Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The question of the Other has arisen in philosophy as a result of a self-centered philosophy coming from extreme rationalism, which exploits exacerbated hedonism, utilitarianism as a way of life and economy, in a society of rights without duties, where what goes for me doesn’t go for the Other.

Philosophical authors such as Paul Ricoeur (cited even by the Pope), Emmanuel Lévinas and Martin Buber, who comes from a Jewish philosophy, speak of this existential emergency that is the relationship with the Other, but our closed circles try to establish narrative half-truths that are only valid for our bubbles.

The essential existential question of who is the Other, Martin Buber, in The I and the Thou, comes to see the most sacred in the Other and the question is, in a way, in Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres I, where he says that children seem to be born with a kind of “instinct for relationships”? which develops throughout the book the idea that we are not born alone and, therefore, through cooperative work and language, we should socialize, and bring out this inner instinct for the relational.

Sloterdijk rejects the liberal, idealistic principle of Cartesian origin, where the isolated individual seeks his existential reason. He starts from an ontology where the primitive is always Two, but if we include the divine that Buber saw, we are three.

But he’s not so idealistic as to say that these two are fused, we could say using Gadamer’s concept, who sees in the “hermeneutic circle”, a “fusion of horizons”, and so we can think of the individual who comes out of the placenta, which will then be dead, as coming out of their primordial bubble, and finding themselves somewhat separated from their mother.

The pre-modern world had a model, for which this separation was not total, of remaining in subjectivity or intimacy (not the interiority that does not separate), this can be seen in some peoples who planted the placenta like trees, and others, like the Egyptians who made pillows, and in the tombs of the pharaohs were buried with them, as if to remain in the initial existential bubble.

We are thus seen in the self-sufficiency of the liberal model, but this model is also criticized, for example, by Rousseau, who sought an isolated life of non-thinking, see as in the experience of the lake, in his writing of the daydreams of the solitary walker, compatible with his model of the man of the good savage, on which many modern democracies are inspired, Rousseau was the contractualist of the most liberal model.

Even the hope of regaining a “general will”, in a stronger state, where a kind of “national religion” is proclaimed, which today erupts in nationalisms all over the planet, is nothing more than a contemporary vision of a self-sufficient “bubble” of various kinds of social closure in ‘communities’, but with a selfish principle inside, what Sloterdijk calls an “inflated community”, social media are just “means” where these ideas of bubbles are propagated.