the origin of power

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By MARILENA CHAUI*

How to explain that man, the only one naturally made to live freely, subjects himself to a yoke that not even animals would accept.

1.

Theaetetus dug the earth to plant. She found a treasure. Socrates went to the market to buy vegetables. He found Callias, who paid him a debt. The ship was heading for Aegina. Encountered a storm and drifted towards Athens.

These examples are classic in the history of philosophy: they are the ones that Aristotle offers when he examines the ideas of contingency and chance. Contingency and chance, explains the philosopher, are not uncaused events. They are events produced by the meeting of two independent causal series. Thus, the first name of contingency and chance is “meeting and unexpected meeting”. Or, as Aristotle explains, the cause of the event is accidental, since it produces an effect that was not foreseen in the causality of each of the series, in such a way that a certain end is realized without it being foreseen by the agents or without it being present in the means. , for these did not aim at such an end, but at another: Theaetetus went to plant and not to look for treasure; Socrates went to buy vegetables and not receive a debt; the ship was bound for Aegina, not Athens.

Why “encounter”? Because the event is not uncaused but the intersection of two independent causal series. Why "unexpected"? Because the mark of contingency and chance is indeterminacy, since both the causes that produced it might not have happened (if Theaetetus had a fever, he might not have gone to plant; if Socrates had found a friend, he might not have gone to the market; if the cargo was not on board, perhaps the ship would not leave the port), but also nothing guarantees that the end will be accomplished, since the purpose of the action decided by the agent has nothing to do with the end accomplished (instead of broad beans, Theaetetus reaped a treasure; instead of vegetables, Socrates obtained payment of the debt, instead of reaching Aegina, the ship ended up in Athens). Because it is an unexpected encounter, contingency is what makes something “new” happen in the world, that is, something that natural causality would not make happen regularly and predictably.

Unlike chance and contingency, what is necessary is what always happens and cannot fail to happen as it does; just as the impossible is what never happens and can never happen – it is necessary for water to moisten, fire to heat, oil to feed the flame, the stone to fall; it is impossible for these effects not to occur and for water to burn, fire to moisten, for summer not to occur between spring and autumn.

When a natural event is contrary to the law of necessary causality, it is said to have been produced by an action or a cause contrary to the nature of the thing, and this contrary cause or counter-nature is called violence. It is by violent action that a stone will go upwards, for it is its nature to come downwards. Necessary and impossible refer, therefore, to the regular and normal action of natural causes, while violence refers to the intervention of a non-natural cause in a natural causality. This cause of violence is technology, that is, human action that interferes with the natural course of things.

At a distance from chance and contingency and located between the necessary and the impossible, is the possible, that is, that which, like the contingent and chance, may or may not happen, but which, unlike contingency and chance, resulting from mere encounter, the possible is what happens if there is an agent with the power to make it happen. Thus, the possible is what is in the power of an agent to make or not happen. This agent can be the technique that uses natural causes in order to alter its results.

But this agent can also be free will with the power to choose between contrary alternatives and to deliberate on the direction, course and purpose of an action. Although the possible is, like the contingent, what may or may not happen, in the contingent the event takes place independently of the agent's deliberation and the purpose that the agent gave to his action, while in the possible the event results from the deliberate choice made by the agent. , which evaluates the means and ends of its action.

This is why, since Aristotle, we have learned to distinguish between the contingent and the possible by saying that the first is not in our power and that the second is exactly what is in our power. Finally, although technique and free will action form part of the possible, the difference between them is that the effect of technical action is an object other than the agent himself, something that exists separately from him as a product, while in free action the effect it is the action itself, it is the agent himself acting, so that the agent, the action and the effect of the action cannot be separated. Only in this second case can one speak of ethics and politics, that is, of actions that cannot be distinguished and cannot be separated from the agent himself.

Thus, if we inherited from Aristotle the idea of ​​chance as an encounter, from him we also inherited the idea of ​​freedom of the will as the action that is in our power. That is why Aristotle states that we do not deliberate about what we do not have the power to make happen, that is, we do not deliberate about the necessary, the impossible and the contingent, but only about the possible. The philosophical tradition leaves us, therefore, as an inheritance the distinction between what is not in our power (chance, the necessary and the impossible) and what is in our power (the possible).

