From the Individual to the Couple and to the Community

Thought and politics are nowadays more critical and reactive than affirmative. A positive foundation is lacking for both the development of thinking and the conduct of politics. It is not by merely encouraging citizens to be in the opposition that they are allowed to be responsible, including for themselves. And neither is it by reducing them to a social and partial identity as workers or heads of the family, or by considering them according to external properties: fortune, possessions of goods, even of cultural goods. What above all matters, particularly these days, is to invite, even to constrain, them to be themselves through cultivating self-affection and hetero-affection, as well as to care about an environment which supplies them with what they need to develop in their whole while relating to one another. This requires them to be concerned with their environment as well as with a lasting growth not only regarding various elements of the world but also human beings themselves and the desire which can unite them with each other.