Below the Radar Transcript
B-Side, Track 1: The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common — with Alphonso Lingis
Speakers: Samantha Walters, Am Johal, Alphonso Lingis
[theme music]
Samantha Walters 0:04
Hello listeners! I’m Sam with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of the Below the Radar B-Sides, we were joined by Alphonso Lingis, who was a renowned philosopher, writer, and professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University. Alphonso passed away in May, 2025, and we’re pleased to share this conversation where he discussed his recent writing, some of the thinkers who were important to his work, and notions of community and mortality. Enjoy the episode!
[theme music fades]
Am Johal 0:45
Hello. Welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted you could join us again this week. We're here with Alphonso Lingis, welcome Alphonso.
Alphonso Lingis 0:54
Thank you very much.
Am Johal 0:56
Yeah, wondering if we can start with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Alphonso Lingis 1:01
Yeah. I taught for most of my career at Penn State University in the philosophy department. And I published, I don't remember, I think, something like 14 books.
Am Johal 1:11
Yeah, and so I suppose you've been retired for some time, but I imagine you haven't stopped writing or thinking or being involved in things. I'm wondering what keeps you busy these days?
Alphonso Lingis 1:22
Well, I just now published with the art museum of Lithuania, a book of essays on art and also a book of photographs.
Am Johal 1:34
Oh, fantastic, fantastic. Yeah. I wanted to begin with, you know, one of the books that you did a number of years ago, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. I've been lately working with a friend of mine on some work around friendship and community. My friend Matt Hern, who really enjoys your work and wondering to speak just a little bit about where that project started for you? You know, all of these debates or discussions around friendship and community, oftentimes are talking about the other, or the stranger. It sort of goes back to the beginnings of Greek philosophy in many ways. Plato and Aristotle talk about the others coming as well. And I'm wondering, you know the debates that happened in the early 80s with people like Jean-Luc Nancy's book, The Inoperative Community. There was Blanchot's book, The Unavowable Community, Agamben's The Coming Community, a number of those. And I'm wondering, you know, how you situate your own work in relation to some of the writing that was happening at the time. Because, you know, Jean-Luc Nancy, he passed away a couple of years ago, and one of the things he said when I interviewed him was that, we still have not solved the problem of community, of how it comes together, what's inside and outside community. Just because a community exists today doesn't mean it will be obliterated— that it could be obliterated tomorrow, like what we hold together, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a forever thing. And I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to how your idea of community has evolved. And it was interesting speaking with Jean-Luc Nancy, just because you know, he had been writing on this for 40, 50 years, and here he is close to passing away a few months— It was about four months before he passed away, and he said, like we have yet to resolve this problem. And I wanted to kind of pose that question to you about how you think about it, and the continuing issues of the inside, the outside, the other.
Alphonso Lingis 3:53
And those three authors that you mentioned are very important to me. Yeah, I think even the understanding of what community is, is so far weak, since most of our attention has been directed to the political structure, the nation, or the economy. And so we have a clear, rational understanding of these but communities which exist in our work, among our workers, among our ethnic groups, people of our language, people of our religion, have a completely different structure. There the profit motive is not operative. So the the understanding of these communities, I think, is not very well understood so far. It's not really so far, focused understanding. I think there is some understanding in anthropology, because one understands that every society develops their own language, or even every subgroup, like inner city gangs, develop their own language, their own dress, values and so on. Their own forms of relationship and that they're always developed aware of other groups. I mean, even the most isolated group, like the Amish or the ultra orthodox Jews or isolated groups in the Amazon jungle are aware of other groups around them, and they borrow for them to some measure, although the things they take in, ways of thinking and ways of acting, they take in for themselves. They do adapt. They do integrate it into the cultural structure they already have. A group, in this way, a society produces its own identity, its own psychological and social identity in contrast with others. There's always, of course, a tendency to think that my way of life, my way of thinking, is good. It's good for me. It's, you know, that's my experience, and that the adjacent ones therefore are less good. So there was always this, I think, almost intrinsic tendency to be antagonistic to the other groups. This is a major issue, a major problem, and yeah, theoretically we don't really understand.
Am Johal 6:43
Now, there's some thinkers today. I'm thinking about people like Achille Mbembe, who's at Wits University in South Africa, originally from Cameroon, and he talks a lot about the planetary notions of a kind of borderless world, this idea that the planetary or the earth as a collective inheritance, and this notion of nations and borders and things, you know, he talks sort of about the notion of the right to move, that human beings have always moved through spaces across the earth, and that these entanglements of borders, that the accident of one's birth shouldn't determine where they can move and travel through and that we already have an inequality built in right at the moment of birth, depending on where it is, what condition, what site we're born in. And so wondering if you can speak kind of to that notion of how the notion of the planetary movement and how that could relate to community.
