Abstract
This paper draws on an in-depth phenomenological analysis of some interviews taken from volunteers, inviting them to reflect on their lived experiences of meaningfulness in the context of volunteering and citizenship. It is found that while some testimonies reinforce the standard conceptions of meaningfulness, other testimonies vary from it. The main challenge of this contribution consists in phenomenologically describing this alternative picture of meaningfulness, depicted as the event of wit(h)nessing. In a final part, the authors consider how volunteering is at times especially prone to further experiences of wit(h)nessing.
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Notes
At the time of the conference , Thaddeus Metz’ book , Meaning in Life (2013) was not yet published. It would be interesting to compare the event of wit(h)nessing with what he calls the fundamentality theory.
The workshop Volunteers, Citizenship, Meaningfulness—where this article was a contribution to—was part of a research project on volunteering and victim-offender mediation. During this research project we came across several stories of volunteer victim-offender mediators that experienced the encounters they had with parties as very valuable. This paper elaborates on their intuitions.
Erik Claes, Emilie Van Daele and Nicole Note interviewed 12 volunteers: 5 of them were victim-offender mediators, one volunteered as a peace mediator in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, one was active in palliative care, one volunteered as a telephone counselor at the suicide line, one was active in an organization for people with psychiatric problems, one was active in the Transition Movement, one was an informal carer and one had set up a project to help an extended family in Kinshasa.
The term ‘wit(h)nessing’ was coined by Ettinger (2006).
Levinas, exploring this same non-territory, calls it the experience ‘par excellence’ (2002, p. 27).
To quote Janny, also a volunteer victim-offender mediator: “I get the feeling that I’m good at something. I feel that I can control a certain technique”. Yet other volunteers talk about self-realization that went beyond the acquisition of skills or techniques: “Everybody tries to realize themselves in everything they do. Volunteering helps you realize yourself. This is not bad at all, it is meaningful, at least as long as you keep putting the patient or client first.”
Mike, who likewise volunteers as a victim-offender mediator, is more explicit about this: “Other people shouldn’t serve my needs for a meaningful life. I would be acting out of the wrong reasons.” And Wendy, who is a volunteer in palliative care says: “Volunteering is not something to brag about. It is scary to think that someone would actually do volunteering work to be recognised.”
Other volunteers confirm this. Manou said: “I want to do something that is meaningful for me and also means something for other people.” And Janny: “What steers my motivation is that it has to be socially significant.” It is meaningful to belonging to a group of people who share the same set values, for instance volunteering, and to be engaged with them in meaningful activities.
In that sense passivity as we use it here is not in contradiction to active involvement in projects of worth.
Not all situations of the volunteers reveal the situation of being moved as wit(h)nessing, at least not in this clear way. This is why we concentrate mainly on two volunteers. Other volunteers, such as Janny and Manou very much show a same structure with each other, and both also overlap in important ways with Peter and Ilse. Yet, at this stage of research we are not inclined to include them, for we have not yet enough subtle insights into these differences. Erik Claes (2014) makes a valuable contribution to further unravel these differences.
The deeper nearness or with-ness we try to describe has much in common with Levinas’ concept of proximity. In Otherwise than being or beyond essence Levinas also describes the difference between the narrowing of a geometrical or physical space on the one hand and the ethical proximity on the other hand. Levinas, however, takes a more radical position when he writes that “proximity, as ‘the closer and closer’ becomes the subject”. Proximity in his interpretation is subjectivity (Levinas 1998, p. 82). The difference with our own interpretation is that proximity does not ‘affect’ the subject but ‘becomes’ the subjectivity of the subject itself. In our interpretation, what happens in-between changes us as subjects.
Irigaray says, “Not yet closed upon some meaning, but opening from the one to the other—a between-two” (2002, p. 16).
To Levinas, this impossibility of enclosing the other in the circle of one’s interpretation is ethics. He expresses it as follows: “We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics” (2002, p. 43.). Also, for Levinas, ethics and deep meaningfulness run parallel, in the sense that our spontaneity of enclosing people in a preconceived image is meaningful in a transcendent analogue way, while the opening up of this enclosing is (deeply) meaningful in a transcendental way.
We use the term ‘gut-feeling’ but decidedly, this moment is not a feeling, strictly speaking, for as we remember, at this instant, there are no concepts and no emotions; emotions and concepts follow after another brief moment).
In Otherwise than being Levinas introduces both the notion ‘saying’ and ‘said’. The saying is the ethical openness to the other, the ethical and unique response to the other; while that which is said reduces or encloses the other in a fixed concept. In Levinas’ interpretation the saying describes the subjectivity of the subject, while we try to describe the communication in-between.
What we wish to emphasise here is that the volunteers are well ‘aware’, with a kind of attention that goes beyond his bracketed self, that he comes close to something of the greatest importance.
There are some resemblances with the notion of gift as a non-conscious happening between people, as envisioned by Derrida (2007).
For the idea of breaking point and leading point we have been inspired by Levinas, who says that “the breaking point is the point (...) where essence is exceeded by the infinite. It is the breaking point, but also the binding place; the glow of a trace is enigmatic, equivocal. (...) It cannot serve as the point of departure for a demonstration, which inexorably would bring it into immanence and essence” (1998, p. 12).
As Derrida puts it, in a related context and more evocatively: “the event as event, as absolute surprise, must fall on me. Because if it doesn’t fall on me, it means that I see it coming, that there’s a horizon of expectation. Horizontally, I see it coming, I fore-see it, I fore-say it, and the event is that which can be said [dit] but never predicted [prédit]. A predicted event is not an event. The event falls on me because I don’t see it coming ” (2007, p. 45).
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Note, N., Van Daele, E. Meaningfulness, Volunteering and Being Moved: The Event of Wit(h)nessing. Found Sci 21, 283–300 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9388-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9388-5