ABSTRACT
Over the last thirty or more centuries, many things have undoubtedly been said about human beings. Yet these were often products of reflection. So the process of looking at human beings from outside – that is, at other people – leads us to reassess number of distinctions which once seemed to hold good such as that between mind and body. Humanity is not aggregate of individuals, community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. To look at human beings from the outside is what makes the mind self-critical and keeps it sane. But the aim should not be to suggest that all is absurd, as Voltaire did. It is much more a question of implying, as Franz Kafka does, that human life is always under threat and of using humour to prepare the ground for those rare and precious moments.
