We live in a society that praises strength, competitiveness and performance. At the same time we are now used to flattering our weaknesses, terrified of the idea of looking them in the face and facing them for what they are: an integral part of our lives.
In “ Being fragile ” (Il Saggiatore, 2024, pp. 128, also e-book) - an essay that takes inspiration from the works of Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, Rainer Maria Rilke, Emmanuel Lévinas and Melville's Moby Dick - the philosopher Catalan Joan-Carles Mèlich then tries to answer a fundamental question : how can we take charge of our fragility without it inhibiting the pleasure of existence or, worse, destroying us?
The starting point is a crossroads, sliding doors in which we all find ourselves when we accept that our body is undermined by wounds, scars and pain and we consider the human condition as precarious and transitory. We can advance by taking refuge in an idea of a world in which everything is orderly, free of problems, and appeal to this principle to give meaning to our life, orient it and direct it. In this way, however, we deny ourselves an enormous possibility, the one that can be offered to us by the power of imperfection and, ultimately, not fully savor existence. Or we can face this type of thought with a radical criticism, to find ourselves as fragile but united bodies.
For Joan-Carles Mèlich the path to follow is that of a community ethic, not based on a set of rules to follow, but understood as the pursuit of empathy, forgiveness, compassion, therefore self-care and other. Mèlich therefore evokes ancient words, full of meaning, important and at the same time neglected, almost forgotten. One of these is forgiveness, a term too often considered synonymous with weakness or simply a senseless, illogical feeling, almost alien to the man who cannot forgive, but perhaps only forget or, worse, seek revenge. Conversely, forgiveness is something that human beings can act as well as conceive. It is gift, abandonment, action, the path to follow if you want to live fully.
As the poet and writer Gian Luca Favetto wrote: « Forgiveness also serves to give back time . It has nothing to do with understanding, with absolving, with bearing and it cannot be explained, except in the sense of explaining it as one explains a sail or a tablecloth. However, it is certain that if you do not forgive, you remain planted like crosses in a cemetery . If you are not forgiven, you remain in limbo, even if in that limbo anyone can organize a carnival to delude themselves. If you don't forgive yourself, finally, if you don't accept yourself, therefore, you can't forgive others. To give something you forgive a little and you lose a little."
Forgiveness requires action and also relationship and we must all strive to rediscover that we are relationship and in relationship . If we break relationships, in the end we don't even exist as individuals .
The great German poet Goethe said: "Treat people as if they were what they would like to be and you will help them become what they can be."
People change when we change our approach towards them . And we too change if we know how to open ourselves to relationships, a relationship not only verbal, but linked to body language. For Joan-Carles Mèlich the definitive answer lies in the contact - that is, in the "caress" - between different bodies; because by recognizing ourselves as vulnerable together we will be able to give comfort to each other , facing fear and suffering thanks to their sharing. Thus we would not be body and soul, constantly at odds and divided, but flesh, a union of spirit and matter, in constant communion with the rest of humanity.