I will use the word gestalt to help derive a meaning for family. Gestalt means, “A ‘shape,’ ‘configuration,’ or ‘structure’ which as an object of perception forms a specific whole or unity incapable of expression simply in terms of its parts.”¹ Gestalt psychology arose in the early twentieth century out of a critique of structural thinking that suggested we could break down human perception into component parts. Irvin Rock and Steven Palmer explain:

In particular, the Gestaltists rejected elementarism, a basic Structuralist assumption that complex perceptions could be understood by identifying the elementary parts of experience…overall qualities of an experience that are not inherent in its components... Even the characteristics of a society are distinct from those of the individuals who compose it.²

If there is a gestalt to our experience and society itself is a gestalt, then can we begin to think of family as a gestalt? “What is family?” is the question that I will explore. I suggest that a gestalt can emerge from as few as two persons in a durable ethical space where there is responsibility. Neither needs to be related other than to be members of the human family.

Frederick Perls’s Gestalt Therapy comes out of the humanist psychology movements of the early and middle part of the twentieth century. In some respects, this movement was in reaction to the prescriptive of psychoanalysis that was beginning to receive considerable critique, especially in the 1960s and beyond.³ Perls explains that through Gestalt Therapy, “We are here to promote growth processes and develop the human potential.”⁴ The scope of this study does not permit the analysis of Gestalt Therapy in detail. However, human growth process and human potential are the subjects of this exploration of the human gestalt as ideas that deserve further attention. It is my thesis that the notion of family is a humanism that does not require related individuals. Total strangers can become a familial unit simply through caring, sharing and being responsible. To explain this idea, I turn to Emmanuel Levinas and his ethos of responsibility. However, first I explore a non-relative familial unit from Science fiction, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human.

In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon published the novel More Than Human.⁵ This is a story about ‘deviants’ as society negatively defines the word: cognitively impaired, orphans, sociopaths, abandoned, social outcasts, and abused who find each other and become a human gestalt. Most are children: the abused African American sisters Bonnie and Beanie, the sociopath orphan Gerry, the abandoned Janie, the ‘mongoloid’ Baby—and one adult, Lone, whom Sturgeon calls an idiot. Each of these humans carries the scars of ‘deviancy’ because they do not conform to society’s requirements for able-bodiedness or able-mindedness.⁶ However, each of these ‘deviants’ possesses an extraordinary, even a supernatural talent. Lone can whirl his eyes and not only read other people’s minds, but he can also make them do what he wants. Janie is a telekinetic and can move objects. Bonnie and Beanie teleport from place to place but do so naked. Baby is confined to a bed and will never grow beyond his child-like condition, but he has a computer’s memory and can answer any question. Gerry, like Lone, can read other people’s minds, but he can also erase their memories. Science fiction? Yes, but where Sturgeon goes with these ‘deviant’ characters is important. Working in the extremes of ‘deviancy’ and capability, Sturgeon shows us that: ‘outward appearances are deceiving’. There is more to this than the old saw. These ‘deviants’ become what they themselves coin, the human gestalt. They are greater together than the sum of their parts and because of their individual extraordinary abilities, more than human. Sturgeon emphasizes what the members of the human gestalt can do not what they cannot do. The words ‘dis-ability’ and ‘deviant’ describe deviation from someone’s idea of norm in a negative sense, not in a positive sense. The phrase human gestalt affirms difference in a positive way and serves in a very Heideggerian and Derridan way to put words like deviant and disability under erasure.⁷ The terms (deviant) and (disability) from here forward will be put in parenthesis to show that while these are the words we have, they are put under erasure to suggest that we need either to give these words different meanings or seek ways to eliminate their use.

Sturgeon’s human gestalt is a familial unit even though none of the individuals is related in any way. This is no Pollyanna story of unity against the odds or outlasting the vagaries of society arrayed against them, rather it is a typical familial story of tragedy, spiritual awakening, dissolution, desertion, guilt, and shame. Sturgeon’s human gestalt, despite its capability to become more than the sum of its parts as all families can, suffers. Fundamental to this tale is the notion of caring and sharing in a familial-like unit. Caring and sharing enable the human gestalt, and when this construct becomes impaired because of dissolution of the family and other exigencies, the gestalt diminishes.

