TITLE: The Limits of the Self: Blindness in Williams James and Judith Butler
ABSTRACT: This paper looks at the moral philosophies of William James and Judith
Butler and their respective notions of blindness. In an interesting affinity with one
another, I argue that both philosophers remain committed to an ethical philosophy based
on the acceptance of limits of recognizability and I will show that they share a resistance
to normative complacency via the notion of blindness. Ultimately, I suggest that they are
both committed to an ameliorative ethics of self-critique, which has considerable appeal
for a moral philosophy.
SUBMISSION TYPE: Paper Submission
In the essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” William James
suggests that each human is blind to the aspects of inner lives of others and that this
blindness constitutes an epistemic limit about what one can know about another.1 For
James, blindness most often results in false moral commitments and intolerance, and
recognizing blindness becomes the site for a new moral imperative of tolerance. This call
for tolerance is a way to keep both the private realm of the individual self and the public
realm of sociality open to differences in experience and values. In an interesting and
unexpected affinity with James, Judith Butler is also concerned with a blindness that
limits one’s ability to recognize the other who is different. In her work, Giving an
Account of Oneself2, the production of the ‘human’ produces a blind eye toward some,
rendering their lives unintelligible to me, which further limits what I know of my self.
James and Butler, then, both take up concern with the questions of unintelligibility, yet
travel different paths to do so. Whereas James’ notion of blindness refers to that which I
cannot know of another, Butler’s notion of blindness refers to that which I cannot know
of myself.
1
2
William James, On Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1913).
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
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Despite these different approaches, however, both philosophers remain committed
to an ethical philosophy based on the acceptance of limits of recognizability. In this
paper, I shall not argue that Butler and James offer the same conception of ethics, but I
will show that they share a resistance to normative complacency via the notion of
blindness. I will discuss their respective notions of blindness and their approaches to the
moral question of the ought in order to argue that they are both committed to an ethics of
self-critique. Lastly, I will consider the appeal of self-critique as central to a moral
philosophy.
Certain Blindness
James devotes two essays, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What
Makes Life Significant,” to the notion of blindness. In the first essay, James suggests that
blindness is a universal characteristic shared by all humans; it is a limit to what one can
know or can recognize of another. Precisely because the other is something or someone I
am not, and is someone who experiences and lives in ways I do not, I always remain at a
distance from her. James describes the impact of this distance that gives way to blindness
when he says, “The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging
spectator fails to see.”3 Ultimately, in my blindness, the other is, in some manner, always
unknowable.
James illustrates these epistemic limits through an example of his own blindness
towards the ways of life of the inhabitants of a mountain town in North Carolina. Upon
seeing the rural ways of this community, James describes his repugnance at what
3
James., 6.
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appeared to him to be the “Ugly…life of the squatter.”4 Yet he recognizes his hasty and
prejudice judgment when he learns that such rudimentariness is precisely what generates
a source of pride and happiness for this community. This understanding, though, is
subsequent to James’ repugnance; it occurs only when James encounters the other and
understands the pride and success the community has in their ways of life. His initial
failure to recognize the pride of this community is due to his blindness to the importance
of their ideals, but this failure results in an additional shortcoming: the failure to attribute
value to those who are different. Consequently, valuing difference does not necessarily
follow from the perception of difference.
It is from this injunction that we see James’s radical definition of blindness. For
James, blindness is not simply a matter of whether one can or cannot see; rather, it is a
matter of the recognition of value in an other’s way of being in the world. This means
that Jamesian blindness is not specular, but is about the phenomenological recognition
and intersubjective appreciation of the other. As a failure to recognize value in an other,
blindness becomes the means through which we not only repudiate difference in moral
deliberations, but also, and perhaps more importantly for James, it is that which leads to
the foreclosure of apprehending and appreciating the other as she is. For this reason, my
blindness to your being in the world grants me the ability to both judge you as immoral
and reject you as you are such that blindness leads to faulty judgments.
James offers a solution to this denouncement of the other and suggests that what
one ought to do in light of this blindness is to develop a disposition of tolerance. He says,
recognizing our blindness “commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we
4
ibid., 7,8.
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see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may
be to us.”5 It is, however, necessary to understand what Jamesian tolerance is, not only
because it constitutes moral virtue for James, but also because it is a contentious notion.
