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  • Essay / Essay on Rational Community - 750

    In his book The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Alphonso Lingis (1994) discusses community and offers a non-traditional view of community, "the other community ". Traditionally, community is seen as a social structure in which individuals have something in common. This usually refers to a shared location, a shared identity, or common values ​​or beliefs. In this traditional vision of the “rational community,” these commonalities are crucial in uniting individuals. This “other community” arises when the lives of individuals connect or collide without necessarily having anything in common. These interactions can happen in inexplicable ways. It is often difficult to understand these “others” of whom we do not share the same qualities of the rational community, even if we recognize them as individuals. We can recognize our shared vulnerability, and this goes beyond the fact that even if our ethical responsibilities are not clearly imposed in a rational way, they nevertheless make demands on us. Lingis (1994) indicates that "one exposes himself to the other: the foreigner, the deprived, judging him not only with his ideas and his ideas, so that they can be contested, but also with the nudity of his eyes, his voice, his silence, his empty hands” (p. 11). This “other community” is born when the stranger is exposed, having no common rational discourse with us. This stranger or intruder disrupts our intentions and makes us question our own cultural coding, “stopping our own intentions” upon encountering them. This face of the other, the stranger, serves us as an “indicative surface”. Lingis (1994) states: “The face of another is a surface on which we perceive directions and directives that order me; w...... middle of paper ...... ape it. The “community in death” of Lingis is made up of a dying person as well as a companion who is not dying. As previously stated, “telling” is necessary in this community. This “community in death” emerges from the dying, which contributes to the reality that they will no longer inhabit this world with their companion. There is an obligation in this “other community” to accompany the dying, without this The other support community of Lingis would not exist. It is this awareness of death that prompts the obligation to accompany the dying. This awareness of the death of the other guarantees my own life as well as death and links my communicative action to the situation. We know what to do, “to accompany” before we know what to say, to “say it”. And this “saying” is perhaps not as important in the end as one might think.