close-up

To Whom do You Belong?

For some it is a threat to the shared life, for others it is a negation of freedom. A look at the history of the word “belonging” and its semantic implications, in order to discover its ontological meaning, one that makes us participate in a good

edited by Maurizio Crippa

If a newborn baby could speak, he would say, “I belong to my mother.” How many times we have heard examples like this, and each time we are convinced that they are true, because the tie of belonging is so evident that it needs no further explanation. So, how is it that in everyday usage–or even more, in the way it is used every day by the social, political, and journalistic context in which we live–this word, “belonging,” so crucial in human terms, becomes tiresome, opaque, and sometimes even felt as a threat to shared life? We “belong” to one side “as opposed to” another, things “belong to us” in a grim division of goods. “To what tribe do you belong?” the Italian writer Moravia asked, casting a bitter glance on the world.

This may be because it is a living word, which becomes depleted or enriched according to what is recognized as its foundation, explains Cristina Gatti, a linguistics professor at the Università Cattolica in Milan, who works in the field of semantic analysis. “Belonging” is a word that has to be explored all the way to its deepest meaning. “This is not an easy path,” Gatti says. “If we look at the history of the word, we discover that it does not exist in the classical languages. The Greeks and Romans used circumlocution to express this concept. Greek says, for example, ‘descend from, be the son of,’ and Latin uses expressions like alicuius esse, ‘to be someone’s.’ Today, if we consult a dictionary, belonging has essentially three meanings: ‘property of,’ ‘part of,’ and ‘pertaining to.’

This is a nice tangle. How do you unravel it?
The most interesting aspect for us is the second meaning: belonging as being part of something. And then, we have to work right at the foundation. It is the foundation that determines the meaning of belonging.

Please explain...
Let’s consider a first level: Whales belong to the family of cetaceans. Here the foundation of belonging is the sharing of a series of traits (being an animal, etc.) shared by the individual parts that belong to this whole. Let’s go on to a second level: The leg belongs to the table. In this case, it is a question of complementarity, meaning it belongs to, it is part of, it is an element that complements the whole. Let’s look at a third level: to belong to a political party. Here the foundation begins to be something more, which is the sharing of an ideal, a project.

We have not yet come to the crucial point...
But we are getting there: to belong to a family. Here the connection begins to emerge between belonging and participation. A son is a part of fatherhood, whether he is a natural or adopted son. Belonging begins to reveal the sense of a more constitutive relationship. You are a part not only because “you are someone’s,” but also because you take part in. Widening the field, we can say to belong to a people, and here the foundation is a sharing of origins, traditions, needs, and instruments brought into being in order to satisfy them. By analogy, we can speak of a nation, of a state, and here the foundation of belonging becomes also juridical.

In short, the more decisive the foundation is, the more clear-cut the value of belonging. But it is right at this level that, according to many, the problems arise. When we belong to a nation, or “worse” still, to an ethnic group or a religious faith, we exclude others, we introduce a principle of division, of enmity...
This is a reductive interpretation of belonging. In the types of belonging based only on an immanent foundation, the possibility of an ideological or quantitative reduction that standardizes everyone is always lurking. Think of a certain way of belonging to one’s employer, party, or state. The other possible reduction is that belonging can become a principle of exclusion. In ancient Greece, for example, philia, friendship, with a slave was not possible, because the slave did not share the belonging to the polis, which is the foundation of the rights and dignity of man.

Is there a better foundation?
Yes. Belonging becomes particularly meaningful when it expresses an ontological participation: Creatures belong to their Creator. If belonging finds a foundation on this level, the risk of reduction of which we were speaking earlier falls away. Belonging is no longer merely being a property or a function, but also taking part in a good that is communicated without being divided up.

“Divided up”?
I can take part in a publicly traded company; in fact, we say that I have “shares” in that company. But in this case, the good in which I take part is distributed by being divided into parts–if I have more shares, you have less. But there is a kind of participation in which the good that is participated in remains intact even as it is shared out. I am thinking of the good that is “being,” but also of goods like freedom and love. Envy, if we look closely, is born out of this.

What does envy have to do with it?
Because we think, wrongly, that the good in which we take part has inevitably to be divided up, meaning that if I share it with you, there is less for me. It is a bit like the manipulated image of belonging to a nation, to the state: the more people belong to Italy, the less rich or free we are. It is a belonging that diminishes in quality and becomes a form of social envy. Even a certain attitude to justice is like this, as it arises from the idea of a wrong to be paid for. In this sense, it is interesting to remember the connection in Greek between the word envy, phthonos, and the term aphthonos, which means “abundant” and thus “not producing envy.”

The only way out is a good that is abundant...
The most apt example of belonging whose foundation is participation in an abundant good, which is not divided up into parts, is the Church. It is no coincidence that the New Testament, when it speaks of the Christian as “part of the body of Christ,” uses the Greek word meros, which means part, but also participation.

There is an analogy between the family and the Church: St Paul says, “If you are children, you are also heirs.” This is an ontological, but also a juridical, belonging. We take part in a reality, a good, that is present.
Yes, this is an ontologically founded belonging, and when the belonging, as in the Church, has this sort of foundation, we have the possibility of an effective koinonia between the parts.

Today, on the contrary, in the prevailing mentality, the highest ideal of freedom is the absence of belonging.
Let’s go back to the example of the son. In order to be sons or brothers, one has to have a father. Conceiving of freedom as the absence of belonging means undermining the very foundation of the nature of the son, which consists in being a part of the father. If you sever this bond of belonging, you undermine the very foundation of sonship.