From More Than Human we discover that the notion of family can be with others who are not our relation. No family structure is always cohesive and at times is self-destructive, but each is fundamentally a gestalt that can be greater than the sum of its parts. Janie explains what her vision of the human gestalt is through her term, bleshing:

Bleshing, that was Janie’s word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can’t walk and arms can’t think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing,’ but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.⁸

Each character in the story has a role in the blesh which brings these societal outcasts into a construct, a more holistic version of existence that produces what each as an individual cannot become. Together they are not (deviant) as society defines it. In the condition, the durable space that they call the blesh, they also become more than human—a gestalt. However, like all familial units there is tension, and in More Than Human, eventual dissolution of the family unit. Lone dies and the children begin to live with Miss Kew, with whom Lone had become acquainted. Sociopathic Gerry kills Miss Kew because she loves them but tries to change the children to conform to her and society’s expectations. For example, she segregates Bonnie and Beanie from the others as was the custom at the time. Gerry becomes the head after the death of Lone in the construct that Janie calls the blesh, but Gerry leaves and the gestalt becomes less than what it could be. Later, Janie and the others begin a kind of Gestalt therapy, ‘promote growth processes and develop the human potential,’ what we might now call an intervention with Gerry, by recruiting and rehabilitating a new character, Hip, whose memories Gerry has erased. Hip comes with the idea of ethos, an ethics of humanity. Hip, with the help of the other characters, Bonnie, Beanie and Baby, shame Gerry into recognizing what he has become. Janie explains what her vision of this gestaltian growth and human potential is, “The Gestalt has a head and hands and a mind. But the most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns…and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly a part of him as long as he lives.”⁹ Gerry finally realizes what the gestalt means after he is shamed by Hip.

Hip explains the idea of ethos, “[t]he code, the set of rules, by which an individual lives in such a way as to help his species—something over and above morals.”¹⁰ Emmanuel Levinas also searches for something beyond morality. He begins his Totality and Infinity with this statement, “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.”¹¹

This introduction to the idea of the ethos of the human gestalt, whether familial or otherwise, leads to what I believe is its origin in Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of responsibility to the other. Levinas wants to overcome the belief that there are (deviants) in society that can be totalized because of their race, belief, (disability), or some other conception of categorical difference. Rather, every individual is infinitely alterior or different from me (whom Levinas calls the ‘same’). Infinity implies a beyond that neither I nor anyone else is ever capable of realizing or understanding. I maintain that a human gestalt becomes in the event of the same with the other. This can be any other, whether a relative or not. Levinas’s ethos is beyond ethics and morality, but is also more fundamental than either because it requires just two humans to experience ethos and become a gestalt.

I believe that Levinas’s ethics of responsibility creates a familial-like unit based upon the simple act of caring and sharing. The key determinants of this familial unit are hospitality, communication, and responsibility. Hospitality at its most basic level is sharing of space and resources. Communication is fundamentally listening and responding to the other to try to understand the needs of the other.¹² This discourse begins with the face as Levinas explains, “The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse.”¹³ Levinas continues:

The face I welcome makes me pass from phenomenon to being in another sense: in discourse I expose myself to the questioning of the Other, and this urgency of the response—acuteness of the present—engenders me for responsibility; as responsible I am brought to my final reality.¹⁴

Responsibility in Levinasian terms means that I am infinitely responsible for the infinite other.¹⁵ However, this responsibility is asymmetrical: it is the other’s business to reciprocate responsibility. “Intersubjective space is initially asymmetrical,” said Levinas, because the alterity of the other has infinite height.¹⁶ How do I know and understand this? When I come upon the other I see the face of the other. This face I recognize as human, and from that recognition, I understand that this other is infinitely other and requires my being, as a result, infinitely responsible for and to this infinite other. Says Levinas, “The other (L’Autre) thus presents itself as a human other (Autrui); it shows a face and opens the dimension of height, that is to say it infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge”¹⁷

Levinas’s responsibility suggests that we can accomplish more together through my responsibility to you than we can individually by being alone with our separate selves. I don’t categorically value this other differently from any other because this and any other are always infinitely alterior from me. To deprecate infinity means to totalize the other. If I totalize the other I have just limited my need to be responsible to the other under the conditions of this totality. In other words, I remove myself and the other from the possibility of becoming a gestalt with the other because I have categorically subsumed the other into something that is _otherwise than more than human.

