The other day on LinkedIn I came across Fra Humanomics til Comics, a fascinating set of 7 minute talks (some in English, some in Danish), given by 30 scholars and writers to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Frederik Stjernfelt’s achievements as a university professor.
As a whole, the various speakers* inspired me to reflect as follows:
If between the Self and the Other lies our second skin, i.e. textiles or clothing, then our most intimate and sacred acts of love involve our own skin on the skin of our loved one, as in a mother breastfeeding her baby, a father or other adult with an all too prematurely born infant placed chest to chest, or two human beings expressing their love for one another – without a second skin in the way.
Beyond this intimate sphere, we human beings need our second skin for practical as well as symbolic reasons when I/we meet you/them in public, although exceptions abound throughout history across the world.
Loincloth clad (male) farmers toiling away in the hot sun; sari clad ladies with legs and chest modestly covered but leaving their midriff, an arm and hair gloriously uncovered; all considered seemly in one society or in one time, while schoolgirls are reprimanded for baring their midriff in a crop top; an innocent girl is murdered for not having her hair adequately covered in other societies and other times.
The dilemmas are many. How much or how little to cover? When does practicality give way to modesty? If a loving Creator gave us life, why do believers feel the need to cover up the Lord’s creation? Why does a gawky adolescent shy about their growing body need to suffer the enforced group shower after school sports? Why are various parts of the body considered taboo in various parts of the world at various times? Who decides what one should wear?
Today, the all enveloping clothes covering hair and face, worn not by choice against harsh climatic conditions and practicality, but enforced by others on hapless and helpless women and girls, leads to their profound loss of Self and identity in the public space.
The reverse is also true. The enforced act of depriving other people of their clothing can again be a prelude to the loss of life. When in February 1942, many elderly women prisoners from the concentration camp Ravensbrück were forced to walk in the biting cold along muddy roads to a nearby ”recreation camp”, the Jugendlager Ûckermark, they would not have imagined that even their tattered winter coats would be taken off them, before the gas chambers, or the cold and starvation took their lives. The human spirit, however, does not disappear into the swamp, even in the darkest times. A woman who kept her wits about her, a Danish resistance courier by the name of Ellen Wilhelmine Nielsen (who back in October 1943 had sheltered and helped Jews to escape, but who by a terrible irony was later forced to work in the gas chambers) quickly tore off the lining of her coat and hid it in her trousers before delivering her coat. And several around her followed her example.**
Today, it is with a sense of irony that one reads the third chapter of Stefan Zweig’s autobiography Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday) where he reflects on the clothing worn by women in his youth in the pre-WWI Hapsburg Empire, and how they reflected the hypocrisy and morality of the times. How these very same mothers, sisters, and friends of yesteryear from the Jewish community of Austria, who were used to being modest in their clothing would have felt a few decades later, when they were forced to remove all their clothes by concentration camp staff before being murdered in the Shoah or Holocaust during WWII is a question that is too painful to contemplate. Their clothes may have been forcibly removed for practical reasons to check for hidden valuables and for reuse, but humiliation and shaming, too, would have been a consideration in this terrible situation when human beings refused to recognize others as equals and deserving of life.
The sump that humankind was dragged back into during the Holocaust years and indeed in all acts of genocide since then, not to speak of territorial gain through war and conquest for the greater glory of some imagined community, then and today, is a denial of the common good, the goodness of life. Instead it supports the theory of life being nasty, brutal and short, as mentioned by Thomas Hobbes in his book The Leviathan back in 1651, and as sadly practised even today by monstrous regimes.
To this, Paul Ricoeur proposed an alternative hypothesis – good will – in a speech to the US Library of Congress in 2004. He believed that reciprocity was a gift that was fundamental to human history. Here each human being would generously recognize and acknowledge the existence of the Other. He argues that the human self, the capable human being as the agent of history, asserts its identity through five capacities: I can say; I can do; I can recount; I can take responsibility; I can promise. But these capacities are meaningless without the recognition of an Other.***
How do we stop the tyranny of the powerful dragging us back into the sump? The answer seems to be in acts of individuals resistance. Some individuals under tyranny fight bravely for the right of people to choose for themselves, and do so every painful day as human beings like Ellen Wilhelmine Nielsen and countless others have done, throughout history, and indeed suffered for their deeds, so others, too, can be free. Can we who are free to choose, because somewhere in the past others have generously fought on our behalf with their lives, not lend a helping hand, however small, to help and support those who do not enjoy this freedom? This is how we all, as human beings, ultimately keep out of the sump.
*Especially my old employer and mentor Marie-Louise Nosch, but also speakers such as Dan Zahavi, Vincent Hendricks, and Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini.
** Kate Fleron, ”I tysk tilintetgørelseslejr” in Kvinder i Modstandskampen, 1945, p.200.
***Paul Ricouer, Time and Narrative, 1983, vol.1, p. 55; “Asserting Personal Capacities and Pleading for Mutual Recognition”, Kluge speech, US Library of Congress, 8th December 2004; and Course of Recognition, 2005, pp. 225-246.
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