/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>2955303

We must choose between the disempowerment of isolation and the disempowerment of submission.”

To satisfy our longing for acceptance and recognition, to be intimately assured that we have a place in the world, and to be freed by this assurance for a life of action and encounter, we must open ourselves to personal attachments and communal engagements whose terms we cannot predefine and whose course we cannot control. Each of these ventures into a life of longing for other people threatens to create a craven dependence and to submerge our individual selves under group identities and social roles.

There is a clash between individuality and participation in social life.
There is a clash between the enabling conditions of self-assertion. For our efforts at self-assertion--at marking out a sustainable presence in the world--may be undermined both by the lack of social involvement and by these involvements themselves.