My flesh, my being, my activity: everything that is mine is already socialized in a certain manner. My consciousness is the consciousness of my embodied and socialized being. In a sense, I believe we are not born human; we become human through the education of our sensibility by the social environment that surrounds us, affects us, and thereby shapes us.
This sensibility is never a passive repository of events. It gives colour and form to whatever happens. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx writes something similar about musical sensibility:
“Just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear […] for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man.”
I am delighted to see sensibility towards others following the same path. Relying on others for my well-being also means relying on them for the education of my own human sensibility towards them, itself a historical and social product, while acting in turn towards them through the same openness. We can care for one another, and it seems to me that we must. This is possible because we share far more than a mere relationship: we share a sensitible flesh that is at once world and body, and a humanized nature shaped by our collective activity, the living legacy of culture.
This sensible nature, beyond the illusion of an individualistic free will and beyond a purely deterministic or biological conception of humanity, is what we can share, preserve, and cultivate. This qualitative enrichment of our common lived experience is a decision to prefer life over destruction and to sustain our being by remaining sensibly committed to this objective, and sometimes cruel, world. We may then imagine a genuine human community of sense and sensibility that transcends every particularism and every frontier without ever erasing the singularity of each of us.