Herbert Marcuse offers a compelling and well-known critique of liberal tolerance.
In “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse argues that tolerance is a highly selective notion that
benefits only the prevailing attitudes and opinions of those who held wealth and power.6
Ultimately, for Marcuse contemporary liberal tolerance is defunct because it outlaws
dissent and opposition in favor of an abstracted, romanticized notion that purports to
build a “free” society. Wendy Brown also levies a striking critique of the notion of
tolerance in her text, Regulating Aversion, that supports Marcuse’s disdain for
contemporary tolerance. Here, Brown suggests that tolerance reifies social inequality by
requiring moral agents to become blind to difference, which leads to a political erasure of
difference.7 For Brown and Marcuse, contemporary tolerance discourse purports to be
freedom maximizing through a “live and let live” constitution, which erases difference at
the very moment it claims to make room for it. In this sense, the discourse of liberal
tolerance is fraught with norms that consolidate the dominance of the powerful and
sustains the abjection of the tolerated.8
5
ibid., 46.
Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, edited by Robert Paul
Wolff, Barrington Moore, jr., and Herbert Marcuse, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pg. 95-137,
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm (accessed May 29,
2010).
7
Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006).
8
Brown provides a rich discussion of how this specifically plays out in the historical and
contemporary treatment of Jews and women. See the chapter, “Tolerance as Supplement: The
‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Woman Question’” (48-77). Both Brown and Marcuse, however, are
critical towards the notion of tolerance as advocated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty where Mill is
skeptical of a democratic government’s ability to foster space for genuine difference.
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James, however, takes his moral prescription of tolerance down a more radical
and meliorative path and, as such, overcomes the critiques of Brown and Marcuse. Rather
than a promotion of liberal tolerance that calls for acceptance without requiring social
change, James’s answer to the question of the ought is a radical, empathic tolerance. This
is a tolerance that requires one to engage and bond with the other so as to form both
respect and change. Ruth Anna Putnam implies that Jamesian tolerance is, in actuality, an
inclusive ideal that is more about “sensitivity and mutual respect” than it is about “letting
others live their lives as long as they don’t interfere with one’s own.”9 Putnam’s
suggestion that Jamesian tolerance is an inclusive ideal is spot on given the fact that
James himself comes to appreciate the North Carolinians. In fact, if James were to take a
non-interference approach with the North Carolinians, he would not have come to
recognize their pride at all. Thus, inclusion operates as a means of empathy in so far as it
allows and urges one to reach out to the other and appreciate her, which can lead to a
shift in ideals. “We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic and
important way,” and it is from this realization that we “diversify our opportunities and
open chances to…new ideals.10 Furthermore, as Colin Koopman shows, this
diversification of ideals that comes via a Jamesian tolerance is a self-transformative
Ruth Anna Putnam, “Some of Life’s Ideals,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pgs. 287 and 290.
10
This prescription comes after James has described the intimacy of Jack and Jill and how, in
their intimate relationality they understand and appreciate one another’s inner lives and ideals.
James continues on to suggest that coming to terms with our blindness because “no one has
insight into all the ideals.... The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of
most human injustices and cruelties.” James, “What Makes A Life Significant,” 51, 92-93, 50.
9
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inclusiveness, which “involves opening ourselves up to…transformations: old scales
might fall from new eyes: historied selves might give way to new living.”11
Rather than dismiss the unintelligible as morally disgraceful, James asks that one
come to terms with her ignorance. While this does involve opening one’s self up to
change, prior to the constitution of a new way of living, one must acknowledge her lack
of knowledge about the other. As such, the moment of coming to terms with blindness is
to come to terms with one’s self, which comes only once one has developed a critical
attitude toward her self; it is to acknowledge that because I cannot know the other, I must
be careful and critical of my judgments of her. James shows how this critical attitude can
change both our understanding and judgments of others in his experience in North
Carolina. Here James suggests that appreciating and doing justice to the other through
tolerance comes only when one is self-critical of her own limits, when one is actively
seeking to educate herself concerning the different value schemas operational in our
private lives and those of others. Without this dimension of self-critique, of recognizing
one’s certain blindness, change is impossible.
