Josep Maria Esquirol’s Philosophy of Proximity

By Cesca Castellví Llavina

What does it mean to resist in an age when deprivation has given way to excess? If history has long been shaped by the struggle against scarcity, today it is saturation – the superabundance of resources and stimuli – that has become the fundamental challenge to human existence.

This is the characteristic expression of contemporary nihilism, which presents two sides of the same coin: the saturation of content and its ultimate sterility. Our lives unfold within an atmosphere of informational overload and constant stimulation, sustained by a scientific technological form of rationality that reduces reality to what can be quantified and instrumentalised. Within this regime, time is compressed into immediacy: processes of maturation dissolve; experience becomes screen-mediated, while intimacy and human bonds erode. Far from intensifying life, this saturation disperses and flattens it. The result is the banalisation of existence, a profound sense of emptiness and loss of meaning, and, ultimately, the erosion of our humanity.

It is against this backdrop of existential disintegration that the question of resistance becomes urgent. And it is here that the philosophy of proximity developed by Josep Maria Esquirol (Sant Joan de Mediona, Barcelona, 1963) gains particular relevance.

The Catalan philosopher’s response to contemporary nihilism unfolds across four essays: La resistència íntima: Assaig d’una filosofia de la proximitat (2015), translated as The Intimate Resistance: An Essay on the Philosophy of Proximity (2021); La penúltima bondat: Assaig sobre la vida humana (‘The Penultimate Goodness: An Essay on Human Life’, 2018); Humà, més humà: Una antropologia de la ferida infinita (‘Human, More Human: An Anthropology of the Infinite Wound’, 2021); and L’escola de l’ànima: De la forma d’educar a la manera de viure (‘The School of the Soul: From a Form of Educating to a Way of Living’, 2024).

Through notions such as the outskirts, the infolding of feeling, the infinite wound, the human as a junction, poietic curvature, and re-encounter, this philosophy shifts attention away from logics of domination, self-realisation, and expansion, toward vulnerability, care, and inward gathering as the fundamental ways of sustaining life and recovering meaning.

Within this framework, resistance is not a counter-offensive. Rather, it consists in learning to stand upright amid the exposure of existence, while cultivating the bonds and everyday gestures that sustain the very possibility of world-making.

HUMAN LIFE ON THE OUTSKIRTS AND PROXIMITY AS RESISTANCE
Human life unfolds in no paradise, nor can it aspire to any form of absolute fulfilment. On the contrary, the human condition is inscribed on the outskirts – on the outskirts of an impossible paradise: a space of fragility, vulnerability, and exposure, where lack, effort, and suffering are present, but where, precisely for that reason, generosity, goodness, desire, passion, and all those qualities that make us human can emerge.

Against the pretence of self-sufficiency, human life reveals itself as essentially relational; from this perspective, the difficulty of existence is not a pathology, but a constitutive feature of our condition. Rather than medicalising every form of vulnerability, sadness, or frustration, Esquirol understands them as intrinsic to human life and as potential sources of care, solidarity, and meaning.

In this horizon, to resist – rather than merely to subsist – means not to dissolve into fragmentation. The meaning and challenge of living today do not lie in self-realisation, but in sustaining oneself amid the corrosive forces that permeate both individual and collective life. For this reason, the author’s intimate notion of resistance takes the form of inward gathering: a way of preserving the inner cohesion of life against its gradual depletion.

To resist is to dwell in proximity: a way of inhabiting the world attuned to what is simple and everyday. Its opposite is not distance, but ‘the ubiquitous monochrony of the technology-driven world.’ Thus, the deeper ground of existence cannot be found in abstractions divorced from experience, but rather in what is near and concrete: the home that shelters us, the bonds that nourish us, the names that anchor us, the simple gestures of daily life – setting the table, tending a garden, an apparently banal conversation with a neighbour. It is here that the meaning of life becomes manifest. Only through a return to what is most fundamental can we come to understand the symbolic dimension of the world.

What is near provides shelter: reflection does not consist in withdrawing from the familiar, but in deepening into it. Esquirol offers a critique of metaphysics: if it has traditionally sought permanence in abstract concepts, it has overlooked the fact that human permanence is always a sheltered condition. For this reason, a post-nihilist metaphysics must begin as a metaphysics of the home – not as a reflection on permanence grounded in notions such as substance or identity, but as a form of permanence rooted in shelter and care.

Within this framework, a genuinely human civilization is not one that conquers new territories, but one that knows how to build a habitable home within them: depth rather than progress, care and cultivation rather than domination, sheltering rather than seizing. Along this path, we may find refuge in exposure – the fundamental condition of the human being.

THE INFOLDING OF FEELING AND THE INFINITE WOUND: ESSENCE OF HUMAN LIFE
What makes us human? According to the author, the deepening of our most constitutive dimension: we are wounded and vulnerable beings, sentient and in need of others. Our fragility is not a shortcoming, but the most authentic expression of humanity and the most fertile condition of human life.

