Sharing is the founding gesture made by a culture in order to define what being human is. Throughout the pages of this scholarly book, François Hartog traces the intellectual genealogy of these founding sharings and their successive movements within the framework of the very long duration of Western culture.
Socrates' famous formula “all men are mortal” is the basis of the first division made by the Greeks between humans and the gods. In response to this infirmity, humans have found a solution: to write themselves into the memory of the living. On the way back to Ithaca, Ulysses strives to escape death, but above all an anonymous death, like that which occurs at sea, underlines the historian. A sublime, Homeric death has as its counterpart an immortal glory. Cicero does not think otherwise when he explains that without hope of immortality, many great men would not have sacrificed themselves for the republic. Another strategy for making human mortality acceptable is the distinction introduced by Plato between the body and the soul. Entirely different from the body, the soul is immortal, passing away “to other gods for accountability”. An important consequence of this other sharing is that life can now be seen as a preparation for death.
Last Judgment
Christ and his resurrection subverted
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