The globe has stopped for a virus. It sounds crazy but it is real. While we are in lockdown and practicing social distancing to fight Covid-19, it is also a time to think and reflect. Distanciation is special to human. We can stand out of the stream of life and still look at it. We can mark a distance without being distant to life. Distanciation is our ability to reflect. But we cannot stay in the cave of our distanciations. We have to return back and face the immanence of life. We transcend life only to return with direction and vigour. The corona moment of humanity that we are facing is one such important time of distanciation. It challenges us to reflect and face life with serenity, compassion, and courage. Let begin this reflection with the basics. Distanciation takes us temporarily apart from the world. We transcend the hustle and bustle of life and look at it with critical eyes. Unfortunately, transcendental mode of thinking is mostly linear and hierarchical and we begin to believe that we are completely apart from the world. The corona moment of humanity is driving us back into the stream of life. It is teaching us that we are not entirely different. We are worldly and bodily and as such are vulnerable as any living organism.
Let’s delve on this levelling down of humanity brought about forcefully by the prevailing corona moment. It challenges us to adopt an immanent mode of thinking. Immanent mode of thinking is mostly non-hierarchical and non-linear and open possibilities in all directions. It teaches us that we part of the world that we falsely think is apart from us. The world is not really apart from us. Immanent mode of thing can assist us to understand our immersion into the world. Like a fish that is in the ocean but may not know the ocean as one fable tells us, we too forget that we are immersed in a world. We are beings-in-the-world and not out of it. This is like the eyes that enable us to see the world but we cannot see our own eyes seeing the world. Indeed, there is no line that separates us and the world. But we cannot live without this marking of distance. We need it for survival. There is a reversal of this in the corona moment. We are firmly reminded that we cannot survive outside our world.
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Our body plays a great role in shaping our experience of the world. We can see all bodies under a background but we cannot see our own body. Human experience of the world is carnal. We know the world through our body. We are present to the world through our body. The presence of our body is paradoxical in nature.We experience our body as the most intimate, inescapable, and abiding presence in our lives. But it is essentially characterized by absence. This means our body that essentially assists us to produce or make sense of the experience of our world stays furthest from our awareness in this entire experience of knowing the world. We relate to the world with a body that is profoundly marked by a corporal absence. In several ways, our carnally produced knowledge of the world is decorporealized. The invisibility of the eyes into its own vision illustrates this fact forcefully. The world is known and thought to be where we are not. This conviction guides our domination of the world. But is the world away from where we are? We are immersed in the world but are not mindfully aware of it. The corona moment by highlighting the vulnerability and fragility of our bodies is bringing us back to our bodily life.
The objectification of the world is possible and is sustained by distanciation that stands between our bodies and the world. It is only through an internal negation of body that we can come to know the world. It is the ecstatic nature of humanity that lets the body become absent to the world and lets us know the world. Perhaps, this gap that we experience in this process has paved a way for the construction of a disembodied lifestyle that is amplified by our technology. It is important, therefore, to listen to our bodies and respect its message. All bodies speak. They have a message for us. The corona moment brings this message loud and clear.
There are other lessons that we can learn from this corona moment in silence and intense attention. It has truly levelled down humanity. The global lockdown has open possibilities for animals and birds to reclaim their rightful spaces. In the silence that has come as a consequence of lockdown, we can now hear the chirping of the birds, dance of the leaves and flow of the river. Human activity seems to have drowned every other voice on this planet earth. Maybe the corona moment of humanity might arouse eco-concern in us. But there is another important lesson in this levelling of humanity. The dangerous coronavirus does not know all the distinction and divisions that humans have introduced among themselves. The divisive politics, casteism, racism, and marginalization of all forms is seemly crumbling under the attack of this minute virus. Humanity today is left with a simple option. To save itself it has to safe the poor. Coronavirus is here to change the way we live as humans. It is for us to learn our lessons and bring the required change individually and collectively. I stop here not because there is nothing more to say. Immersive thinking in the mode of immanence is not stand-alone thinking. it is a collective thought that brings us back into the stream of life and offers tremendous possibilities to be humans in the world. This thinking has to go on. But it cannot do it without you.
(The author is Professor of Rachol Seminary.)
