Levinas' "Glory" and the Clinical Encounter
Mark Kissler, MS, M.D., Resident Physician, University of Colorado School of Medicine
If the account that medicine often makes of itself—that it is “fundamentally scientific”—is taken to be true, it has important consequences. Conceived in this light, medicine often attempts to totalize the relational, corporeal, and sacred: all may be reduced, in medicine’s eyes, to therapeutic modalities, facets or enhancements of medicine’s scientific cure. This cure is a cold one, for science is more equipped to preserve bare function than to invite healing. If science remains fundamental, even the increasing efforts to make medicine more “human” are fated to become mere adjuvants that attempt to justify their existence within medicine with evidence of what Jeffrey Bishop calls, echoing Alasdair MacIntyre, “efficiency and effectiveness.”
It is difficult to challenge this state of affairs, and to bear witness to the ways that the relational, the embodied, and the sacred elements of our being do not serve science (or medicine) but instead are served by it. How do we turn our eyes to God, even in the midst of our medical science? The difficulty stems in part from the fact that this turning is hard to express—we approach the Infinite with language, but the Infinite exceeds us, resisting our attempts to thematize it, (or worse) to make it “useful.” This paper proposes that, in order to begin to turn the critique of medicine’s totalizing power to a positive offering, we may have recourse to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and in particular, his phenomenology of glory.
This paper explicates Levinas’ use of “glory” in Otherwise than Being, with particular attention to his concept of the Infinite and how the Infinite glorifies itself through the “Saying” of the subject (that is, the part of speech that is the opening to the other, as opposed to the “said,” which is the content of speech). Levinas has a keen sense of the ways that we may participate, even in our finitude, in the Infinite—and this is relevant to the clinical encounter, especially for those who are concerned with ways that we recognize the presence of God as we reach out to heal. For Levinas, glory is the trace of the Infinite as it passes through our lived, embodied experience. And for him, it is not just inadvisable but impossible for medicine to be “fundamentally scientific.” Instead, the call of the Other is the foundation, calling us out of ourselves and only then giving rise, by virtue of our responsibility, to science, medicine, and dialogue.
Levinas approaches the Infinite in a way that may be closer to prophecy than to philosophy, allowing his words to “unsay” themselves, and his sense of reality to overflow his themes. Perhaps by lingering ourselves in the glory of the Infinite, whether in reading, writing, contemplation, hospitality, or dialogue, we may also become prophets of a sort, transforming the clinical encounter, and becoming more willing to reach out in vulnerability and wonder to the other in all his or her inexpressible dignity.
If the account that medicine often makes of itself—that it is “fundamentally scientific”—is taken to be true, it has important consequences. Conceived in this light, medicine often attempts to totalize the relational, corporeal, and sacred: all may be reduced, in medicine’s eyes, to therapeutic modalities, facets or enhancements of medicine’s scientific cure. This cure is a cold one, for science is more equipped to preserve bare function than to invite healing. If science remains fundamental, even the increasing efforts to make medicine more “human” are fated to become mere adjuvants that attempt to justify their existence within medicine with evidence of what Jeffrey Bishop calls, echoing Alasdair MacIntyre, “efficiency and effectiveness.”
It is difficult to challenge this state of affairs, and to bear witness to the ways that the relational, the embodied, and the sacred elements of our being do not serve science (or medicine) but instead are served by it. How do we turn our eyes to God, even in the midst of our medical science? The difficulty stems in part from the fact that this turning is hard to express—we approach the Infinite with language, but the Infinite exceeds us, resisting our attempts to thematize it, (or worse) to make it “useful.” This paper proposes that, in order to begin to turn the critique of medicine’s totalizing power to a positive offering, we may have recourse to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and in particular, his phenomenology of glory.
This paper explicates Levinas’ use of “glory” in Otherwise than Being, with particular attention to his concept of the Infinite and how the Infinite glorifies itself through the “Saying” of the subject (that is, the part of speech that is the opening to the other, as opposed to the “said,” which is the content of speech). Levinas has a keen sense of the ways that we may participate, even in our finitude, in the Infinite—and this is relevant to the clinical encounter, especially for those who are concerned with ways that we recognize the presence of God as we reach out to heal. For Levinas, glory is the trace of the Infinite as it passes through our lived, embodied experience. And for him, it is not just inadvisable but impossible for medicine to be “fundamentally scientific.” Instead, the call of the Other is the foundation, calling us out of ourselves and only then giving rise, by virtue of our responsibility, to science, medicine, and dialogue.
Levinas approaches the Infinite in a way that may be closer to prophecy than to philosophy, allowing his words to “unsay” themselves, and his sense of reality to overflow his themes. Perhaps by lingering ourselves in the glory of the Infinite, whether in reading, writing, contemplation, hospitality, or dialogue, we may also become prophets of a sort, transforming the clinical encounter, and becoming more willing to reach out in vulnerability and wonder to the other in all his or her inexpressible dignity.