Living together makes us alive: that is why it is necessary for us to be together

Often when we talk about coexistence, we tend to see first and foremost a chapter in political philosophy, referring to the peaceful coexistence of states or to the social contract, i.e. the decision of human beings to create UK Parliament To end the war of all against all. But in my opinion wrong. And this certainly does not lie in trying to develop as much comfort as possible in politics, at a time when the winds of war are blowing mightily. Rather, when considering political coexistence as the paradigm, the basic form of coexistence. In my opinion, this is not the case: the imperfect and bureaucratic version of a deeper and defining truth of man, the need to be together, the lack of which generates the greatest spiritual suffering that life often forces us to experience, and which breaks out with particular ferocity during the holidays, when A break in work can, for the less fortunate, mean a break in living together.

We have great examples of what we should be together, without even going back to Adam and Eve or Euryalus and Nessus. Between August 16 and 18, 2004, Jacques Derrida, who was in the terminal stage of cancer that would take him in a few weeks (he would die in Paris on October 9), did not escape the attempt to cross the Atlantic, a very long journey to the southwest, to take part in the conference To think about deconstruction: political, ethical, and aesthetic problems. It is not difficult to explain this heroic and almost transcendent effort: Derrida always lived, as authors so often do, in the light of a society of readers, and it was to this society that he wanted a final farewell. , if you will, a brilliant inverse but complement to the slew of Friends and Traveling Buddies episodes he hastily posted the year before, Chuck Fu is unique, la vin du mondeeach time the end of the world is unique, because it is true Every time a person leaves the whole world to drown, big or small, with whom he had relationships, and that shaped his world. This is the point from which we must start, the world of the individual immersed in society.

In other words, ego cogito, ego sum certainty of existence, but in itself little if not supplemented by the immense wealth of our fellow men, those with whom we have relations, whether of friendship or enmity, but who enjoy their time with us: the German zetgenocine, which stands for contemporaries, just means: having fun or sharing at the same time. It would therefore be a mistake to regard Descartes as a philosopher of anaphora, since in reality all his reflections boil down to proving that there is a God, that he created an external world, and that in this world there is an alter ego. On the contrary, living that does not involve living together will not be life. Why? The first proofs come from direct experience. The fact that humans are social animals is of course a solid question. We shall never see a cat frustrated by another cat’s inattention, while being chased away, or succumbing to his ostentatious indifference, which is one of the worst offenses and sufferings that can befall a human being. ThinkSpinoza was cursed by his community: you all warned that henceforth no one should speak to him orally or communicate with him in writing; No one shall serve him, nor sleep under his roof, nor come near him more than four cubits (about two metres, as at closing time), and no one read anything dictated to him or written in his hand.

Why is this a curse that would leave the lizard completely indifferent to be so terrible, and correspond to the dry, slashing form of death that civil death brings us back? The origins of human nature. and above all to our first nature of living beings, especially deprived and slow-moving organisms. Precisely for this reason, symbiosis, as a therapy that offers a second nature to a first, is certainly rooted from the outset in our caregiving needs, linked to neoteny, that is to say the survival of the infantile elements in adult development, which is characteristic of man. Just like man, man too, is his late development, making him initially dependent on the forms of nourishment he received as an infant (which is the first and basic form of coexistence) until the child’s dependence on the symbolic authority or perhaps on the emotional blackmail of the parent or professor, and the writer based on the opinion of the critics, and on myself, obviously, how will you judge these lines.

But it is not just a matter of poverty, or need. It is hard to imagine life truly being a life without other selves. The announcer or Robinson certainly lives a solitary life, the former by choice, the latter by necessity; That is, they live in solitude, but an solitude that is haunted by the ghosts of a former social life. while a human animal brought up in complete isolation will have no hope of survival, unless it takes the form of the group to which it belongs (as in the wonderful stories that fill our childhoods with children adopted by wolves); Therefore, from a non-human society. Nor is it simply a matter of general sharing of human nature. For example, it is difficult to say that spending time among strangers is really living together. In these cases, instead, one gets the impression of being alone in a crowd, which is exactly the opposite of living together. On the contrary, there may be marital relationships, especially in the first stage, that of absolute and exclusive falling in love (a rare gift that many mortals have not had the grace to know), that can leave the surrounding world in the background so that only two personalities stand out. They are great moments, it is clear that they pass, transform and break sometimes, leaving great pain, but they show the essence and distinction of non-social or political coexistence.

In all the cases we have studied, from the archetype or stereotype of the social contract to the ever-changing uniqueness of the union that can bring two people together in a couple, There is a hermeneutic circle at work, which is the circle of social life. The human animal, which has only internal purposes, like any other living being, receives, very early in its life, a series of external purposes, being brought up at a very young age in a very ancient world filled with myths, rituals, traditions, and languages. Meanwhile, you are engaged in hard work, looking back, such as gaining an upright posture, learning to speak, and then reading, writing, and arithmetic…

All this colossal collapse of inner purposes is due to the human animal who now feels more human than animal. He is alive, but his life is indeed different from the life of other living beings because it is full of ambitions, difficulties, and shortcomings that other beings do not even remotely suspect, and which inevitably have to do with coexistence. We will never find a beaver frustrated because he got a bad grade in school or sad because the beaver he’s madly in love with doesn’t respond to his messages or is limited to divination or dirty feelings. These are the ways of existence that belong exclusively to the human form of life. And it is precisely in this form of life that a man can ask himself a question inconceivable to a beaver or a dolphin, that is, to ask whether what he is leading is a real or a fake life, whether or not he has had a real experience of life, and argue for a very long time, perhaps all his life, to conclude again with questions of this kind, A lonely life is no life.

What I propose with the idea of ​​symbiosis as a constituent of human nature, the first, the biological, and the second natural, the social, transcendence in this aspect. We are not alone in this world, there is another person, different from us but human beings like us that we can treat with hate or love, but precisely as an alter ego that has something of us in itself (pets are also allowed, but it is not difficult to notice which and how many anthropomorphizations we undergo dogs, cats, parrots …). Rule of the game: You can’t feel like a human being without some kind of relationship with another human being. How books provide us with an eternity of the past, said Umberto Eco, in retrospect, like this Living together, recognizing ourselves as human beings, gives us a completely earthly transcendenceThat is, it offers us a sense of being together beyond a life which, if examined for what, without the further feeling of living together, remains lonely, poor, unpleasant, brutish, and however long it lasts, it is still too short.