Relation to others· Society and history
Communitarianism and patriotism
Axis: Belonging — Where does our belonging lie first: with our own community, or with humanity as a whole?
We are not abstract individuals: our identity and attachments arise from the concrete communities that shaped us, family, nation, culture. Loyalty to one's own is not a prejudice but a virtue, and the real source of solidarity.
Movements 2
Romanticismexplicit
One is not a human being in general but first of a language, a soil and a people, and it is this rootedness, not the cosmopolitan abstraction of the , that gives a life its depth. awakens the proper genius of each nation in its songs, its tales and its language; from this will be born, for better and for worse, the modern idea of the nation as a community of destiny.
Herder, Voices of the Peoples in their Songs · Herder, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity
Show inferred positions (1)
Confucianisminferable
The moral identity of the Confucian subject is woven from its belongings: the family, the lineage, the local community, and the state ordered by the rites (li 禮). One becomes fully human only within these relationships (the five cardinal relations), not as an abstract individual or an undifferentiated citizen of the world.
Mencius (Mengzi), 3A4 · Confucius, Analects (Lunyu), 12.11
Philosophers 3
Show inferred positions (3)
Confuciusinferable
The individual exists only as caught in a fabric of particular relationships: family, lineage, community, state, ordered by the li 禮 (rites). Xiao (filial piety) and loyalty to one's own take priority over any abstract belonging to humanity, anchoring Confucius on the side of .
Analects, I, 2 (the familial order, foundation of the social order) · Analects, XII, 11 (let the father be a father, the son a son)
Lucretiusinferable
The pursuit of honours and power, which throws men against one another, is ranked among the empty desires born of the fear of death: better to obey and keep quiet than to wish to rule affairs by command and to hold kingdoms. Like the Epicureanism of which he is the herald, Lucretius turns men away from civic ambition and public life toward the security of withdrawal, which leans toward a restricted community rather than an active cosmopolitanism.
On the Nature of Things, V, 1120-1135 (better to obey in peace than to reign)
Epicurusinferable
The motto live unnoticed (lathe biosas) turns the sage away from public life: the city, its honours and ambitions are sources of disturbance, and true security lies in withdrawal and friendship, not in civic engagement. This preference for a small elective community, the Garden, over an active cosmopolitanism inclines slightly toward communitarianism.
Vatican Sayings, 58 (freeing oneself from the prison of public affairs) · Principal Doctrines, XIV (security through withdrawal from the crowd)
Characters 1
Odysseusexplicit
The whole Odyssey is strung on a single desire, , the return: Odysseus crosses the known world and refuses the islands where he might settle, happy and forgetful, only to regain Ithaca, his rocky land. Held by the nymph , he spends his days on the shore weeping toward the sea and his home. The marriage bed he carved himself from a living olive tree, rooted in the ground, says plainly enough that for him identity and happiness rest on rootedness, not on the elsewhere.
Odyssey, V, 151-158 (weeping toward the sea on Calypso's island) · Odyssey, XXIII, 183-204 (the bed carved from the rooted olive tree)