For Peter, With Love

Abstract

Before I start, a bit of context may be helpful. Peter Gabel and I go back a long way and our agreements and disagreements, just as long. As best as I can figure out, we were the only two members of the original Critical Legal Studies (CLS) crew who were deeply and permanently influenced, some might say scarred, by existentialism. I was most taken by Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre's plays  Peter seems to me to have been more taken by Martin Buber and Sartre's "Being and Nothingness." I suppose we met somewhere in between, perhaps in Sartre's great lecture, "Existentialism is a Humanism.", Peter believed then, as he believes now, in the possibility of more than fleetingly overcoming the otherness of the Other. For me the idea that it is possible to return to the prelapsarian position is unthinkable. The otherness of the Other is the ontological grounding of humanity. And so Peter experiences transcendence when dancing and singing "Tov Le'Hodot La' Adonie" and I, when walking to catch the inter-campus bus on a clear blue morning. I see the world as alienated from me; he surely sees me as alienated from the world. And yet, I know and treasure the glorious feeling of being enveloped in Peter's love.