• Yves Adeva
    4
    Is anyone here familiar with Jean Luc Nancy? I am currently doing a research on his concept of "Ideal Community". Can you please help me by sharing some of your insights? Thank you!
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    An ideal community should balance group interests with individual ambitions. We want to live in harmony but not at the expense of losing our individual identity. This is the reason, I believe, that we haven't achieved the ideal community.

    Community is a social organization and we value personal identity which is asocial, even anti-social.

    Also, a community forms on the self-other distinction paradigm. This is bound to put any community in conflict with the other. Harmony within but chaos without.

    There's one way out from this predicament. Make me one with everything.
  • Yves Adeva
    4
    Thank you very much for your idea!

    On one hand, Heidegger said that in order for us to exist, we must co-exist. As I have understood, the beingness of a being becomes a reality when it is affirmed by another being. Does this mean that our being only becomes a reality when we get identified with another being?

    On the other hand, Jean-luc Nancy suggests that in order for us to "be" we must return to the original idea of individuality.

    The cause of problems in our society today, Nancy suggests, is that we are vigorously searching for an ideal community, this often results to misuse of power, corruption, and division in the community.

    Dont you think humans are capable of forming a community without sacrificing ones identity? or without running the risk of falling into individualism?
  • Joshs
    5.8k
    Heidegger did not say that beingness only becomes a reality when it is affirmed by another being. On the contrary, he argued that being always already implies being-with. Being is already outside itself, ahead of itself as being-with, even when we are alone.
    Nancy, in “the Inoperative Community, moves from Heidegger’s notion of being-with. Nothing exists except as singular-plural, in a relation-differential tension of same-different. Thus a community can never be an ideal unity. It exists as relations-tensions between and within individuals comprising it. That is why it is ‘inoperative’, which doesn’t mean dysfunctinal, it means there can be no operational, ideal, normative definition of community
  • Yves Adeva
    4
    Thank you Joshs for correcting me, I really appreciate it.
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