Opinion | Faces in a Nursing Home

HOUSTON — Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas died in Paris. Born in Lithuania and naturalized in France, Levinas had led weekly Torah readings until shortly before his death just shy of his 90th birthday. I often thought about his age this spring as I worked as a volunteer in a nursing home. Not only was Levinas as old as several of the residents who I helped to feed, but he was engaged in an activity — being with others — denied to the residents since the pandemic burst into their lives. In both his person and his principles, Levinas offers a guide for the crises that now threaten nursing homes.

“Le visage,” or the face, happens to be the very grounding for the ethics proposed by Levinas. Indeed, what he understands by the words “face” and “ethics” have little to do with their common usage. For Levinas, the face is not the sum total of physical pieces — nose, eyes, ears, mouth, etc. — that we present to the world. Instead, the face, as Levinas frames it, marks what is utterly other than those specific physical features. As he declared in his book “Totality and Infinity,” the face is the naked and living presence of the Other.

Think of it this way: The highway I take to work is generally not a place for moral quandaries. That is, until I exit, stop at the first intersection, and face an ethical impasse at the underpass in the presence of panhandlers. Face: There is no better verb, if only because it is also the noun that captures what is truly at stake. I do my very best to evade these face-offs. I look at the panhandler as I might look at faces in a police lineup. I try to assess their situation, comparing the pleas on their signs with the clothing on their bodies or expressions on their faces.

And yet, there she is, a human being, navigating the torrent of traffic as she slowly works the line of cars. Her cheeks are livid, her hair is unwashed, her eyes try to fix on my eyes. She wants to be seen. Will I allow myself to see her? Or will I allow the inevitable bottleneck of questions and rationalizations to come in between us before driving away?

In this moment, Levinas would argue, the panhandler’s real face is revealed to me. It is a face “that cannot be assembled,” like a puzzle, into a recognizable type. It is a face that I cannot colonize by assigning it an identity. It is a face that, if only for a moment, shears away my own self and shoves me before my responsibilities toward humankind. It is a face, finally, that in Levinas’s words — “déchire le sensible” — strips what is sensible and reveals what is transcendental.

We can think of it in an even more disturbing way. A group of Russians, survivors of the German siege of Stalingrad, watch with mounting anger as a line of captured German soldiers carry dead bodies out of a building’s basement. Staring at a broken officer cradling the limp body of a young girl in his arms, an enraged woman steps from the crowd and approaches the German with a brick clutched in her hand. Rather than hitting the officer, she suddenly plunges her hand into her pocket, pulls out a lump of bread, gives it to the officer and quickly walks away.

This scene, taken from Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate,” was often cited by Levinas as an example of how the face upends our habitual state of being. At that “extraordinary” moment, Levinas suggests, the woman faced someone who was no longer a German officer — here again, the sensible is stripped away — and is revealed as Other: a face that constitutes all the ethics we need by “revealing the vulnerability of the outsider and our common humanity.” She stuns him with the bread rather than the brick not because of who she is, but because of who he is.

Crucially, this ethical stance, unlike Christian or Kantian ethics, reflects an asymmetrical relationship. We must care for others not because we are all equal, but because we are not at all equal. It is not a case of “He’s not heavy, he’s my brother,” than “He is heavy because he is more than my brother.” We move from the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am,” to the Levinasian “You are, therefore I am.” When faced by the Other, Levinas concludes, “I am infinitely responsible.”

In the ruins of Stalingrad, the German officer exercised what Levinas calls “height” over the Russian woman. Paradoxically, the woman needs the officer even more than he needs her because his needs save her from her own self and its habit of reducing the world to her own concerns.

While I pushed carts laden with dinner trays at the nursing home, I often asked myself what would change if I responded as Levinas believes I should to the “height” the residents held over me. It was not an idle question. The fact that I was serving meals reflected a crisis endemic to nursing homes across the country: Rarely have so many depended on so few for so much.

Since mid-March, when they locked their doors to all visitors, long-term care facilities in Texas have created the cruelest of contradictions. In order to defend the physical health of their residents, the residences are damaging their emotional health. Confronted with a dizzying surge in Covid-19 cases — since the start of the pandemic, some 4,000 Texas nursing home residents have died and thousands more have been infected — administrators were understandably fearful. Overnight, the word “visitation” had lurched from its everyday meaning of a family member coming to call to its archaic sense of divine wrath coming to afflict.

But their success in stemming the pandemic’s onslaught has created — to use the state’s own phrase — a metastasizing “failure to thrive” among the residents. How could it be otherwise? At my understaffed nursing home, my co-workers struggled to meet the basic demands of the residents: cleaning and changing, shifting and shuttling, serving and supporting them. Or, indeed, understanding them. When residents leave their rooms, they must wear masks. Their voices, already weak, are even more muffled.

And their faces are partly hidden. Back in the room, though, those same faces — revealing an infinite variety of tints and textures, shapes and sizes — also remind me of my responsibilities. But how to fulfill them? Caught between the resident I was with who alternated between nibbling and yodeling and the sight of all the trays I still had to deliver, Levinas’s rule of infinite responsibility toward the Other struck me as infinitely impractical.

Still, a rule may be impractical, yet still relevant. As Levinas would remind us, duty toward the Other applies not just to nursing home workers, but also to state and federal institutions. They have the same duty toward residential workers that the workers have toward their residents. By increasing financial support to these residences — which operate on razor-thin margins — these authorities would help enable the residences, by increasing the number and salaries of their staffs, to acknowledge the ethical authority that their residents have over all of us. If, as Levinas declared, “the future is the Other” then we all have a duty toward those we are consigning to the past.

Robert Zaretsky is a professor at the University of Houston and the author of, most recently, “Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment,” and the forthcoming “The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas.”

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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