This experience of sensibility is condensed in what Esquirol calls the infolding of feeling. When sensibility reaches its highest point, it bends back upon itself, generating depth and reflexivity. In the human being, to feel is also to become aware of feeling: an awakening to being affected.

The concept of the infinite wound is inseparable from this infolding of feeling. The human being is a wounded being, yet this should not be understood in negative terms: it is the dimension that opens us to life, to others, and to the world. It is infinite insofar as it can never be fully sutured and remains constitutive of who we are. This opening unfolds across four dimensions that shape the whole of human existence.

The first is the wound of life, experienced as an intense embrace – the savour of living that permeates all experience and upon which every tearing occurs. The second is the brush of death: the anguish that arises from the awareness of finitude, a constant presence that accompanies life. The third is the gift of the you, the presence of the other, which opens a space for trust, responsibility, and shelter. The fourth is the shadowing of the world, a concept that renews Plato and Aristotle’s thaumazein: the impact of reality’s mystery, an experience both of wonder and disturbance, which Esquirol links to Jan Patočka’s notion of problematicity (the recognition that the meaning of existence is not predetermined, and that freedom consists precisely in taking responsibility for the world’s openness and shared nature), and to Martin Heidegger’s Verborgenheit (concealment), the idea that every disclosure always retains something concealed or withdrawn.

These four wounds shape the unique drama of every human existence. To live humanly does not consist in trying to mend them, but in inhabiting them, so that vulnerability may become a source of interiority and sheltering capacity. In this way, the author opposes an anthropology of the wound to an anthropology of power: subjectivity does not emerge from the ‘I can’, but from the ‘I am touched.’ Freedom does not stem from a self-sufficient will nor from a sovereign assertion of the self, but from the capacity to respond to what calls upon us and affects us. The wounded self is thus the most profound form of subjectivity, since it is this primordial exposure that enables action, as well as the fundamental human gesture of sheltering. Esquirol puts it this way: ‘Only because we are infinitely wounded can we be hospitable; it is because we are wounded that we can be healers. The creation of shelter arises from the infinite wound.’

THE POIETIC CURVATURE: AN ETHICS OF CARE

The human response to the infinite wound takes the form of what the author calls poietic curvature: a creative action that, arising from the depth of the wound, cares, accompanies, and weaves meaning. This poiesis is expressed in everyday gestures such as educating, healing, keeping company, nurturing relationships, singing, or sustaining a home. The curved dimension of the action expresses a relation of proximity, inward gathering, and shelter: ‘In contrast with the linear framework of progress, care is a movement that curves back toward what lies deep. And what curves becomes close, so that curvature is also proximity and nearness.’

Poietic curvature unfolds in three directions: the poietics of life, which intensifies and expands life, contributing to its development; the poietics of the world, which sustains it and makes it habitable, creating order, shelter, and harmony; and the poietics of meaning, which orients existence and opens paths of understanding. Good action transforms the wound into a creative force. In this sense, the human being can be understood as a poet – or a craftsman of the world –: one  who, from their constitutive vulnerability, keeps the world’s fabric tightly woven, articulating reality through gestures of care and responsibility. The philosophy advocated by Josep Maria Esquirol also engages in this same movement: it neither imposes itself on reality nor withdraws from it, but rather approaches it in order to understand it more deeply. ‘The best philosophy is the one that curves back over the infinite wound, and helps to care for it and respond to it’, he writes. Or yet: ‘Not being an idiotic philosopher means knowing that the primary care, the primary therapy, is service. Perhaps the greatest lesson a philosopher can learn from franciscanism is to become, beyond all haughtiness, a lesser philosopher among the Lesser Brothers.’

AN ONTOLOGY OF THE JUNCTION
The human being is, essentially, a junction or a liminal space: we exist by connecting, relating, and articulating meaning. To speak and to think is to bind what is present with what is absent, what is manifest with what is hidden. This liminal space – much like in physics, where an interface enables the reflection of light – gives rise to the clarity of reflective thought (in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, this openness is called Lichtung, the clearing: the open space in which beings can come into unconcealment). Yet this clarity is never absolute, but always partial: we are an articulation of light and darkness, disclosure and concealment.

Human consciousness is an open depth traversed by the infinite, and this is why our quest for sense is itself infinite. As finite and fissured beings, our understanding remains partial and always points beyond itself. We are structured around the expectation of ever more meaning, as it is endlessly deferred and postponed.

THE OTHER AS THE ORIGINARY HOME

For Esquirol, hospitality is the condition of human existence, and the other constitutes our originary home. Against Nietzsche’s will to power and eternal return, the author affirms a fraternal community and a continual return home; against the disembodied, technologized world, he defends a materialism rooted in hands that touch, hold, and nurture.