Now, there is only possible when there is deliberation and choice, and for this reason one can only properly speak of the possible for human actions. Now, in the case of our actions, the necessary and the impossible do not just refer to what escapes our power because they are what always has to happen or what can never happen – that is, what is necessary is the immutable sequence of causal series and of series of effects, and the impossible is the absence of such series of causes and effects – but they still refer to time. The past as the past is necessary and therefore not in our power, and the future as the future is contingent, that is, it may or may not happen this or that way. The necessity of the past is opposed to the possibility of the present, due to the indeterminacy of the future.

The possible is articulated to the present time as a choice that will determine the meaning of the future which, in itself, is contingent, that is, it can be this or that way, depending on our deliberation, choice and action. This means, however, that once the choice is made between two opposing alternatives and the action is performed, what was a contingent future becomes a necessary past, in such a way that our action determines the course of time. It is this passage from the contingent to the necessary through the possible that gives human action an incalculable weight, as a freely realized possible becomes an instituted necessity.

The ethical and political agent finds himself, therefore, wedged between two external powers that determine him in exactly the opposite way: necessity obliges him to follow (natural) laws and (historical) rules over which nothing can; the contingency forces it in unpredictable contrary directions. More than that, in the case of ethics and politics and, therefore, of history, necessity was produced by the agent's own free action, which transformed a contingent into a possibility and, by realizing this possibility, transformed it into a necessity. This is why, when describing the virtuous ethical and political agent, that is, free and responsible, Aristotle will affirm that the perfect virtue is prudence and the perfectly virtuous man is the prudent one, that is, the one who looks forward and backwards, examines past and future, weighs the consequences of action because these will become necessary and will have effects on him and others. The prudent person is the one who faces the biggest problem posed by free action, that is, the indeterminacy of the present time, the necessity of the past time and the contingency of the future time.

It is this essential relationship with time that finally leads Aristotle to distinguish between chance in nature and chance in human actions. In nature, chance is just the accidental meeting of independent causal series that produce an unforeseen end and an unforeseen event. In human actions, however, chance is called luck or luck, which, explains Aristotle “is a cause by accident of the one who normally chooses according to a reflected choice in view of an end” and as the causes coming from fortune are indeterminate “fortune is impenetrable to the calculation of man”. The possible is the field where our will and our freedom are exercised. Fortune is the space-time of the unpredictable in which things happen to us without our being able to have any attitude other than that of reception of the event that falls upon us. Ethics and politics thus belong to the field of the possible, nature to that of the necessary, and history, because the field of innumerable simultaneous causalities always tends to be seen as the field of fortune, that is, of contingency, since this bears the imprint of all that is uncontrollable and imponderable in time.

Tradition enshrined an image of Fortune that crystallized in a very precise iconography: she is represented by a beautiful young woman, blindfolded, who holds a globe in one hand and a cornucopia in the other; she wears a belt with the signs of the zodiac around her waist; she comes with a robe blown by the wind; she has wings on her feet, and she steps on the wheel which she turns with her feet. This image offers us fickle and inconstant Fortune, mistress of the world (the globe), mistress of our fate (the zodiac), dispenser of goods (the cornucopia), agitated as the storm (the puffy cloak), inconstant (the wings on feet), blind or indifferent to men's requests (the blindfold) and fair (the wheel that raises the loser and demotes the winner).

However, there is an aspect of great relevance in this image because it is in it that the possibility of an ethical and political action capable of defeating Fortune itself will come to be inscribed: the wings on the feet. Although these wings serve to indicate that Fortune is fleeting, inconstant, capricious, fickle and ephemeral, these same wings indicate that she acts because she has time in her favor, which runs quickly. Now, this time that runs quickly is not the time of nature, which is repetitive and regular; nor is it the time of destiny or divine providence, which is a slow and long time of carrying out a divine plan. The swift and ephemeral time, which Fortune uses, is the kairos: the opportune moment or the opportune occasion, that is, that elusive moment that we must know how to seize if we want to act and if we want to beat Fortune on her own ground. O kairos it is the time for adequate action, the instant of initiative, when a virtuous agent takes his life in his hands against the harassment, seduction and illusions of Fortune.

