ABSTRACT
What is, or what constitutes a community? In his book The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Alphonso Lingis observes that “community” is usually conceived as constituted by a number of individuals having something in common-a common language, a common conceptual framework-and building something in common: a nation, a polis, an institution (Lingis 1994, ix). A special instance of this kind of community is what Lingis calls the rational community. The rational community is not simply constituted by a common stock of observations, maxims for action, and common beliefs, but produces and is produced by a common discourse in a much stronger sense (Lingis 1994, 109). In the rational community “the insights of individuals are formulated in universal categories, such that they are detached from
the here-now index of the one who fi rst formulated them. . . . The common discourse is. . .a rational system in which, ideally, everything that is said implicates the laws and theories of rational discourse” (Lingis 1994, 110).
