Shared life: An introduction

Abstract

Humans form their self-representations not in opposition to animals, as all Western histories of human evolution recount, but with them and through them.In other words, to be human does not mean to have fled animality, but on the contrary to live within it and to let it live within us.The phenomenon of shared life is, then, a problem of spillover and not one of hunting, breeding, domestication, or pets.It concerns human existence itself and, more widely, existence in general.A shared life implies becoming oneself while being other.Since antiquity, Westerners have lived in a culture that has constantly insisted on the man/animal opposition.Today, probing the convergences and proximity of all life is a major task; the issue of life in common is an attempt, among others, to do so.This problem's central point of departure is not that we must cohabit with others, but that we are the others and the others are us.Therefore, the challenge is how we might consider the specificity of the human in proximity to other living beings (including plants and fungi) rather than setting strict boundaries.It is therefore wrong to say that we live with animals; it is more correct to say that we are animals and animals are us.The pertinent metaphor is not one of immigrants who must be welcomed but rather the fingers of a hand; in other words, one must consider humans and animals in terms of inseparable difference (Lestel, 2013).The animal question entails the full recognition of our existential physiology, which we share with living beings on earth.Thus, a shared life is more precisely a shared existence -a life that is always lived together from the perspective of the first-person point of view, and with the implied second-person point of view for all living beings (although it could mean otherwise).What is clear, however, is that no life is constituted from the point of view of the third person -even if that is the perspective privileged in Western culture.Life is fundamentally metabolic on the one hand and existential on the other.

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