From this perspective, the Renaissance defined virtue by its opposition to fortune, thinking of a confrontation between two temporal forces: it takes fortune as the force of indeterminacy of situations and events, at the point of departure and arrival, and to it opposes the virtue as the power to determine the indeterminate, to deliberate and choose the possible. Fortune ceases to be the brute exteriority that befalls men to become the indeterminacy and adversity that demand the strong action of the virtuous. This is how Machiavelli, Montaigne and Bacon resume the relationship between virtue and fortune, in line with the adage “man is the architect of his own fortune”.

There remains one last trait to complete our picture. Prudence was prized as the virtue capable of not succumbing to fortune, because the prudent person is the one who has his eyes turned to the past and the future to choose what is possible in the present. However, alongside the valuation of prudence, Another virtue was also placed in opposition to the power of fortune: “friendship”. Faced with fortune as a meeting that can be good or bad, which can be good fortune or misfortune, philosophy thematized friendship as a good meeting, that is, that relationship between free and equal beings whose actions are a source of freedom for others.

Why is fortune powerful? Because it can become mistress of events, seizing time as kairos. Fortune has no power over the time of Nature or over the time of fate or providence, but it has power over the time of our action. But what does a time mean that is just a fleeting, ephemeral instant, in which everything can be plotted against us or in our favor? This relationship with time as indetermination is the mark of our finitude. We are not finite just because we are mortal, we are finite because we know we are mortal; we are not finite just because our power is much smaller than the outside forces around us, but because we know that we are smaller than they are.

To our finitude, philosophy has always contrasted the image of the eternal and perfectly happy god, self-sufficient, autarkic, autonomous, completely free. How could men have a life that resembled eternity, freedom, autonomy and divine happiness? Two are the human ways of living, thinks Aristotle, in which man resembles the divine: political life, in which the community acts together for the good and happy life of the whole and therefore the politeia perfect is the autonomous and free polis that ensures maximum survival, security, justice, and freedom to each of its members. The political community is, therefore, the good meeting of free men and one of the ways to imitate the self-sufficiency and autonomy of the divine.

However, no matter how good the political community is, it is always subject to the action of enemy foreign communities and, above all, subject to the action of internal enemies - external war and civil war indicate that fortune also maintains its reign within the interior of the political community. polis. There is, however, a superior form of good encounter, of victory against fortune and of imitation of divinity, friendship - a relationship between free and equal woven in the well-willing and well-doing in which friends reciprocally supply each other's limitations. others and form a free company that mimics the self-sufficiency of the divine and lessens the dramatic effects of finitude.

Unlike the political community, friendship does not succumb to the power of fortune, but, on the contrary, only it has the strength to prevent the difference in possessions, fame, glory and honors from dividing friends, because what belongs to each one is their own. everyone and it is everyone who acts so that each one is what he is and has what he has. If, through politics, we humanize ourselves, through friendship we divinize ourselves. This is why, not Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Etienne de La Boétie affirms that friendship is a holy thing.

2.

O Discourse on Voluntary Servitude it could be read in the key of the tradition whose framework we sketched above. However, there is something in La Boétie's text that prevents us from remaining in this key. And this something becomes legible if we make a detour through another tradition.

At a given instant of Speech, exactly when formulating the idea of ​​a bad encounter that would have denatured man, causing him to lose the memory of his original natural freedom, La Boétie raises a hypothesis: that a “whole new people would be born, neither accustomed to subjection nor attracted by freedom ” and who was asked if she wanted to live as a servant or live free: “with what laws would you agree?” asks La Boétie. The hypothesis is evident: La Boétie refers to the image of the inhabitants of the New World, traditionally presented by travelers as men without law, without faith and without a king.

Now, this image had become central in European disputes over the right of conquerors. The most debated issues by theorists of the period refer to natural law, the law of nations, civil law, whether or not the Indians are natural slaves, whether the existence of kingdoms, such as those of Mexico, indicate the need to include the Indians in the law of nations and civil law. In other words, the sixteenth-century discussions are of a legal nature and oscillate between the affirmation and denial of natural law, the right of people and the civil right of the Indians, and between the affirmation and denial of the natural slavery of the indigenous people.

The peculiarity of La Boétie's text lies, first of all, in not raising the question of the “savage”, that is, of an other who would be the same as us Europeans in a primitive phase of evolution, nor of an other imagined as “noble savage”, nor the savage as an already constituted figure of politics and civil law. In other words, La Boétie does not introduce a legal question, nor an image of the “whole new people” as a stage in the constitution of human, that is, European, identity.

