“Exist or survive?” by Francesca Nodari
The advent of mobile phones from the 90s and, subsequently, smartphones constitutes an event that has radically changed our sociality, our ways of interaction with others, our own life which is as if it had been colonized by what, apparently, seemed to us to be a means of improving communication, but which, in reality, proved to be a sort of idol to which to vote. Moreover, just look around on the street, on public transport, in restaurants to have confirmation of a behavioral trend that crosses the company: Fixed eyes on the smartphone, earphones on display, trill of all kinds that warn a new notification, the reception of a message, an email, people who talk to chatbot as if they were to turn to another human being. Old and new imperatives impose themselves: “The medium is the message”; “Being is information”; While the trespassing of reality in the virtual advance. What we witness is the progressive to fail the face to face, with the consequent reduction of the other with a voice to arrive, even to his disappearance. As David Le Breton writes rightly The fin de la conversation?: «The social bond is more an environmental data than a moral need. For some, even, it is nothing more than the indifferent theater of their personal fulfillment. Contact with others is optional, it is no longer a fact of evidence ». In a vintage leap marked by a permanent uncertainty, by growing self -centeredness, by rancorous feelings full of indifference we are no longer able to meet the gaze of the other. We deny, with the facts, that “correlation apriori” which bases our being already always in relation to something else and, therefore, to the other. We are satisfied with mere contacts, losing sight, totally, the value of the dialogic – After all, humans are the only living beings with language – and we proceed quickly towards an incorrect perception of our corporeality – exhibited, mostly seated, and to be brought with it as if it were an object by passing from one activity to another with one of its minimal mobilization, thanks to the use of countless technological processes. What remains of the awareness of our lived corporeality, of our permanent state of indigence that requires the meeting with the other and together determines the deciding-to-instance-quolosa-with-ifsi-stasi taking seriously the time and the other? Now, on the one hand, in front of what, rightly, has been defined by Jonathan Sacks, a new social poverty: loneliness; For the other, in front of the multiple registration of escapes or slipping in the “whiteness”, which crosses the various ages of life, cannot we say that we are faced with real phenomena that are symptoms of the closure to the event? In the introduction ad Realize you are alive (with G. Bromolini), Franco Arminio, he warns how much it is necessary, today more than ever, to proceed with “a radical rethinking of the human” And with the following verses it really seems, shaking, the safety of the contemporary “stubborn self”:
For the first time in its history
This little small round land
it is inhabited by sunshine,
never as now human groups
are acronyms, provisional assemblies,
single and desperate cases,
Deriors drift in the kingdom
Of the only me.
Now if it is true, as it is true, that these words give us a phenomenology of the present it is, in our opinion, to put head to a rethinking of the human that passes from the event represented by the asymmetrical encounter between me and the other And from remembering that the founding event of human dignity, as Bernhard Casper took, Eviene in what happened of the correlation, whose last sense is responsibility.
Perhaps that the antidote to the ‘bad’ anachronism of the conversation – which, as the Breton has intuited, is about to be supplanted by the mere communication – does not reside in the beneficial and salvific anachronism of diachrony, of a time “that flows transversely” which is enigma, mystery, in the meantime and which makes a sign – known Emmanuel Levinas – to “a reason that speaks, comes out of its splendid isolation, Does it betray his superb indifference, abdicates his nobility “? After all, what contemplates the event itself of speaking if not the giving of that “period of time” – time not synchronizable – which is to say, that it is diachrony? Here, then, that acquires all its imperative strength this writes Levinas in i Carnets de captivité When warns: “Moral – is the pure word – the possibility of seeing a face behind all its masks”.
From here, we are convinced, we should start to put head to A rethinking of taking us of flesh and blood that cannot be separated from one’s humanity and temporality. The stakes are very high: it is a question of deciding whether to exist or survive.
