The respectivity of realities in Ignacio Ellacuría: reflections on the coronavirus pandemic

Abstract

This paper revisits the notion of “respectivity” proposed by Ignacio Ellacuría to reflect on the possibilities that the coronavirus pandemic has brought about. Thus, it begins with the stratification of reality previously posited by Zubiri and revisited by Ellacuría to highlight the intrinsic dynamism of material reality, which unfolds new forms of reality through dynamic tension and the unfolding of possibilities, while always understanding that human beings arise from these very movements and are not constituted as alien to them or as entities outside of intramundane reality. Similarly, the text questions whether the new reality—in which technology has been incorporated into the process of new and higher forms of reality—is, in and of itself, a new way of being in reality. By questioning the role that human beings occupy in the world and re-examining their insertion into the materiality of history and its inherent dynamism, we can recover the humanitarian meaning inherent in this health crisis. Thus, calling for a new humanity and a new earth, these lines awaken the longing for a civilization of poverty where habits and lifestyles more respectful of our Common Home are practiced, and where human beings reclaim their necessary place in history and in the reality in which they are embedded.