«THE RABBIT SENDS IN A LITTLE BILL»: BEING-WITH UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF THE LOSS OF COMMENSURABILITY
Abstract
The article addresses the socio-philosophical examination of being-with as a form of human existence that presupposes a certain commensurability between the subject, the body, social space, and the structures of interaction. The author investigates the conditions under which a shared world becomes possible, as well as the mechanisms through which this possibility is lost in situations of crisis. The central thesis holds that being-with cannot be reduced to the mere fact of physical presence or communication, but is grounded in a complex system of correspondences between the human being and the world of their social existence.
The fourth chapter of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland serves as the primary material of the study, examined as a philosophical model of the breakdown of commensurability. It is shown that the crisis of being-with arises not only from conflict or communicative rupture, but also from the disruption of habitual correspondences between body and space, social role and person, presence and mutual understanding. Particular attention is given to the phenomenon of social recognition, the problem of embodiment, the functioning of roles in crisis situations, and the specific character of interaction under conditions of absent co-presence.
The article argues that social order is sustained not only by norms and institutions, but also by concealed structures of commensurability that ordinarily remain unnoticed. Their disruption renders visible the fundamental conditions of human coexistence. The analysis demonstrates that even goodwill, openness to interaction, and communicative receptiveness cannot guarantee the possibility of a shared world if the participants in interaction lose their capacity to remain commensurable with one another.
The conclusion is drawn that Carrollian nonsense functions not merely as a literary device, but as an instrument of philosophical analysis of social reality — one that allows the crisis of being-with to be understood not as an exceptional state, but as a mode of revealing the ontological and social preconditions of everyday existence.
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