Human Relations’ Web: Praxis, Community, Responsibility and Survival

The notion of praxis has been largely worked upon, since the Greek Philosophers, but it was Marx who expanded the notion to economic, political and social levels of noisy polemic argumentativity, when the author defined it as a concrete human activity of production/reproduction and transformation of nature, of society and of men. Praxis literally means: action, activity. We act when we speak, we act when we think, when we feel, when we dream; our cells, the cells of every living being are in permanent activity.

In linguistic terms of pragmatic entanglement, to speak, to discourse are communicational interactive dynamics, taking place in intersubjectively shared communitary situational contexts: every human individual action/activity incorporates communicable cognitive/empirical dynamical syntheses that include what Kant designated by “sensus communis”, that is, a faculty of reflexive judgment that, in its reflexive activity, considers, “a priori”, the place of the other, understanding the other as any possible existent of a community of individuals capable of reason and feelings.

To think by oneself implies, in the postulated Kantian “sensus communis”, simultaneously, to think “placing” oneself in the irreducible topos of the other, in the sense of an irreducible reciprocity. The Kantian “sensus communis” carries a sense of irrecusable responsibility of connection to the others, understanding by “the others” the whole of the indeterminable generation in each present. We are doomed to live and die together, our survival kit includes, deterministically, an innate disposition towards sociability: we are capable of interpreting facts, events and experiences, attributing to them intersubjectively sharable senses and meanings. The responsibility is not a choice, it is a duty/imperative that places itself in face of the “arbitriu” of each one with an ontology of necessity of existence, necessity of life.

“Rhizomating” some notions of systemics, phenomenology, Marx and Varela, it is acceptable the statement that the intersubjective systemic activity of the relations of production and productive forces enacted the technoglobal interface of the current trans-subjective survival networks that are condensated in irresponsible Kafkian looping of recycling.

The secrets of life, the secrets of the world, the precarious apocalypses, the fears, the guilts, the regrets transhumate in the Babelonic web, zombified by a judicative inability, while, in the big screen, our indignity, our misery, our problems ritualize in the electromagnetic field the projectivity of Darwinian sustainability: unemployment, hunger, epidemics, global warming, extreme weather patterns, loss of biodiversity, ecological disasters, degradation of the soil, desertification, air, sea and rivers’ pollution,…, extinctions.

With some inspiration in André Leroi-Gourhan (“Le geste et la parole”), we question ourselves: how is it that protoplasmic mammals, like us, whose “archaic needs” constitute the engine of evolutionary sustainability, will push our transplanetary Sisyphic techno-rock, if we fail to do the communicational perceptive jump that allows us to understand that the things, the others, and ourselves, life, existence are not (we are not) reducible to the desiring egoticity of the precarious incipient and unreflected niches of powers?!

Images of water droplets causing subsequent ‘ripple effect’ by David Simonetti

Editors Note: Maria Odete Madeira is an Interdisciplinary Researcher in Philosophy of Science, Ontology, Systems Science, Cognition and Neurocognition.