doing

For in every action what is primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, is the disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that is desires its own being, and since in action the being the doer is somehow intensified, delight naturally follows. Thus nothing acts unless (by acting) it makes patent its latent self.

Hannah Arendt

By "doing", says Arendt, we disclose ourselves, and we keep doing this "doing" since the beginning of times, not only because it brings about our own image, which is a pleasurable- for narcissistic- act in itself, but also because by doing it fearlessly for others, it allows us to open a way for a further, honest contact with the Other.

Any theory can jump from the small letters to the bigger ones. The concrete and close objects are as important as the abstract, distant ones.

Action is, she hints, the only way of blurring the arbitrary boundaries between us all, the only way of seeing oneself through becoming any-other, through letting also any-other becoming part of ourselves, as well. True solidarity, true contact, and equality starts, then, with the reckless and sort of naive gesture of letting oneself go, of enjoying the pleasure of fully being oneself for others.

This has nothing to do with the sort of humanitarian enterprises we see advertised everyday on Television.

But it should be, paradoxically enough, an altruist display of nakedness in motion, not a pragmatic, controlled, and efficient calculated move. "Doing" needs to come naturally: it cannot be the consequence of a cold meditation on the subsequent gains and losses. It is altruistic, it is unmediated, almost spontaneous. This is why "doing" is particularly efficient when it springs from us, from our own and only pleasure, when it becomes a blind display of a awakening that will only be hardly theorized,

and so here i stop,

just do(ing).