Are we hospitable? How does one prepare for the coming of the other?

How should one prepare for the coming of the other, or how should one be open? Is the other, as other, not precisely the person for whom one is not already fully ready, and for whose coming one therefore has not prepared? Does preparation not free the other from his otherness, that is, if we are ready, then what comes is not the other but the same, precisely what we expected, that is, what we have already finished off and exhausted in our conceptions? Is real hospitality toward the other not a state in which one is prepared for everything? Paradoxically, does being prepared for everything not require having a certain unconditionality that in fact means being open to a state for which one is not prepared? Is the only preparation sufficient for the coming of the other to confess that we cannot be prepared for what will come? Then how can one be (un)prepared, that is, how can one be prepared for the advance of someone for whom we can never be ready?

These questions pursued by the famous hermeneutician John D. Caputo are, for him, the key to the great secret that opens the way to making hermeneutics even more radical. The unknowability of the other is the real great secret, but it is at the same time the key to opening up to the other by giving him his due, respecting his rights, in a way that also produces respect for oneself. On this subject Caputo appeals to the theme of the hermeneutics of secrecy in Edmund Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation. There, while indicating that knowing nothing about the other is the basic condition of being open to him, he also indicates how the foreknowledge, prejudice and preunderstanding we may inevitably have about the other can violate his rights.

According to Husserl, the other self (alter ego) is a person whose mental life I will absolutely never know or occupy, not because of some possible limitations that I could later overcome, but because he is in principle inaccessible. If I could reach him, the otherness of the other would be destroyed; the other I know would not be the other. The inaccessibility of the other's mental life is therefore positive and not something to be lamented, because it is precisely this unknowability that constitutes the other. The other's appearing as other consists in not appearing.

These are overly subtle and complex questions and considerations that, in our social and political culture, where our attitude toward the other is very crude and rough, will perhaps touch nowhere and find no response. We kill the other within our concepts and categories right away, before news of him reaches us. The otherness of whoever comes to us does not remain; as someone we have already defined, what he would say has been said and answered before he reaches us, and when he arrives, whatever he says, we have determined it all in advance.

If the other is an artist, we cut off the way to his artistic originality and creativity with our expectations by telling him what kind of art we expect from him. We are a society that kills its artists. Likewise its philosophers. By saying national, by saying native, by saying ours, by saying "befitting our history, our traditions, our glory, our culture," we determine in advance what our artist and our philosopher will tell us.

When the other comes as a prophet, even the people who were awaiting a prophet reacting with "should not a prophet have been the most learned among us?" is one of the typical cases in the whole history of prophets. Should not a prophet have been from our own people? Should not a prophet be able to show miracles when asked of him? Should not angels be walking before him, behind him, beside him? A prophet, who walks about in the market and bazaar like us and eats and drinks? Can that be a prophet?

Killing even the prophet within one's own expectations and being unable to see his unknowability, and the fact that what he will tell us is outside and beyond our calculations, as his essential characteristic, is no exception in human history. Is a bargaining attitude toward the Prophet, as the Messenger to us of God, who must be held exalted as the absolute other, not the same as killing the prophet?

Some, in order to kill the prophet, compare prophet and philosopher; some compare saint (veli) and prophet. In both cases they try to weaken the position of the prophet, as an other, to come and call out to us from where we do not at all expect. They are not even aware that the rational or mystical effort to which they cling against that position they have already put in the vise of their own ego and turned into a weapon against the other, and thus in fact against their own authentic being.

We mentioned that we kill the friend (the saint) in the same way within our expectations. As is known, the only result that comes out at the end of the lists in which we line up our expectations of a friend is this: "there is no friend."

Aristotle's famous expression later became the guide of all the literature on the friend or friendship. We touched on this before. We try to have a friend by killing him. That is, by imprisoning him within our expectations. The moment we notice that he has gone beyond those expectations, we are ready to give him up. Then we follow the ancient but equally ignorantly seductive guide that says there is no friend. If there were a friend, would you listen to him? Are you willing to bear the friend's hardship, to listen to his words that you would not like at all, to stand by him in his time of need? Are you willing to give what you expect from a friend without any bargaining and without calculation, and to be a real friend?

The other is, as much as an artist, a prophet or a friend who calls out to us, a stranger, a needy person who demands things from us to the point of disturbing our comfort, a poor man, a guest or an asylum seeker, a stranger who is not of the same religion, the same color, the same language as ours.

The problem of friendship and otherness is therefore also a problem of hospitality. If you will not make yourself the friend of the stranger, if you will not treat the stranger and the traveler as a friend, if you will not treat one who is not "one of us" as we treat "ourselves," if you will not take the other into your home, what does hospitality mean?

A man with empty hands and a closed door is hardly hospitable, and will be no one's friend.