A Partial Blindness
Butler’s notion of blindness also considers the limits of the self. In Giving an
Account of Oneself, Butler suggests there is an opacity to the self, which constitutes a
“shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves.”12 In this case, blindness is not
primarily of the other, but of the “I” that I am. For Butler, this partial blindness emerges
when one tries to give an account of oneself to the other. The act of giving an account is
11
Colin Koopman, “Pragmatist Public Pluralism: Beyond the Public/Private Debate.”
Unpublished Manuscript.
12
Butler, 41.
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never one that I am fully accountable for; the account always occurs for the other and
within a state of affairs that serves as the ground for intelligibility. Because of this, at the
very moment I speak, I am dispossessed of myself: “the account is completed only on the
occasion when it is effectively exported and expropriated from the domain of what is my
own.”13 I become recognizable as a subject precisely in the process of dispossession. I am
always partially blind to my self not only because I am constituted through social frames
that are not my own, but also because I emerge only in the frame of the other.
Butler’s notion of blindness becomes distinct from James’s in this respect because
blindness is first of the self. To establish the dispossession of the self, the failure of full
self-knowledge is, for Butler, a necessary condition for recognizing the other as she is.
Without knowing that I exist only in relation to the other, I can never become morally
responsible to the other. For this reason, Butler emphasizes that my account of my self,
my ‘I,’ is, in some way, always already yours and never fully my own. Hence, “There is
that in me and of me for which I can give no account,” and thus I am partially blind.14
Butler’s emphasis here on what I cannot know of myself is not a form of
narcissism, but rather provides a way to acknowledge epistemic limits. In so far as one’s
account always fails, it follows, then, that I can never fully know the other. The account
of the other that one hears does “not capture the body to which they refer,” since the other
emerges in my frame.15 Thus, like James, Butler also suggests that I am blind to the other.
There is always part of you that exceeds my frame and thus you are, as I am, constituted
from a partial blindness. This is where Butler’s ought emerges. She says, “An ability to
affirm what is contingent and incoherent in oneself may allow one to affirm others who
13
ibid., 36-37.
ibid., 40.
15
ibid., 38.
14
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may or may not ‘mirror’ one’s own constitution.”16 Annika Thiem illuminates the
significance of the moral prescription that arises here. Rather than provide a way to live
the good life, Butler’s moral task, as Thiem explains, is to show how that “we are
implicated in the lives of others,” so as to make us responsible for life itself.17 For Butler,
when we ask to know the other, we must not expect to know her fully and, rather than
this cause moral panic, we must let the question of the other remain open. We must, in a
sense, become responsible for this limit of knowledge. Ultimately, Butler suggests that
recognizing one’s partial blindness “can…constitute a disposition of humility and
generosity” that will let the other live as she is, even if she is unintelligible to me.18 For
Butler, this disposition is a means to a critical responsibility that one ought to take
towards others and towards oneself.
Of course, like tolerance, the notion of moral responsibility is philosophically
rich, such that it makes sense to clarify what Butler means in her call to responsibility. 19
Thiem explains this succinctly: “…responsibility has to do with acting as a being
conscious of limitations and then becomes a question of how to sustain the possibility of
responsible action precisely in the face of those limitations.”20 Butlerian responsibility
16
ibid., 41.
Annika Thiem, Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical
Responsibility, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 215, 226.
18
Butler, 42.
19
For other views on moral responsibility see Galen Strawson, “The Impossibility of Moral
Responsibility.” Philosophical Studies (1994) 75: 5-24. See P.F. Strawson, “Freedom and
Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962):1–25. See Kurt Baier, “Types of
Responsibility,” in The Spectrum of Responsibility, ed. Peter French, (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1991). See Michael Zimmerman, An Essay on Moral Responsibility. (Totowa, NJ: Roman
and Littlefield, 1988)
20
Of course, it is worth exploring the Butlerian notion of responsibility in depth, but that exceeds
the particular scope of this paper. But such an analysis would be extremely beneficial for this
project in so far as it would illuminate the complimentarity that exists between Jamesian tolerance
and Butlerian responsibility. Thiem, 137.
17
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calls for an obligation of uncertainty, a remaining open to the other as an avowal of
difference. This openness must be humble and generous or else one runs the risk of
violence in so far as the other constitutes a disavowal of the other’s life.
