. This is not a kind of empathy at all, nor a verstehen. This is a careful, delicate, fragile experience that can be learnt by seeing exemplars. It may cover friendship or love, not in the sense of eros, nor agape nor caritas; it is a reciprocal relation in which both sides will to sail into the ocean of other's world. This may easily be misunderstood in our modern wold, for it has nothing to do with business or money or any material interest!