We categorize all the time. We discern the bird on a branch from the rest of the forest. However, as Gabriel Marcel says, “As soon as we accord to any category, isolated from all other categories, an arbitrary primacy, we are victims of the spirit of abstraction.”¹⁸ The characters in More Than Human have been arbitrarily abstracted as (deviants), and they themselves initially remove themselves from society to exist with Lone so that they can become what it is possible for them to be. In this story we see the other than able-bodied or able-minded in the condition that they likely find themselves in 1953, shunted into places out of the view of society that values the capitalist notion of compulsory able-bodiedness. Nor is (disability) the only abstraction we employ. We abstract race, mental illness, class, faith, and other arbitrary categories that totalize and separate the other that limit the human gestalt of interpersonal relationships.

Levinas formulates his humanism, this humanistic ethos at the most basic level in the durable ethical space where you and I come together. This simplest form of relationship as foundational suggests that the remedy for maladies like war and human conflict begins at the most basic level of human co-existence and understanding. Even more basic in this relationship is the face, which begins the notion that there is an other, this other, this human other who stands before me. Our pareidolia sees human faces in clouds, patterns, or even in the outline of the brown markings on a piece of toast. Levinas understands that the human face is primordial to any human engagement with the other. The primordiality of the face brings us out of our dwelling within ourselves, into the open, into the durable ethical space where we can begin to see the other as the other is; though, as has been explained, the infinite other can never be fully understood.

We know with our own families, as was deftly expressed in More Than Human, that the relationship to the other is difficult because hospitality, communication, and responsibility are challenging at best. Levinas wants us to think about each in fundamental terms. Hospitality is Abrahamic because it welcomes anyone, even one who might do us harm. Communication is listening at the most basic level, but with the understanding that likely you will hear it wrong, and as such, not always offer or provide the responsibility the other requires. Responsibility means not standing in the other’s shoes because one cannot, but it is to give one’s shoes to the other. It requires one to substitute oneself to be responsible to the other even if it means increasing one’s own suffering. It also means understanding that the other need not reciprocate because if reciprocity is required, that would mean that I could, if reciprocity is not given, decline further responsible acts…but that is impossible because I am always already infinitely responsible for this other. When asked whether the other ought to be responsible towards me, Levinas responded, “Perhaps but that’s his affair…The I always has one responsibility more than all the others.”¹⁹

Finally, Levinas understands responsibility in terms of otherwise than being. Levinas explains, “The beyond being, being's other or the otherwise than being, here situated in diachrony, here expressed as infinity, has been recognized as the Good by Plato.”²⁰ The diachrony of the good that Levinas refers to is the notion of the turning away from the notion of the totality of being as expressed as early as Parmenides who suggested in the opening lines of Fragment VIII of his proem: “Being is ungenerated and imperishable [cannot not be], whole, unique, immovable, and complete.”²¹ Rather, the diachronous evolution of the good Levinas has in mind begins in the undoing of the being-for-oneself to the infinity of being for the infinite other. Says Bettina Bergo, “In short, Levinas’s present derives its radical novelty from the fact that his intersubjectivity is not rooted firstly in the intentional constitution of a world made up of other ‘me’s’ or monads.”²² Levinas goes further, “What is formulated here is the putting into question of this with, as the possibility of escaping solitude. Does ‘existing with’ present a veritable sharing of existence? How is this sharing realized? [Which he clarified] It is not a matter of escaping from solitude, but rather of escaping from being.”²³ It is the existing-with in a familial way, that produces the gestalt of the together-with and the more-than-with.

This otherwiseness is the foundation for the good and that begins in the idea of responsibility, communication, and hospitality expressed by the relation between the same and the other in the durable ethical space of the ethos I, through Sturgeon, call the human gestalt. This familial notion of being with and for the other—any other—is what I believe is the most fundamental explication of what ‘we are family’ means.