La Boétie speaks of people not used to subjection nor attracted by freedom. That is, people who did not institute a State, people who do not even know the name of freedom, but who, faced with a choice and deliberation between two possible opposites, namely, serving themselves or serving a lord, would choose to "serve reason" rather than "serve a man".

These “whole new people” do not know the name of freedom precisely because they live freely; they are rational people and it is this rationality that makes them choose, without hesitation, to serve reason, that is, themselves, and not to serve a man, that is, a master. In other words, La Boétie does not ask whether these people would dispute about legitimate and illegitimate forms of domination, but claims that these people would refuse any form of domination. In this way, the sixteenth-century image of savages as people without law, without faith and without a king takes on an entirely new meaning: they are not people who do not know how to have laws, a faith and a king, but people who chose not to have them. have because he chose freedom.

The “whole new people”, as we said, are introduced at a precise moment in the Speech, when La Boétie asks how the misfortune took place, that is, how to explain that man, the only one naturally made to live freely, is the one who subjects himself to a yoke that not even animals would accept without first fighting against it and without being forced on him. This interrogation is linked to another, which is the center of the Speech: La Boétie's interrogation is not directed at the difference between legitimate and illegitimate powers nor the search for the cause of tyranny, but turns to the enigma of the separation of power. How is it possible that men have instituted a power separate from society and which, thanks to this separation, can dominate them as a strange and transcendent force?

that the interrogation of Speech it is not about the cause of tyranny but about the origin of power separated from society, the proof is that La Boétie affirms that there are three types of tyrants – by election, by conquest and by heredity – but that, although the ways of to come to power, it is “always the same way to reign”. That is, the tyrant is not the one who exercises excessive and illegitimate power, but simply the one who exercises power when men have chosen or accepted a power that is located outside and above society and that someone exercises it because chosen to exercise it. .

Why is there no difference in the ways of reigning? Because the chosen one behaves like a conqueror and the conqueror, as if he had been elected, and both work to ensure the heredity of power, which will give it traits of naturalness, as if it had always existed, by Nature. La Boétie's question, therefore, is: how was a power transcendent to society born? And the initial answer is that, if the “whole new people” were asked if they would want to serve a master, they would answer “no” and would not allow the birth of such power.

Thus, the “whole new people” appear in the Speech to demonstrate that there is neither a natural necessity nor a destiny necessity in the emergence of the State as a power separated from society, that is, as domination by a lord or several lords over the rest of society. If it is neither the necessity of nature nor the necessity of fate that such a power has been instituted, what is the origin and cause of its institution? If this is not a necessity, then it must be either contingent or voluntary. Since, in human actions, the contingent is what happens by chance while what happens by will is done by freedom, it is worth asking whether the separate power, that is, the State, arose by misfortune, and not by deliberate human action of the men, or whether it was born by the freedom of the human will. Was he born by fortune and misfortune or by free will?

3.

O Voluntary servitude speech, as its title indicates, deals with an enigma: how did men, naturally free beings, use freedom to destroy it? How is a voluntary servitude possible? Indeed, writes La Boétie, voluntary servitude is something that nature, God's rational minister and good ruler of all things, refused to have done. More than that. Voluntary servitude is something that language itself refuses to name, since this expression is an oxymoron, since free will and servitude are opposites and contraries: all will is free and there are only servants by coercion or against their will, something that even the animals give proof. The riddle, then, is twofold: how were free men freely willing to serve, and how can servitude be voluntary?

It is to answer this question and decipher this double enigma that La Boétie begins by proposing misfortune or a bad encounter as an answer. It was luck that men denatured themselves, that is, they lost their natural freedom and chose to have masters, getting used to serving them. With the love of freedom gone and the “obstinate will to serve” rooted, humans lost their natural right, that is, they unlearned to be free and forgot that, by nature, they obey only reason and are no one's servants.

Why luck? Why for bad encounter and misfortune? Because, writes La Boétie, by nature we are all free, equal and companions with the gift of speech and thought to recognize each other and so that, by declaring our thoughts and feelings, we can create a communion of ideas and affections. Therefore, "it cannot fall into anyone's understanding that nature has placed anyone in servitude". Consequently, if we are servants, we are not so by nature, but by the operation of fortune. But what misfortune was this, what bad encounter was this that denatured us to such an extent that we no longer remember that we were once equal and free?

