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Human Dignity Between Kitsch and Deification1

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Human Dignity Between Kitsch and Deification1 essays Human Dignity between Kitsch 1 and Deification Avishai Margalit Horizontal Honor and Vertical Honor What is so great about human beings that each and every one of them deserves moral respect? Strangely enough, respect for humans is like aristocratic respect, honoring you for who you are, not for what you do, and who you are depends on your family tree. In the case of humans, the family concerned is, so to speak, the family of humanity. Yet there is a vast difference between social aristocratic honor and moral honor (respect) for humans as humans. Social honor is typified by two dimensions: the vertical honor you owe to those above you in rank and the horizontal honor you owe to your equals. Moral honor has only one dimension: the horizontal. This respect is extended to all humans, even the cruelest criminals and the most mentally challenged. Even human corpses are to be shown respect. Dead bodies, even those of our enemies, are not ani- mal cadavers. They are expected to be treated differently, a difference that manifests respect. There may be a serious tension between social honor and moral respect, for we are often called to morally respect individuals whom we intensely disrespect socially. The poet 1 An earlier version of this essay was delivered as the 2004–5 Litowitz Lecture hosted by the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale University on October 14, 2004. Having taught at Hebrew University for many years, most recently as the Schulman Professor of Philosophy, Avishai Margalit is currently serving as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of Idolatry (with Moshe Halbertal, 1992); The Decent Society (1996); Views in Reviews: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews (1998); The Ethics of Memory (2002); and Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Buruma, 2004). 7 THE HEDGEHOG Review / fall 07 W. H. Auden composed an epigraph to his 1930 poems “let us honour if we can / the vertical man / Though we value none / but the horizontal one.”2 Did he mean that we can honor only the dead, the horizontal, and are incapable of honoring the living, the ones who are still vertical? Or perhaps he had an erotic private joke in mind. I do not know. But my essay is about the reverse of Auden’s verses—“let us honor if we can the horizontal man, though we value none but the vertical one”—meaning, let us deal with the purely horizontal honor that is moral respect, even though it is vertical, social honor in which we often indulge. The Religious Answer What justifies respect for human beings as human beings? One influential answer to this vexing question is that human beings as such do not deserve respect. The source of respect for humans rests somewhere else; it is only because humans are created in the image of their creator that they deserve respect. Since God is the sole creator, God, and only God, deserves veneration. Respect for humans is merely a reflected glory, ema- nating from the glory of God. So the answer to the question—what is so great about humans that makes them deserve respect?—is that there is nothing great about humans. God is great, and humans are created in the image of the great God. But then what is it to be created in the image of God? This remains terribly obscure because, based on traditional readings of the scriptures, God is not supposed to have an image in any literal sense. The idea of being created in the image of God is that there is some unspecified similarity in virtue such that humans are similar to God and this simi- larity reflects glory on human beings. It does not mean a symmetric relation, however. It is like saying that “Tel Aviv is more similar to New York than New York is similar to Tel Aviv.” Similarity, as Thomas of Aquinas tells us, is a non-symmetric relation. I should add that the idea of humans deserving respect for being created in the image of God is backed by a powerful myth of origin, which tells us that humanity descended from one couple that was created by God. Hence, respect for being created in the image of God is extended to all humans because we are descendents of that first primordial couple. All humans thus constitute one extended family, the family of humanity. The universalistic reading of the relevant Biblical verses from the Jewish tradition, based on the view that all humans are created in the image of God, is not shared by all who belong to that tradition. There are very distressing readings, mainly by Jewish mystics, that narrow the category of being a human to being a Jew. Noted among them is the Talmudic saying, attributed to the mystic sage Shimon Bar-Yoahi, “you are called 2 W. H. Auden, Epigraph (1930), Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). 8 HUMAN Dignity between Kitsch AND Deification / margalit humans but the gentiles are not to be called humans.”3 So far we have ascertained a prominent religious justification for respecting humans. Contrary to such an account, humanistic morality does not appeal to the Divine for any moral justification. Humans are the measure of all moral things. Thus, the question of why humans deserve respect is answered in humanistic moral theory by an appeal to humans or to human attributes that provides direct justification, without going through the mediation of something else such as God. The challenge to the humanistic approach is to find a justifying attribute, that is, a good-making feature of humans by virtue of which each and every human being deserves respect. Being human is not usually regarded as good enough to justify respect because it is regarded as a merely descriptive term to designate a biological species and hence has no moral bearing. Against this common view, I maintain that being human is the right title to justify Being human is not usually respect as humans. Moreover, other justifying attributes shoot either too high or too low, whereas being human is regarded as good enough to right on target. An example of shooting too low is respect justify respect… for humans as potential victims. An example of shooting too high is respect for humans as potential moral legisla- tors. Shooting too low involves kitsch; shooting too high involves deification. Both are seductive traps. My concern in this essay is to clarify what I believe these traps to be and to extricate the discussion from some claptraps that go along with it. Moral Kitsch Once, as a young man, I received a present, an album of photographs called The Family of Man, which was fairly popular at the time. The album was based on an exhibition that went under this name in New York and under The Great Family of Man in Paris. In it, people from different races and ethnic groups with exotically varied physiques engaged in what humans all share together: being born, getting married, working, dying, but also laughing while we are still alive. An ashen, wise, old Hungarian Jewish lady who worked with me in a youth village saw the album, leafed through it, and muttered to my astonishment, “this is kitsch.” I was deeply troubled by what she said. Not that I liked the album that much, but I liked the person who gave it to me. Years later, I read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, which discussed The Great Family of Man exhibition in Paris. He objected to the exhibition for postulating Adamism—a human essence underneath superficial, though colorful, diversity. This was not quite the point of my old lady friend. She found The Family of Man, though technically well done, 3 Shimon Bar-Yoahi, Tractate Ybamot 61. The translation is mine. 9 THE HEDGEHOG Review / fall 07 unbearably sentimental. She sensed that kitsch and sentimentally are intimately related. This, in any case, is my point: sentimentality is part and parcel of kitsch. I also claim that sentimentality is bad for art and can be bad for morality. Kitsch, in short, is not merely an epithet for bad taste; it is a term of criticism that should apply equally to art and to morality. There is kitsch art, but there is also kitsch morality. Sentimental humanism, its noble sentiments notwithstanding, is highly ame- nable to the two faces of kitsch: the moral and the aesthetic. Carl Jung wrote in the early 1930s on James Joyce’s Ulysses. He found the “atrophy of feeling” in Ulysses rather refreshing and took it as a sign of Joyce reacting to the “hideous sentimentality” around him. Jung wrote, “There is a good deal of evidence to show that we actually are in a sentimentality hoax of gigantic proportions. Think of the lamentable role of popular sentiment in wartime! Think of our so-called humanitarianism!” And he goes on to write, “sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality.”4 Jung’s metaphorical use of Karl Marx’s division between base and superstructure, ren- dering brutality as the base and sentimentality as its superstructure, makes for a deep observation. It is clear what is wrong with brutality, but what exactly is wrong with sentimentality? An answer to that question will also provide a partial answer to what is wrong with kitsch. For one, sentimentality distorts reality. This does not mean that sentimentality is always and necessarily about something. A tune on the violin or, even better, on the saxophone can be sentimental without being about anything.
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