Living Together: Re-Thinking Social Unity for a Multi-Faith Society

当代政治中的“公民健康”话语预设了社区生活和个人生活之间的类比，而这往往被忽视。本报告考察了关于个人生活的两个重要哲学概念——“情节”和“叙述”，并考虑了它们可以告诉我们关于社区生活的什么。报告发现，这两种概念都掩盖了他们想要揭示的东西：生活和分享生活的过程。情节概念认为人生是一系列离散的情节，忽略了一个事实，即美好的人生不仅仅是一连串的快乐时刻，而叙事概念把人生解释为一个展开的故事，倾向于规定自己喜欢的生活方式，以一种挫败实际生活的方式。为了保持公民社团的“活力”，有必要以相当不同的方式评估公民健康：确定和促进有意义的公民生活的基本形式，同时避免努力规定其内容。健康的公民生活的故事必须先亲身经历，然后才能被讲述。

The 'civic health' discourse in contemporary politics presupposes an analogy between the lives of communities and the lives of individuals that is often overlooked. This report examines two prominent philosophical conceptions of the life of an individual - the 'episodic' and the 'narrative' - and considers what they can tell us about the lives of communities.The report finds that both conceptions obscure what they seek to disclose: the process of living, and sharing, a life. The episodic conception, according to which a life is a sequence of discrete episodes, ignores the fact that there is more to a good life than a succession of happy moments, while the narrative conception, which interprets a life as an unfolding story, tends to prescribe its preferred way of life in such a way as to frustrate the enterprise of actually living.In order to preserve the 'vitality' of a civic association, it is necessary to assess civic health rather differently: by identifying and promoting the basic form of a meaningful civic life whilst refraining from the effort to specify its content. The story of a healthy civic life must be lived before it can be told.