You’re arguing with someone about something. You don’t accept what they’re saying out loud, but somewhere inside, you actually think they might have a point. But you’re not really persuaded. You just quickly find, in your head, some way of handling it, and fold that “might have a point” back into your original position, without a single drop leaking out.
Thinking back on it afterward, you notice something rather strange — it’s been a long time since you’ve truly lost a single conversation.
This isn’t a coincidence. There’s a mechanism that’s always been running inside you. The better you get at handling every challenge, the more you’re able to turn any impact into a problem you can solve within your own capabilities, the less you ever need to genuinely open yourself up to anything. Heidegger said that people are always living in a posture of “being-able” — constantly coping with things, projecting plans, drawing everything around them into a range they can understand, a range they can control.
This is a good thing, in itself. Who wouldn’t want to become more capable of handling the various difficulties life throws at them? But have you ever thought about this: every time you successfully “handle” something, you’re actually adding another layer of brick to your own boundary. The more bricks you add, the higher, and the thicker, the wall gets.
The problem is, the higher and thicker this boundary gets built, the safer you become — but also the more sealed off. The moment the Other appears — meaning people or things genuinely different from you, capable of challenging you, negating you, making you uncomfortable — as long as you keep holding the posture of “I can handle this,” it will eventually get absorbed by you, assimilated by you, turned into material for your own narrative, rather than a presence that can genuinely shake you, genuinely change you.
You hear a sharp point made against you, say “I hadn’t thought of it that way, that’s interesting,” and then keep on living exactly the way you always have. You think you’ve taken the other person in. In reality, you’ve only turned them into a version you can understand, can digest, can fold into your own framework — you never actually let them in at all. They never touched you. They just passed by you.
So what does it actually look like, to be genuinely touched by something? Levinas proposed a completely different state, one he called “the capacity for incapacity” — not simply that there’s something you can’t do, but that you can’t even actively choose to “bear this powerlessness” itself. You’re pushed into a condition of total passivity, with no strategy, no initiative you can call up to handle it.
This sounds a little abstract, but translated into concrete experience, everyone actually understands it. Late at night, sick, going through a major blow — some moment when you have no spare capacity left to analyze anything, to resist anything — you suddenly hear a sentence, and there’s simply no time to run it through your usual psychological filters. It goes straight through you. Looking back on it afterward, you find that the change wasn’t the result of you “deciding” to accept something. It happened, forcibly, at a moment when you had no capacity to defend yourself at all. You didn’t get a choice.
These two kinds of experience are actually very different. In the first kind, your psychological defenses stay strong the whole time. While you’re listening to the other person, you’re already, in parallel, preparing your rebuttal, searching for holes, defending your original position. Even if you end up conceding a step on the surface, that’s still a choice you made actively, after calculation — your boundary stays fully intact from start to finish. In the second kind, you have no defenses at all. That sentence wasn’t something you allowed in — it forced its way in directly, and you never even got the chance to close the door.
Only the second kind is a moment of genuinely being touched by the Other — it requires, as its precondition, that you temporarily and completely give up control. And that “giving up” usually isn’t an active posture at all. It’s that you simply no longer have the capacity to hold on any longer.
Think about it this way, and you’ll notice something rather ironic. The environment we live in has always been encouraging you to become more “capable” — constantly optimizing yourself, constantly upgrading your problem-solving abilities, constantly becoming calmer, more able to handle anything. All of this sounds unambiguously positive. And you really have become stronger because of it — whatever happens, you can quickly find a way to deal with it, and very little can genuinely throw you off anymore.
But it’s exactly this ever-strengthening “capability” that’s building you into an ever more solid, ever more impenetrable fortress — you might look, on the surface, extremely open, very willing to hear different voices, very skilled at communication. But that openness is, from start to finish, built on the premise that you’re fully in control of the situation. The Other never gets a chance to enter in any truly disruptive way, to shake you, to change you. You win every argument — and precisely because of that, you’ve never actually been persuaded by anyone.
The last time you were genuinely changed by something — not something you accepted after analyzing it, but something that went straight through you — has it been a long time since a moment like that last happened? Maybe it’s not that no one is capable of touching you. It’s that you’ve always been too “capable” — capable enough that no one ever gets the chance to truly come near you.