On the connectedness of life and its recognition in a shared world
Human beings are social creatures. They do not come into the world alone, cannot care for themselves as children and remain dependent throughout their lives on conditions they do not create by themselves. Food, water, shelter, care and participation in social life all presuppose relationships with other people and with the natural environment.
This connectedness does not rest on any decision; it exists before we recognize it. We can shape it, change its effects or push it out of our awareness, but we cannot abolish it.
This gives us the following understanding of solidarity:
Solidarity means recognizing that other living beings have basic needs of their own, and actually taking these into account in our actions and in the way we live together.
© 2026 Andersen Storm
Recognition Does Not Require Evaluation
Other people have needs, and these exist regardless of whether we understand them, share them or declare them justified.
Someone who is hungry needs food, someone who is exhausted needs rest, and someone who has to relieve themselves needs a suitable place. Needs like these do not become real only because others agree with them.
Other living beings, too, exist under conditions of their own. Their needs do not have to correspond to human needs, or be compared with them, in order to be recognized as needs that actually exist.
Solidarity therefore requires neither that we equate different forms of life and their needs, nor that we feel personal affection.
To take the needs of others into account in our actions, we do not have to feel what they feel. Empathy can draw our attention to needs, but it creates neither the needs nor the connectedness.
The reality of a need must be distinguished from the possibilities of satisfying it. Whether a need is real does not depend on anyone recognizing it. Whether it can be satisfied, by contrast, very much does.
How a Shared World Arises
Every living being exists within limits. It requires certain conditions and is at the same time itself part of the conditions under which other life becomes possible.
Humans continually change these interrelations: they build houses, construct roads, cultivate soil, manage traffic and distribute water, energy and food. In the process, new possibilities open up and others are closed off.
In this way the world we live in is constantly being reshaped, and none of these changes affects only those who directly cause them.
A road alters the routes of others, and the regulation of a river changes living conditions upstream and downstream alike. And whoever decides how public space is used helps determine which needs can be satisfied there.
Solidarity therefore reaches beyond the personal relationship between two people. It shows itself in how we shape our shared world.
What matters is whether I am willing to help another person, and just as much whether the living conditions we have created take that person’s basic needs into account at all.
How Solidarity Can Be Prevented
A familiar example is the public toilet.
People have bodily needs that cannot be postponed at will, and anyone moving through public space therefore needs, among other things, access to sanitary facilities.
If a public toilet is removed without replacement, the need remains; what has disappeared is any consideration of it at that place.
The person now has to enter a shop or a café, depends on the willingness of a private proprietor and may have to buy something in order to satisfy an elementary need. The shared infrastructure thus leaves them to find an individual solution to a problem that arises from human existence itself.
This changes how public space can actually be used, most clearly for children, older people and people with disabilities or illnesses. Such a design can structurally impair solidarity, even if no one intends to harm anyone.
The effect reaches further, to our expectations of one another: if my basic needs receive no consideration in public, it can come to seem natural to me over time that others, too, have to manage their needs alone.
Shared responsibility becomes a matter for the individual. The actual dependence remains; its social recognition fades.
In this way desolidarization can arise even though people retain their fundamental capacity to act in solidarity.
Solidarity Is More Than a Willingness to Help
Solidarity is often demanded where someone is in distress: others are expected to help, show understanding or forgo advantages of their own.
Such acts can be acts of solidarity. A society that takes elementary needs into account in its very organization, however, does not depend on the willingness of individuals to help on every occasion.
A publicly accessible toilet does not presuppose an empathetic decision by someone passing by. It exists because the need was taken into account when public space was designed.
Solidarity can therefore exist as a lasting quality of social conditions. It does not have to be created anew in every encounter, but can remain effective in institutions, rules and the ways resources are distributed.
None of this means that every need can be fully satisfied at all times. Resources and possibilities for action are limited, needs can conflict with one another, and taking them concretely into account requires decisions.
Recognition itself, however, does not first have to be earned through an evaluation of the other person.
The World Does Not End with Human Beings
Our connectedness extends beyond human society.
We need air, water, soil and functioning ecological relationships, and we share these conditions of existence with other living beings, whose possibilities for life we change through our decisions.
Here, too, solidarity can be understood as the effective recognition of basic needs.
The organisms of a forest have conditions of existence of their own, even if the forest does not seem useful to us. And an animal does not have to resemble us for its needs to be taken into account when humans intervene.
No simple instruction for every intervention in nature follows from this, but a standard does, by which to consider its consequences: other living beings do not disappear from the shared web of effects just because we disregard their needs in our decisions.
Solidarity Need Not Be Invented
The human capacity for cooperation and mutual support develops early; its preconditions are part of human social development.
Even so, existing connectedness does not necessarily lead to acting in solidarity: people can exploit one another, ignore needs and destroy living conditions on which they themselves depend. The connectedness persists throughout; what changes is the way in which it takes effect.
Relationships and institutions based on solidarity can be created, maintained and changed; likewise, the conditions for realizing them can be restricted or removed.
The question of how more solidarity can be produced may therefore fall short. We can also ask which social conditions prevent the recognition of needs that already exist, and how these obstacles can be changed.
Solidarity then appears not as an extraordinary moral achievement but as a way of shaping life together in accordance with its actual conditions of existence.
In this philosophical understanding, love names the original connectedness of Being, one not directed at any purpose, which precedes every particular relationship and every decision.
Solidarity does not first bring this connectedness into being; it becomes real where the basic needs of others are recognized and effectively taken into account within our shared world.
In order to be in solidarity, we do not first have to be connected with one another; we already are. What we make of this changes the world we live in.
Andersen Storm · 2026
From the conceptual system of the Permeability of Being. The concept of solidarity is in the process of systematic development.
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