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1. Oxford English Dictionary, "Gestalt | Gestalt, N." (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press). ↩︎

2. Irvin Rock and Stephen Palmer, The Legacy of Gestalt Psychology, Scientific American 263, no. 6 (1990): 84. ↩︎

3. Frederick S. Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (Gouldsboro, Me. : The Gestalt Journal Press, Inc., 1992), 21. ↩︎

4. Frederick S. Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (Gouldsboro, Me. : The Gestalt Journal Press, Inc., 1992), 21. ↩︎

5. Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human (New York: Ballantine Books, 1953). ↩︎

6. Able-bodiedness comes from Robert McRuer and his work in Crip theory. Crip theory is a critique of capitalism and its requirement of what Robert McRuer calls compulsory able-bodiedness. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006). ↩︎

7. Martin Heidegger had a problem with imprecise language and began the convention of writing a word and then crossing it out. Gayatri Spivak in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology explained under erasure or sous rature, “Since the word is inaccurate it is crossed out. Since it is necessary it remains legible” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) p. xiv. ↩︎

8. Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human Kindle Edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 1953), Location 1408. ↩︎

9. Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human, in American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956, ed. Gary K. Wolfe (New York: The Library of America, 1953, 2012), 364. ↩︎

10. Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human Kindle Edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 1953), Location 3410. ↩︎

11. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (NY: Springer, 1961, 1969), 21. ↩︎

12. C. Fred Alford explains, “I can never do enough, because doing enough would require that I know the other’s needs as I know my own, and it is precisely this reduction of the other to the same that Levinas would avoid. The best I can do is devote myself to serving the one whose true need must forever elude me” C Fred Alford, "Levinas and Political Theory," Political Theory 32, no. 2 (2004): 154. ↩︎

13. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (NY: Springer, 1961, 1969), 66. ↩︎

14. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (NY: Springer, 1961, 1969), 178. ↩︎

15. Leah Kalmanson and Sarah Mattice say about responsibility, “Yet we nonetheless suggest that an ethics of alterity does require specific actions on the part of the subject—namely, the subject must engage in practices of self-regulation such as meditation. In a sense, we are recasting the meaning of infinite responsibility: My obligations are unfulfillable not because I am always beholden to the other’s whims, but because the self is in a state of constant flux and must continually be regulated. I am perpetually responsible for calming and clearing my mind so as to be responsive to the other, and this is the obligation that I can never discharge.” Leah Kalmanson and Sarah Mattice, "The De of Levinas: Cultivating the Heart-Mind of Radical Passivity," Frontiers of Philosophy in China 10, no. 1 (2015): 128. ↩︎

16. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (London, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1978), 98. ↩︎

17. Emmanuel Levinas, Emmanuel Levinas Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. A. T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, & Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1996), 12. ↩︎

18. Gabriel Marcel, Man against Mass Society, trans. G.S. Fraser (South Bend, In.: St. Augustine's Press, 2008), 116. ↩︎

19. Emmanuel Levinas and Philip Nemo, Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 98 & 99, emphasis in original. ↩︎

20. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburg, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1974), 19. ↩︎

21. There are multiple versions of Parmenides Proem from many historical writers. This paper consulted Leonard Taran’s text for both the Greek and the English translations: Leonard Tarán, Parmenides: A text with translation, commentary, and critical essays: (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 85 Item in Brackets added. Says Karl Popper, “This truth is based on the thesis ‘it [the knowable, the object of knowledge, the real world] is, or exists’, so that it cannot not exist. Sir Karl Raimund Popper, The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1998), 148. Emphasis in original. John Palmer says, “Being in such a way that it cannot not be is a way in which an entity can exist or be what it is.” John Palmer, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 93.” ↩︎

22. Bettina Bergo, "Radical Passivity in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (Lectures of 1954)," in Radical Passivity, ed. Brenda Hofmeyr (New York: Springer, 2009), 34. ↩︎

23. Emmanuel Levinas and Philip Nemo, Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 58 & 59. Bracketed material added. ↩︎