Common Reality
The American branch of the ecclesial community Communion and Liberation, founded by Luigi Giussani, recently put up videos of its annual 3 day cultural and intellectual event, “New York Encounter”.
Among the presentations was a panel on Hannah Arendt entitled “The Miracle of Beginning”, made up of Roger Berkowitz, who runs the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities (and also hosts the podcast Reading Hannah Arendt); the panel also consisted of Carlo Lancellotti from the College of Staten Island.
At a certain point in the discussion between Berkowitz and Lancellotti, attention shifted to the point that really resonated with me, concerning the notion of a common reality. The dissolution of a common reality was highly significant for Arendt, who in her Origins of Totalitarianism noted that this dissolution of the common reality, together with its accompanying atomism, laid the foundations for ideology (that is, a preconceived thought that is not verified by human experience) and from that, totalitarian politics. For when there is no longer a common reality in which human persons can inhabit, there is a vacuum of meaning that political entrepreneurs will be more than willing to fill.
Among the many points that flowed from this conversation was the role that consumer culture played in the dissolution of this common reality. For when the incorporation of the world’s goods become oriented towards nothing other than individual consumption, what results is a hollowing out of any material basis for a common life together. Consumer culture therefore, can be viewed as an oxymoron, whereby what looks like a common culture of conumserism, is really a honeycomb of materialistic and ultimately individualistic silos.
This resonated with me for a number of reasons. The first is that it then adds another dimension to moral action. Christian conceptions of moral action cannot be reduced to an individualistic act of meeting a checklist of good or bad actions. Because Christian moral action is not situational but objective, it implies that moral action also has an avoidable public dimension, building a common reality for all. In other words, Christian moral action cuts across the arguments of left and right wing political pundits, insofar as morality is not a simple matter of individual choice, nor a matter of individual interior formation, at the expense of the material makeup of a world shared in common.
Against this backdrop two points of reference can become really helpful resources for thinking about this common reality.
The first is what the German phenomenologists in the tradition of Edmund Husserl call the Lebenswelt or the “Life World”. In the words of his The Crisis of the Modern European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, this “Life World” which acts as a “universal horizon, a coherent universe of existing objects”, by which everyone, “each ‘I-the-man’ and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world” (p. 108).
The second is Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si which, before it is an encyclical about the environment, is a tract about building a common human home, which calls the faithful to remember that, because of the primacy of human dignity, also implies that there is an objective universe of value beyond individual choice.
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