The way in which one becomes and is to be humble and generous is similar to
how one becomes and is tolerant in the Jamesian fashion. Since I am constituted by
epistemic limits, which means that I never fully know myself and others, it follows that I
must be careful about my course of action. And, understanding these limits is an explicit
action of becoming critical because my limits are the foundation for responsibility. Butler
thus suggests that this becoming critical is a way to meliorate the world that forecloses
and does violence to the other whom is different. Insofar as Butler’s call for
responsibility advocates for a genuine recognition of the other and my relation to her, it
runs akin to James’s emphasis on empathy that emerges from his notion tolerance.
Ethics of Self-Critique
In both Butler and James, then, the notion of blindness becomes central to
fashioning a critical attitude that allows for a recognition and empathic acceptance of
difference. They are both explicit about the epistemological register of blindness, since
their emphasis is on the impossibility of knowing who the other is. A critical attitude
toward what I do not know is thus necessary if I am to accept the other as other. Yet, this
emphasis on epistemic limits is not the only way and, perhaps, not the most fruitful way
to read James and Butler. Taking blindness to be a phenomenological limit emphasizes
the lived, bodily relationality of moral agents. We see this in James when he asserts the
eagerness of life that is communicated within experience and in Butler when she
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suggests, following Levinas, that the face of the other and the act of facing the other
occurs only within an experiential horizon.21 In this sense, to recognize one’s blindness
entails recognition of the other as an embodied subject. And, only when the other’s body
becomes intelligible as a subject via my recognition of my blindness is an ethical bond
formed, from which I begin to experience my self as sharing a being-in-the world with
the other. Given that the other’s being in the world is at stake in this recognition, reading
James and Butler on a phenomenological register allows one to see the radical
implications of an ethics of self-critique.
Yet, the notion of self-critique is more explicit in Butler’s work, particularly in
her work on Michel Foucault.22 Following Foucault, Butler says, “ ‘critique’ is precisely
a practice that not only suspends judgment… but offers a new practice of values based on
that very suspension.”23 It is from here that it becomes possible to see how James is also
up to an ethics of self-critique. James explicitly asks us to give up our hasty judgments in
order to provide a way to a new understanding of the other, whereas Butler suggests a
bracketing of normativity that allows for “knowledge that is foreign to one’s own.”24
Thus, both James and Butler suggest that what one ought to do is to acknowledge her
limits of knowing, so that she does not foreclose the possibility of other ideals. In both
instances, self-critique is the primary ethical action. Yet, while James advocates for an
empathic tolerance, which is necessary if one is to become responsibly responsive, Butler
21
These, of course, are points worth elaborating on. However, since they are both themes that are
integral to Jamesian and Butlerian ethics it seems relevant to bring them up here.
22
See Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in The Politics of Truth, eds. Sylvère Lotringer and
Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997).
23
Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue” in The Judith Butler Reader
(Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 304.
24
ibid., 308.
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more fully draws out a framework within which we can be morally responsive to such
empathy.
The significance of an ethics of self-critique is both in its troubling critical spirit
and in its call to create a new horizon for being in the world. Self-critique at once troubles
all conceptions of morality and encourages moral agents to engage in transforming their
current horizons such that their experiences and the contexts in which they occur have the
possibility for radical alteration. This means that self-critique is a vehicle for an
individual to query the larger cultural milieu in which beliefs emerge; it is a coming to
terms with one’s self within her cultural milieu. Subsequently, the critique of a
phenomenological limit acknowledges and constitutes a shared social horizon that is, as
Butler maintains, uncertain. But, this uncertainty suggests the need for a means of
responsiveness to other moral agents and our socio-cultural conditions. Such
responsiveness is where one locates the Jamesian call for empathic tolerance.
This has at least two integral consequences for moral philosophy: the moral agent
becomes active and responsible for the moral judgments she will make, and secondly,
social transformation becomes possible given that critique requires openness to different
horizons. Rather than calling for an ethics of moral certainty from which the moral agents
proceeds with particular conceptions of what is good, self-critique demands reflection on
individual and social actions and one’s relation with the other. Ultimately, this reflection
is a suspension of judgment that allows for change within experience. As such, an ethics
of self-critique is thus ethically and politically appealing because it calls for openness and
demands responsibility. The question of the ought itself becomes a question so as to
move us into a process of civic engagement; it demands that we become critical,
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embodied actors. This does not make moral philosophy impractical or impossible, but
instead allows us to examine how our sharing the world with the other is conditioned by
normative prescriptions, so that we can labor together in critique to create a better future.
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