The answer is sought at the origin of tyranny: misfortune, that uncontrollable contingency, happened at the moment when men elected a lord, who would become a tyrant, or at the moment when they were conquered by the weapons of a tyrant. In the first case, they were reckless; in the second, overcome by force. Now, even though the ways for a tyrant to come to power are different, we already know that the way of governing is identical and, if that is the case, it is not enough to refer the cause of tyranny to fortune, because even if he rises to power in a moment of misfortune, the tyrant remains in it by the voluntary consent of the tyrannized. If fortune can explain the advent of tyranny, that is, that power is separated from society, it cannot explain its conservation, and so we are back to our initial riddle: how is voluntary servitude possible?

O Speech then look for a new answer. If by nature men are free and serve only themselves, serving reason, servitude can only be explained by coercion or illusion. By coercion: men are forced, against their will, to serve the strongest. By illusion: men are deceived by the words and gestures of another, who promises them goods and freedom, subjugating them by deceiving them. Again, however, the answer is not satisfactory, because, as before, coercion and illusion can explain why the tyrant rises to power, that is, why power separates itself from society, but they cannot explain why it remains so.

Now, however, La Boétie seems to have found the right answer: tyranny is preserved by the force of custom. This is second nature and humans, initially forced or initially deluded, get used to serving and raise their children by feeding them on the milk of servitude; for this reason those who are born under tyranny do not perceive it as servitude and serve voluntarily, as they ignore freedom. Custom, therefore, is what teaches us to serve.

Now, what is wrong with this argument that seems so coherent? To assume that custom can be stronger than nature and erase it. The proof that this is false lies in the large number of historical examples of peoples and individuals who struggled to recover their lost freedom. Thus, separate power, even if it is instituted by fortune and preserved by custom, does not find its true origin in fortune and custom. It is necessary, once again, to explain where separate power derives the strength to preserve itself and where the desire to serve comes from. It is necessary to know why and how men act towards their own servitude.

The strength of the tyrant, explains La Boétie, is not where we imagine to find it: in the fortresses that surround him and in the weapons that protect him. On the contrary, if he needs fortresses and weapons, if he fears the street and the palace, it is because he feels threatened and needs to show signs of strength. Physically, a tyrant is a man like any other – he has two eyes, two hands, one mouth, two feet, two ears; morally, he is a coward, proof of this being in the display of the signs of strength. If so, where does his power come from, so great that no one thinks of putting an end to tyranny? It comes from the colossal enlargement of his physical body through his body politic, equipped with a thousand eyes and a thousand ears to spy, a thousand hands to plunder and strangle, a thousand feet to crush and trample.

The tyrant's physical body is not only enlarged by the political body like the body of a colossus, his soul or morals are also enlarged by the political body, which gives him the laws, allows him to distribute favors and privileges and seduce the unwary so that they live at ease. around to satisfy you at all times and at any cost. The question that must be asked is: who gives you this gigantic, seductive and malevolent body politic? The answer is immediate: it is we, “foolish peoples”, who give him our eyes and ears, our hands and our feet, our mouths, our goods and our children, our souls, our honor, our blood and our lives to feed him. it and increase the power with which it destroys us.

But if that is the case, and if, by misfortune, a tyrant has gained power and, by custom, remains there, how can he be overthrown and freedom regained? La Boétie answers: it is not necessary to fight him, it is enough not to give him what he asks of us: if we do not give him our bodies and our souls, he will fall. It is enough not to want to serve it, and the State will fall.

But if the answer is so clear, the enigma of voluntary servitude is even greater, because if it is an easy thing to overthrow tyranny, it is necessary to ask why we voluntarily serve what destroys us. La Boétie's answer is terrible: we consent to serve because we don't want freedom. We consent to serve because we expect to be served. We serve the tyrant because we are tyrants: each one serves the separate power because he wants to be served by others below him; each one gives his goods and life to power because he wants to take possession of the goods and lives of those below him. Servitude is voluntary because there is a desire to serve, there is a desire to serve because there is a desire for power, and there is a desire for power because tyranny inhabits each one of us and institutes a tyrannical society. Having a tyrant means that there is a tyrannical society. It is she, and she alone, who gives power to the tyrant and keeps him there where he has placed him to do harm. It is the social division that institutes the State as a separate power. Here is the misfortune.

