Ignatieff The Needs of Strangers

On Solidarity and the Politics of Being Human
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78227-909-9
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Reissue of a profound exploration of the concept of human need by the esteemed author of On ConsolationWhat does a person need, not just to survive, but to flourish? In this profound, searching book, Michael Ignatieff explores the many human needs that go beyond basic sustenance: for love, for respect, for community and consolation. In a society of strangers, how might we find a common language to express such needs?Ignatieff's lucid, penetrating enquiry takes him back to great works of philosophy, literature and art, from St. Augustine to Hieronymus Bosch to Shakespeare. Reissued with a new preface, The Needs of Strangers builds to a moving meditation on the possibility of accommodating claims of difference within a politics based on common need.

Michael Ignatieff is a writer, historian and former politician. He has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, the University of Toronto and Harvard and is currently university professor at Central European University in Vienna. His books, which have been translated into twelve languages, include Blood and Belonging, Isaiah Berlin, The Needs of Strangers and The Russian Album, all published or forthcoming with Pushkin Press, and On Consolation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ignatieff, Michael

Leseproben

Questions about human needs are questions about human obligations. To ask what our needs are is to ask not just which of our desires are strongest and most urgent, but which of our desires give us an entitlement to the resources of others. This natural pairing of the idea of need with the idea of duty and obligation is what distinguishes need from desire. Need is bounded by the idea of the necessary or the essential. Desire is unbounded even by the idea of utility. It is possible to specify the duties which would follow from an obligation to meet someone’s needs. But the duty would be boundless, and therefore meaningless, if it extended to a person’s desires.

Need is a vernacular of justification, specifying the claims of necessity that those who lack may rightfully address to those who have. Without a language of need, and the language of right that derives from it, the human world would scarcely be human: between powerful and powerless only the law of hammer and anvil, master and slave would rule. The pathos of need, like the pathos of all purely verbal claims to the justice or mercy of another, is that need is powerless to enforce its right. It justifies an entitlement only if the powerful understand themselves to be obliged by it.

What is it then which binds those who have more than enough and those with less than enough in the ties of obligation? For most people, obligations are a matter of custom, habit and historical inheritance as much as a matter of explicit moral commitment. But might there not be something more than custom, habit and inheritance? Whatever the customs of a country, it would seem ‘unnatural’ for a father to deny his duty towards the needs of his children, unnatural for a daughter to refuse to give shelter to her homeless father. Beneath all these, there is nature: the natural feeling which ought to exist between father and children and more mysteriously between human beings as such.

The language of human needs is a basic way of speaking about this idea of a natural human identity. We want to know what we have in common with each other beneath the infinity of our differences. We want to know what it means to be human, and we want to know what that knowledge commits us to in terms of duty. What distinguishes the language of needs is its claim that human beings actually feel a common and shared identity in the basic fraternity of hunger, thirst, cold, exhaustion, loneliness or sexual passion. The possibility of human solidarity rests on this idea of natural human identity. A society in which strangers would feel common belonging and mutual responsibility to each other depends on trust, and trust reposes in turn on the idea that beneath difference there is identity.

Yet when one thinks about it, this is a puzzling idea. For who has ever met a pure and natural human being? We are always social beings, clothed in our skin, our class, income, our history, and as such, our obligations to each other are always based on difference. Ask me who I am responsible for, and I will tell you about my wife and child, my parents, my friends and relations, and my fellow citizens. My obligations are defined by what it means to be a citizen, a father, a husband, a son, in this culture, in this time and place. The role of pure human duty seems obscure. It is difference which seems to rule my duties, not identity.

Similarly, if you ask me what my needs are, I will tell you that I need the chance to understand and be understood, to love and be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, and the chance to create something which will outlast my life, and the chance to belong to a society whose purposes and commitments I share. But if you were to ask me what needs I have as a natural, as opposed to a social being, I would quickly find myself restricted to those of my body. I would abandon the rest as the work of my time and place, no less precious for all that, but not necessarily a universal human claim or entitlement. Yet even the natural identity of my body seems marked by social difference. The identity between such hunger as I have ever known and the hunger of the street people of Calcutta is a purely linguistic one. My common natural identity of need, therefore, is narrowed by the limits of my social experience here in this tiny zone of safety known as the developed world.

Why bother with the natural then, so long as the social tells us what we ought to do? The problem, of course, is that the social does not always tell us what to do. We may know what our obligations are to our families and friends and our fellow citizens, but what are our obligations to those strangers at our gates? Take one step outside our zone of safety – the developed world – and there they are, hands outstretched, gaunt, speechless or clamouring in the zone of danger. There is no claim of kith and kin to connect us together: there is only the indeterminate claim of one human being upon another.1

What these claims from strangers make so painfully clear is the asymmetry between natural and social obligation. The lives of a father, a daughter, a son are precious to us; the lives of strangers count for little. If we have the same needs, the same natural identity, this should not be so. Why does our natural identity count for so little, why does difference count for so much?

The natural identity of need helps one to understand why the new language of universal claims – the language of universal human rights – makes so little headway against the claims of racial, tribal and social difference. The needs we actually share we share with animals. What is common to us matters much less than what differentiates us. What makes life precious for us is difference, not identity. We do not prize our equality. We think of ourselves not as human beings first, but as sons, and daughters, fathers and mothers, tribesmen, and neighbours. It is this dense web of relations and the meanings which they give to life that satisfies the needs which really matter to us.

There is no deeper reflection on the claim of need, on the role of the natural and the social in the grounding of the claim, than King Lear.2 It is a play that sets out to show us why we must take the needs of others on trust, by showing how murderous and pitiless a place the world can become without such trust. The claim of need makes the relation between the powerful and the powerless human, but the nightmare of the powerless is that one day they will make their claim and the powerful will demand a reason, one day the look of entreaty will be met with the unknowing stare of force. This is the nightmare which Lear begins to endure in Act II, Scene 4:

Goneril:                                 Hear me, my lord:

What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,

To follow in a house where twice so many

Have a command to tend you?

Regan:                                        What need one?

Lear:     O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,

Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need –

You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.

Kings in the fullness of their power do not have to speak the language of need. Theirs can be the pure and unjustified language of desire: ‘Do it, for it is my wish.’ Kings do not have to justify their desires. The most inconsequential of their whims has the force of a command.

All his life Lear had been addressed in the supplicating language of need. Now, for the first time, he must use the language himself. Its taste is bitter. He discovers that need may seem reason enough when spoken to the self alone, but when spoken to the pitiless and powerful, it must indeed be reasoned. His daughters’ demand for reasons is so stinging an intimation of his new powerlessness that he cannot avow or accept it. He veers uncertainly between the usages of a king and the entreaties of a subject. Like a king, he says he has a claim that brooks no argument, and yet, like a subject, he is obliged to call his claim a need; thus he is entrained against his will to justify it, to offer reasons.

In what does the force of his claim reside? You are my daughters, he says, and a daughter does not reason her father’s needs; to do so would be to deny the reality of familial obligation. To ask for reasons is not merely insulting or disobedient; it puts into question the plain meaning of family duty.

What Lear says he needs – a retinue of knights – counts as a need only within a given time and place, a given zone of safety guaranteed by a...