Alphonso Lingis 7:48
And I do think it's not adequately understood that all the great urban centers of civilization have always been multicultural. You know, that has been, that was true of Egypt, of, you know, Greece, of Lhasa. There were specific communities in there that maintained their own identity, the community, they maintained their own language and religion and so on, integrated into city, which was dominantly of another culture. I guess we all know that, you know, the Jews in North Africa were integrated for centuries in those cities, until the Six Day War. And there was never, there were not pilgrims in Africa, that they occurred in Europe. So it does seem like, historically, we can see that people have maintained, have been able to maintain positive relations with other communities. Well, now, immigration is certainly going to massively continue and increase as a result of global warming making many zones of the planet, you know, less inhabitable, and the draw of differences in economic conditions. So it will certainly increase. On the other hand, so many communities have become somehow International, like engineers, scientists, media people and so on. So there is more and more presence of people from other communities within one's own community. In the United States, people who have specialized skills in technology or communications are welcomed in California, wherever they come from. So I think that there— and of course, travel has got us more and more in contact with one another. So I do think there is a kind of global movement toward community networks that extend across borders and across nations.
Am Johal 10:12
I wanted to speak to you a little bit about your motto from your book Abuses in 1994, this line about the unlived life is not worth examining, which is, you know, similar to the Socratic point that the unexamined life is not worth living. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit.
Alphonso Lingis 10:34
Well, there is certainly, I think, in our education and our culture, kind of primacy of the normal. And I think in our culture, our families tend to want their children to get into professions that are safe and normal and secure and so on like that. So I think... I just read a philosophy book by a very intelligent man, but all his examples were about things that an academic would experience, you know. It was very closed, in that way. So I think what has, starting with Nietzsche, there's more attention to people who are extraordinary, who in any way do unusual things. Especially in France, there was this strong interest, starting with people like Artaud and people who lived half insane or more, and also the outsider art movement, which started preoccupied with the art of the insane, which has become a major interest in a certain tradition. So I think that in our tradition now, we have tended more and more, intellectually, philosophically, to look at people who live extraordinary lives.
Am Johal 12:08
Now, you've remarked before about the question of that our self is bound up with the notion around the question, how good is it to be alive? You know, who am I that declares the goodness of life? What is the good life? In many ways. But you know, we do live today in a technological age where we're constantly reproducing the self in a technologically mediated world. I'm wondering if you could speak to that notion of, you know, if we're talking about, how good is it to be alive, but we live in this technologically mediated world that gives us, perhaps new freedoms, but also new enclosures. And what are the questions that come up for you in terms of the way human life has been altered into this technological frame, which I guess in many ways has been an ongoing and accelerating direction since the beginning of the 20th century.
Alphonso Lingis 13:12
Wow, big issue. Yeah, well, certainly we have ourselves changed as a result of communication technology. I mean, our talk patterns are quite different since the Internet and computers, we will certainly continue to do so. When our technological world recreates our environment, so that we will be far removed from the entire environment which we ourselves go into. I think, for example— well, I think both ways, it always seems to me that there's a strong draw toward nature, toward going to nature, and living in nature, and that, in some way that strikingly continued. I mean, there are more people now engaged in photographing nature and bird watching than there are people that hunt, that, you know, buy guns to hunt in nature. So with the growing, on the one hand, the growing sort of separation from nature, we now live in cities we don't see any wildlife except pigeons and rats. On the other hand, this attraction to go back to nature continues very strong, and perhaps it's become more pure. My father was a farmer, but so much of his dealing with animals was commercial, you know, and he was not all that interested in wildlife and things like that. So I think that our interest in nature may have become more pure and more intense.
Am Johal 15:12
I know that throughout your work, there's a number of thinkers who have influenced you, but wondering if you could just speak a little bit to the work of Emmanuel Levinas and how his work has affected your own, or impacted your own work.
Alphonso Lingis 15:30
He was very important to me, and I think the center of it is his isolation of the experience of being faced. Being contested, being intruded upon, being appealed to by another. He sort of centered— that to him was this fundamental ethical experience. So for him, the ethical experience is not the moral laws, the universal moral laws that we can devise and so on, but rather this very concrete ethical experience which exists in— and I would, I came to argue, which could be extended beyond humans, be extended across species also because one could also be contested and confronted with deer, with a seagull and so on. I think Levinas was the most original and most forceful ethical thinker of our generation.
Am Johal 16:42
Yeah, he definitely, continues to remain relevant. Wondering there's in some of your work you talk about mortality, like the human relationship to death, and you're what, roughly 90 years old. So you must think about it as well. I'm wondering how your thought have changed around notions of human mortality, but also in how communities come to terms with death.