4.

To prove that the desire for freedom is natural and that, for men, to act according to their nature is to act for freedom, La Boétie confronts the “many” (foolish peoples and blind nations) who serve “one only” and the “some” who have not stopped desiring freedom because they do not want to serve. These “some” are, in the first place, those who are “able to see further” and “look back and forth”: they are the prudent, those who know that once freedom is lost, “all evils will disappear”. follow through”. Because these “some” are prudent, they do not allow themselves to be dominated by fortune, by the adverse conditions of the present, but seek to read the course of time and act to determine the indeterminate, because they know that the present action will become a necessary past that will trigger the necessary effects for the future. for coming.

If the prudent are those who do not allow themselves to be seduced by fortune, by present benefits that will become harm to come, friends are those who do not allow themselves to be deceived by the greatest risk, that risk which is the original misfortune because it is that voluntary and free action in life. which will be planted the germ of separate power or tyranny. What risk is this?

Friendship – writes La Boétie – is a holy thing, a sacred name. It only exists where there is equality, freedom and justice, cultivated among those who unite for the natural good and for the good to do reciprocally. There is no place in it for complicity and harm. Fortune wins because it is not deceived by false goods, because each friend is true good for the other. But if that's what friendship is, then the greater risk is that, out of friendship, friends elevate one of their own and place him above the rest. If they do, they institute inequality, throw one of their own outside and beyond the limits of friendship, separate him from good company, isolate him and serve him, imagining thus compensating him for the isolation and lack of love that his new condition brings him. .

Now, that this risk is real, it is enough to prove it if we remember that the Greek name tyrant us it does not mean one who exercises power by the use of force, but one who is more excellent than others in whatever he does. AND tyrant us the best, the bravest, the wisest, the most far-sighted, the most skillful. It is precisely because of his exceptional qualities that friends elevate him above them and isolate him, and, from admiration, pass to servitude.

By resuming the two virtues with which tradition had imagined overcoming fortune, adversity and misfortune, La Boétie produces an effect of astonishing knowledge: the origin of voluntary servitude lies in three causes that should make it impossible, that is, free will, prudence and friendship. Free will, if humans choose to have a master. Prudence, if when deliberating, calculating between two evils, they choose the lesser evil instead of no evil. Friendship, if friends elevate the best among their own, separating them from the circle of equals because it is tyrant us. In this way, it is exactly the conditions of virtue, freedom and happiness that can be the cause of voluntary servitude: this is what La Boétie calls “misfortune”.

To shed light on this misfortune, the Speech introduces “all new people”. However, after the allusion to the new people, La Boétie curiously alludes to another people, “the people of Israel” whose story provokes indignation in the author, since “without any coercion and any precision it gave itself a tyrant”, that is, a king, contrary to the order left by Moses. The text is clear: if it was without coercion or precision and if humans only serve if forced or deceived, it is evident that the Hebrews were deceived and that their situation is exactly the same as that of the Greeks, mentioned at the opening of the book. Speech, when, according to Homer, they accept the word of Ulysses: “in having several lords I know no good / that one is the lord, that one is the king”. Both in the case of the Hebrews and that of the Greeks, these peoples and nations did not cease to suffer “the evils that follow in stride”.

Why the counterpoint between the Hebrew people and the Greek people, on the one hand, and the whole new people, on the other? La Boétie looks at the moment of the origin of the separate power, represented by the Greeks and the Hebrews, in opposition to the new people that impede this institution. Situated between two temporalities, the Speech it is not located between two empirical times, but in an ontological difference: the time after freedom and the time of freedom.

However, because it is situated in temporality, the Speech he knows that he is situated in the contingent, in the possible and in the permanent risk of a bad encounter or misfortune. This is why the “whole new people” appears in his argument to express something apparently contradictory: on the one hand, to represent humanity as such, the original universality of the human race, and, on the other hand, to lead to the recognition that this universality or humanity , while rational and free, disappeared. From this perspective, the savages of the New World are those who do not want voluntary servitude, who refuse the separation between community and power and, therefore, figure in human universality and the (ontological) memory of the lost origin. They are not the Other: they are the human in men.

*Marilena Chaui Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at USP. Author, among other books, of against voluntary servitude (Authentic).

Originally published on Journal of Reviews, on 30/01/2013.

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