“Do we still want to live together? », by Pierre-Henri Tavoillot:

LEARN TO GROW TOGETHER

Is everything wrong? All over the world? In France more than elsewhere? The tendency has been to answer these questions affirmatively. Mainly because coexistence is no longer something evident and the reasons for forming a society seem to be disappearing. We would only have the option between “leave everything” EITHER “break everything”abandon or destroy, separate or rebel. Worse still, we would perceive others only as threats, while in ourselves we would only discern a hateful decadence or an arrogant emptiness. There is definitely something rotten in the realm of democracy.

It remains to be seen whether the situation is really that dark. The discomfort is certainly indisputable and is intense. But can we affirm, by repeating it, that it has become absolute and irremediable? In articulating these questions, philosopher Pierre-Henri Tavoillot, professor at Sorbonne University and Sciences Po, refuses to give in to dominant pessimism. It does not ignore the current difficulties or crises that affect democracies and social life. But first it seeks to understand what it is that blurs our perceptions of these common realities that bravely persist and still motivate us. Striving to highlight how much, even unknowingly, we still care about each other, his reflection draws on these persistent pillars to indicate the direction in which society might reinvent itself.

In his eyes, as in those of Marcel Gauchet, with whose initial observation he agrees, the main origin of our difficulties lies in the emergence, with modernity, of “society of individuals”. Instead of merging the individual with the group and subjecting him to the power of the collective – as all other forms of previous human organization did, each in their own way –, this singular novelty favored, with complete success, all freedoms and liberties. unexpected individuals. autonomous decisions. But it cannot, however, undermine the social aspect, which guarantees the very exercise of these freedoms. The challenge of democratic modernity is to keep these two elements in tension together.

The seven links that define usability

Our depression comes from not being more aware of it and, therefore, from not clearly knowing how to live together, or for what, or with whom. The great merit of Do we still want to live together?clearly conceived and written, is to propose a solution. It is based on highlighting seven links that resist and define coexistence (shared food, sexuality, couple, children, debates, work, religion) and on a general objective: growing together. This means that we stay in contact with each other to become each more experienced, more responsible, more autonomous, in other words, more “adult”.

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