Alphonso Lingis 17:19
Yeah, I was originally very strongly affected by Heidegger. This concept that to realize that one is mortal, that one will be cast into nothingness, reacts upon oneself, and that one senses oneself, what one's own possibilities, one's own capacities, and that is for Heidegger, the beginning of living on one's own, not living controlled and controlled by cultural models and people. As I went on, you know, I I found Heidegger's doctrine weak in many ways. He says in his essay on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, that he says that when one confronts one's death, it's one's own death that one feels in anxiety. And to the death of other people is for us, a spectacle. He talks in that story of the people who go to the death of their— funeral of their friend, and come back reassured that we are alive, you know, and that that person has simply become an immobile corpse. But that I thought was weak. I thought that with feeling, or when I feel myself vulnerable and mortal, I come to understand, like not before, the suffering and mortality of other people, and that when I die, I die as anyone dies. My own death is not individualizing in that way, I die with others and as others die. So I wanted to emphasize this essential, we could say, community in being mortal. This is a business that I've been trying to think about quite a lot recently is that I think this idea that when you die, you become nothing, really isn't true, because the dead are with us for a while. And I think we have to think about this understanding of the way they are with us. Of course, it's in some ways they're with us, through their commands, through their advice, their orders that continue to speak to us after their well, they they're, you know, I obeyed their orders and their injunctions when I didn't see them, you know, when I only spoke to them on telephone. And now when they're no longer alive and I don't see it, it's not essentially different. So their advice, their instructions, their values, continue to guide me and order me. So I think that this sense of being there, which is not like a physical being there, but it's also not simply imagination. It's not simply that I construct this for myself, because in thinking of them, I think of them the way they were and what they said and what they did. And that continues to affect me and guide me.
Alphonso Lingis 20:47
The whole question of an afterlife continues to puzzle me because on the one hand, it's so universal and so ancient. On the other hand, it's often not like, like Christians, imagine it. You know, the soul, the same soul that was alive, is there, still there in another world, in heaven and so on. Very often, it's not that. I was thinking, for example, in the island of Bali. In Bali... Like in our culture, when a child is born, we think of him as Joe's son, Joe's daughter. But in Bali, it's the reverse. The newborn child has a strong identity and gives identity to the parents. So the father would now be Joe's father, you know, and the grandfather would be Joe's father's father. So while they're alive, they become sort of, for example, the elders become sort of categories, not so much concrete people, but their identity is constructed through the identity of the dawn of the child. I think that that would be a clue, perhaps in many cultures that they really thought of the dead as sort of categories that protect them, guide, rather than as concrete individuals that still subsist the way they were on Earth. Yeah, I think we could start a whole rethinking of the way the dead have been conceived in all the cultures that have some kind of belief in afterlife. Well, for example, Ancient Egypt, especially the ruling class were immortal, but also animals were mummified for the next life. So that's a very curious situation.
Am Johal 22:57
Alphonso, you mentioned you have this book that you're working on, the Lithuania photographs, but wondering if you could speak a little bit to the kinds of things you're working on now?
Alphonso Lingis 23:09
You know, almost all my books have been collections of essays, and essays that usually started either in a class lecture or a public lecture of some kind, or article. And so now I have 150 pages that are, they're as good as I can make them, you know. And I think maybe the best piece was recently published in the journal, what is it called Graduate Philosophy Journal of the New School, and it's on memory and forgetting— was a special issue on memory. This is a piece that has lots of different quite separate strands. And for me, the most striking part in the first part is psychoanalysis, which has so dominated our contemporary thinking of memory. So the central issue in psychoanalysis is that our neuroses are due to repressed childhood traumas. I discovered in my research that, in fact, real traumas are not repressed. And neither childhood traumas or wartime traumas, which is the second class that Freud examined are remembered accurately in detail. You know, in the 80s, there was this whole culture of recovering childhood memories that were for the most part induced by culture and by the therapist who were doing the investigation. So this was a big intellectual change for me. To think that our whole understanding of our psychological problems since Freud has now been shaken by the repudiation of this idea that they're all due to repressed childhood traumas. And so now, for example, in the Veterans Association Hospitals, they don't use classical psychoanalytic method. They don't use it to ever to revive and catharsis the trauma, the war trauma. They rather instruct people on how to deal with your situation now, with what you remember and learn new ways of living after trauma. So, you know, it's, a whole different experience. The second part of this piece was specially devoted to collective memory, which is not really memory strictly speaking, it's rather a narrative which is constructed, and constructed for different purposes. So we always had this cliche that societies that kept the past are determined to relive them. I was really struck by a book called In Praise of Forgetting by David Rieff, who is Susan Sontag's son. He was a war correspondent, and throughout his life, in many of the worst