Rethinking Community in the Aftermath of Communitarianism: Outlines of a Phenomenological Path

Three decades after it arose, the contemporary Communitarianism and the questions it raised still appear to be worthy of serious attention. In an attempt to confront this legacy, the first part of the present essay seeks to propose a redefinition of the concept of community. It does so by setting itself two key phenomenological questions, which are both devoted to the concept of sharing. The first question asks how something can be shared amongst multiple beings who are divided by emotional, ethical, religious, linguistic and ethnic differences. The second and no less fundamental question, in turn, asks what people have to share in the first place. The second part of the essay invokes a familiar Kantian distinction in order to sketch out and discuss a proposed ‘semantics of sharing’. This semantic model is intended to clarify and enrich the questions surrounding the ‘integration of the self’, which constitutes oneof the most central aspects of the human being’s need for sociality.