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118 | THe Putosopuy or Eco-Potitics of solidarity. “Without knowledge of and attachment to particular persons and particular places and species, it is hard to understand how one might be moved to defend the interests of persons, places and species in general. Local social and ecological attachments are the basis for sympathetic solidarity with others; they are ontologically prior to any ethical or political struggle for universal environmental justice.” 3. In the footsteps of community-centred thinkers Man is the being most dependent on companions; few dispute this. Our special ability, self-consciousness, is the creation of connection through language. I have to see myself with others’ eyes in order to consider the effect of my acts on them when performing my acts. For this, I must understand them. I think, therefore we are: thought is the creation of dialogue. The existence of a thinking being can be none other than coexistence with others. To be able to understand each other, however, we had to have already agreed with each other; at least on the correct use of words if on nothing else, Wittgenstein points out in his philosophical examinations.'"? This understanding has a precondition too: an advance of trust. Above all, we had to believe others so we could learn from them. In his work on tacit knowledge, Mihaly Polanyi calls this trustful participation in others’ mental processes conviviality.'"' Its original Greek meaning referred to a group of participants of one of the banquets so important in ancient communities. To my knowledge, Polanyi is the first to use it to characterise man’s being. Man’s being is being together. His chief goal is to participate in others’ lives, because without the understanding and help of companions he would not even have been able to become who he is, let alone survive. I learn who I am from the Other, who is of existential importance for me. Conviviality appeared in the lexicon of the burgeoning green or ecological discourse through the work of Ivan Illich (another emigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy), a decade and a half after Polanyi. The author of Tools for Conviviality considers it important to explain that the fact of interdependence does not impose a limit on human freedom, but rather gives it meaning. “I consider conviviality to be the individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as 109 Robyn Eckersley Ibid. p.190. 110 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations. First published in 1953. 11 Mihaly Polanyi: Personal Knowledge, Part 2, chapter 7. First published in 1958.
