UNIVERSAL HUMAN ETHICS AND OTHERNESS: DIALOGUES WITH FREIRE, BUBER, MARCEL AND MOUNIER

Abstract

The study aims to problematize emerging issues in these times of pandemic and post-pandemic, anchored in the following question: what does the pandemic urge us to learn and restore in the ethical-human sense? We used as generating themes the categories Universal Human Ethics and Alterity, in the sense of Paulo Freire, updating them in the dialogical dialogue with the authors Emanuel Mounier, Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel, whose references constituted the theoretical field. Through the bibliographical research, we carried out the analytical interpretative reading, with the purpose of understanding in Freire's works aspects in which the universal human ethics is expressed in the relationship of the self with the other, evidencing the interlocution with the referenced authors. In the exercise of extracting principles and meanings from these categories, which make it possible to update the author's thought and vision, we emphasize his theoretical and methodological contribution to dimension humanity and otherness configured in current circumstances, in order to rethink the human in the world and in relationships. As results, we emphasize the need to restore the meanings of the human and otherness, reflecting on the effects of the curtailment of freedoms, the resurgence of trenches that deny humanity and break with the principles of ethics. We show that the provisions of the single discourse, as well as the binary (polarized) views, make the possibilities of dialogue unfeasible. Dialectically, perceived in the contradictions, but also in the processes of overcoming, the interlocution provided by the authors, points to a possibility of restoring the human and alterity in this time called post-pandemic, based on the perspective of emancipation, freedom and autonomy, generated from and in reflection-action-reflection arising from experience, as well as from the praxis of paths of those who crossed and survived the desert of the pandemic.