The self is a prerequisite for a true community, the professor says

Comedian Groucho Marx once said he didn’t want to be a member of a club that would accept his membership. Marx’s comments joke and highlight important aspects of the collaborative experience. To somehow not be a member of us, our community, without supporting that membership ourselves.

“Based on birthrights, we may belong to a variety of groups, such as class, ethnicity, blood type, etc., but group memberships that can be determined based on objective markers can be used to determine what that means. It’s not particularly useful when trying to understand, says Professor Danzahabi of the University of Copenhagen.

Professor Zahavi’s new book, “Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Phenomenological Contributions,” was published by Oxford University Press.

“We can, for example, become members of such groups, promote citizenship, and, for example, that can be distinguished from those based on shared objective characteristics, for example, shared, objective characteristics. It is important to understand that it is a kind of social formation.

What was the first community?

However, in many academic accounts of groups and self, groups are considered before individuals. Going further, some argue that the self does not exist, but Zahabi is skeptical of such claims.

“There is no doubt that communities and groups are very important to the values ​​and beliefs we form in our lives. No one agrees with that. The problem is that communities are very important to us. What this means is that many people lead many people. Our self-identity depends solely on the group or group we belong to,” says Zahabi.

“However, we need to be careful here: while some dimensions of the self are clearly established first through socialization, the proper assessment of our experiential life is the inherent subjectivity of its essentially. , they have the ownership of perspective, and this function is not a social construct.”

Zahavi says that self-ness allows us to mark our differences with others, and allows us to share our perspectives with them. Denying yourself is a reality. This is due to the exact same token to deny the reality of the community.

“In other words, eliminating the first person singular also means losing the first person plural.”

Me, us – and you

We need to identify with us to become members, but Zahavi is not enough to get a membership. Because we are clearly made up of multiple members.

Therefore, if you want to understand the meaning of sharing your beliefs, intentions, emotional experiences, or more generally, perspectives with others, you need to understand others and look into the ways that are relevant in the first place. there is.

“To understand our nature, it is not enough to look at the relationship between me and us, and the engagement between our members and our two here and the intertwining of communication that it allows. You need to look at the relationship, it’s very important,” says Zahabi.

“Of course, between us, who know each other in person, and between us, like our religious and national communities, members have never met, but still united, There are important differences: shared rituals, traditions, normative expectations.