conflicts. And so many of these conflicts were emotionally and intellectually based on ancient grievances. Grievances that the present generation had no part in, or their grandparents or their, you know, great grandparents had no part in. But these grievances are sort of collectively recalled to justify current antagonisms. That led me to understanding, for example, what happened in Germany after the war. So very famously, all the reporters who went to Germany after the defeat, reported there were no Nazis, nobody admitted being an active part of the Nazi party. So there was this sort of mass collective denial that it was only in a small group around Hitler, that duped the rest of us. And then they taught their children, you know, that they had no part in it, and then in the 60s, many of their children discovered, began to discover what their parents and parent's generation had actually been doing during the Nazi period. And finally, it's the second generation, the third generation, who were able, psychologically and culturally able, to begin to examine the Nazi period with some kind of objectivity. And so, that is kind of puzzling, because it's sort of theoretically puzzling, because we've been taught that you had to face the past, you had to discover the truth, that truth will make you free, and so on. But as a matter of fact, what happened was the experience of the recovery, of the economic recovery, the vast number of men who were either killed or disabled men, women massively entered the labor force, the great number of immigrants, there were German populations from Poland, from Hungary, and all these other countries who were brought in by the thousands, with a different German experience, who then mingled with the population, that began to give the general population a different view. And also the success, the economic success, led people to accede to the Democratic state more and more. So it's interesting that the recovery didn't really go through a phase of facing the past, you know, to learn the truth and so on.
Alphonso Lingis 29:08
I earlier studied the war in Cambodia. And there again, the demand of the outside community to bring the past to trial and expose the truth and the limits of that. Yeah, I've been think a lot about reconciliation. You know, since the second world war most all the wars have been civil wars. And they typically go on for 10 years and then often restart. And so that seems to me the most urgent and most intractable political issue of our time. So the task of reconciliation inevitably involves some kind of amnesty, some time of forgetting the crimes of a lot of people. I mean, one doesn't go around in, well, in Germany, they did the Nuremberg trials, but they didn't go around and arrest everybody who was involved in the Nazi party. So there's always a kind of forgetting, a kind of amnesty, and an effort to start again. So I think this forgetting is an essential part of our effort to live together. I think that's true on a very personal level, you know, of all the sleights, and harms that I may feel from my friends, I don't want them to confess and ask for forgiveness and apologize. If they're friends, if I like you, I want to be with you. Let's forget that, you know, I think that's on an individual level, that's true.
Am Johal 31:00
Alphonso, anything you'd like to add?
Alphonso Lingis 31:03
I guess it is one idea about friendship. And it's a new idea for me that, that hope is an essential part of it. You know, I think in my own in my own life, there's always hope in almost everything I undertake, because I don't control the natural environment, social environment in which I act. So there will be some degree of hope. But usually, we don't realize it, we don't think about it, it's it's, you know, minor. And it's only on sort of dramatic occasions when I get sick with a serious illness. And when I decided to pick up everything, and moved to California, when I decided to enroll in a medical program, and so on that I really feel strong presence of hope. But it seems to me with our friends, hope is much more present. And we hope that they will succeed, and there'll be a good life and the children will be happy, and so on. And I think the hope is more dominant, because there's less than we can do about it. In our own situation if I want to go to graduate school, I knew a lot, I don't know if I'll succeed, but I can do a lot. For sure I succeed with their friends, if they get into terminal illness. I mean, we could console them, we can encourage them to take the chemotherapy and so on. But it's limited, you know, it's indirect, the influence that we would have. So I've come to feel that hope is such a strong presence. It's also it's also there with our children. I mean, I didn't want to talk about relationship with children, but you know, it's always there with children you hope they're going to do well, they succeed and so on. So hope is such a strong element in our experience that I think it would be well to, to think about when you're a student at the University, they've counselors to, to figure out what your talents are, what your likes are, and then to where the jobs are, and where the opportunities are. But they make it it's almost as though, you know, you could just fit in, be predicted. There's so much hope in our lives and so much hope in our lives with our friends.
Am Johal 33:28
Alphonso, it's been so wonderful to speak with you. Thank you so much for taking the time to share some thoughts. It's really been a pleasure to have you on Below the Radar.
Alphonso Lingis 33:40
And it's a pleasure for me. And I just discovered your book, you know, when I was looking so I'm going to order it and read it right away.
Am Johal 33:49
Oh, fantastic. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much, and have yourself a wonderful day. It was great to be able to speak with you.
Alphonso Lingis 33:57
Thank you.
[theme music]
Samantha Walters 34:02
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast originally created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. The Below the Radar B-Sides are supported by Vancity Credit Union. Thanks for listening to this episode with Alphonso Lingis. Find out more about his work in the show notes. Thanks for tuning in!