Abstract
The outbreak of COVID-19 has raised a global concern and calls for an urgent response. During this perpetual time of epidemic crisis, philosophy has to stand on trial and provide a responsible justification for how it is still relevant and can be of used during this global crisis. In such a time of crisis like that of COVID-19, this paper offers a philosophical reflection from within the possibility/impossibility of community thinking in India, and the demand for an ethical responsivity and response-ability to act ethically towards the Other (autrui) to show that philosophy always already emerges from within the context of crisis. As an alternative outlook to the thinking of totalitarian singularity and individualism, community—in its possible and impossible making—can offer more meaningful engagement with the other human being by being responsible and extending care towards the Other. The thinking of a shared community life is the facticity of one’s own being-together-in-common without the dismissal of individual differences as can be seen in the works of Jean-Luc Nancy, and there is an ethical demand that comes from the face-to-face ethical relationship with the Other as argued by Emmanuel Levinas.
Highlights
The early decades of the twenty-first century seem to have their own global crisis, which could be different from that of the twentieth century
By drawing certain philosophical insights from Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking on community as the “clinamen of the ‘individual’” as in his work The Inoperative Community (Nancy 1991, 4) and Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics towards the Other,3 as explicated in his Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Levinas 1979), this paper aims to provide a philosophical reflection on the idea of the possibility/ impossibility of the making and unmaking of community and communitarian life during/(post-) COVID-19 pandemic from within the ethical stance of responsivity, response-ability and care towards the Other in a diverse country like India
It is important to revisit the question of relevancy and contribution of philosophical thinking during/(post-) COVID-19 as raised in the introduction of this paper
Summary
The early decades of the twenty-first century seem to have their own global crisis, which could be different from that of the twentieth century During this time of crisis, the question of the role and the use of philosophy (as a distinct academic discipline) always pops up, and such a question has been raised by those who call themselves silent spectators from a distance, but more importantly, by those whom we consider the practitioners of philosophy. In the context of the present scenario, the question can be raised as where is the place of theoretical-philosophical thinking during the perpetual time of epidemic crisis and the practical utility of such a discipline This question, guided by instrumental rationality, aims to arrive at the possibility of proving the utility of philosophy. If philosophy is to have a significant practical contribution, it has to understand its role in unravelling the existential question of who we are today, the understanding of one’s finitude and the crisis of a community rather than continuing the ongoing search for an abstract universal truth and foundation that function as a transcendental truth
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