It is precisely vulnerability – our condition as a fragile juncture – that calls forth the need for shelter: to care for, protect, and sustain others. Goodness is not a moral abstraction nor a heroic stance; rather, it consists in the discrete, ordinary forms of care that sustain life and protect it from exposure: a word, a gaze, a discreet helping gesture, an act of hospitality. From this horizon, happiness also takes on a different meaning. It does not lie in a definitive state of fulfilment, but in a way of life that fosters more life and allows others to grow. Generosity is inseparable from this attitude.

The centrality of the other also shapes how we understand subjectivity and freedom. As noted above, the individual is not sovereign, but subjected – that is, responsible and exposed. Rather than resting on self-affirmation, freedom consists in the capacity to respond to the other’s call. Emmanuel Levinas calls this an invested freedom, as Esquirol writes: ‘Not I, but here I am, or here I am for you, as Levinas would say, are the expressions of freedom. To return to oneself is to empty oneself and thus to find oneself as exposed passivity, as being held (subjected, made responsible).’ When denied, vulnerability turns into violence or dogmatism; when embraced, it lays the foundations of a fraternal community.

This conception is reflected in a fundamental symbolic opposition at the heart of this philosophy: that of the desert and the ocean. The desert becomes the privileged metaphor of the human condition, as it expresses precariousness, exposure to the elements, and the need for shelter. It is a space of utmost fragility, but also the place where proximity and care acquire real density. The ocean, by contrast, symbolises dissolution into totality and the loss of singularity. This dichotomy culminates in a reinterpretation of an Eastern spiritual image: faced with the question of how to keep a drop of water from drying up, the oceanic answer is to let it fall into the sea. Esquirol offers another response, in tune with a philosophy of proximity: to place it on the lips of a thirsty person.

This understanding of existence resonates in the political sphere as well. Collective life also unfolds on the outskirts: we live in communities devoid of fixed centres, always exposed to degeneration. Democracy, fragile and imperfect, appears to be the regime best suited to this condition, as it acknowledges plurality and fosters fraternity across diversity. Esquirol retrieves the original sense of interest as inter-esse – that is, being-in-between, to be among others, to take part, to weave bonds. Genuine politics arises from this concern for the common good and from the willingness to sustain what is shared: interest and community converge in it. The author proposes the image of a ‘half-step shift’ to name those small gestures of responsibility and care which, without grandiloquence, have the power to transform coexistence. Human beings can shift – even if only by half a step – towards a more fraternal form of life, becoming not merely alive, but capable of life: that is, of making existence more dignified and habitable for oneself and for others.

THE RE-ENCOUNTER
The great wounds of the human condition – the wound of life, the gift of the you, the shadowing of the world and the brush of death – are not only fractures, but also forms of encounter: to live is to be in encounter with oneself, to love is to encounter the other, to inhabit is to encounter the world, and death is an encounter that intensifies the meaning of all other encounters. Human life is thus defined by a vocation for companionship: greetings and farewells – ‘welcome’, ‘see you again’ – are its most elementary and profound expression. In every encounter there is a good that makes us desire re-encounter (not as a Nietzschean eternal return of the same, but as an ever-new experience). This desire takes two forms: expectation, when the re-encounter belongs within the realm of the possible, and hope, when it exceeds its conditions. The wound of death makes life oscillate between this impulse toward re-encounter and the awareness of its possible – or definitive – impossibility.

On the other hand, we also live in expectation because not everything is right: the world is full of evil and suffering. Yet this recognition does not lead to despair, but to the intuition that things themselves – faces, everyday gestures, the simplest situations – bear signs of a promise of good. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History shows that progress is an accumulation of ruins and suffering: despite its powerlessness to repair past atrocities, its wide-open eyes preserve the possibility of responding to them. Ernst Bloch, in turn, reveals everyday reality as full of appearances imbued with promise: he points out forms and situations that, beyond their immediate meaning, prefigure the possibility of change. Even in automatic, ordinary exchanges such as ‘how are you? Good, right?’, a latent utopia emerges.

In this sense, hope is not a hollow optimism, but the perseverance of keeping life open to meaning despite pain, suffering, and death, through encounter and through fraternal, benevolent gestures that sustain life: ‘I try to hold that humanity arises from an invisible depth, from an affective vibration that is both joy and suffering, and a promise of poietic curvature – of just action and goodness – (…). Not everything is right. But there is a promise in humanity, a call, a utopia.’

THE SCHOOL OF THE SOUL: A HUMANIST EDUCATION

Esquirol understands education as the integral formation of a person. Rather than a place for the transmission of knowledge, as most contemporary educational approaches tend to conceive it, the school is a space of inner cultivation – a true school of the soul. Its primary task is to cultivate resistance to indifference, while fostering openness to the world and to others. Such formation requires each person to learn how to orient themselves in the world, and how to respond meaningfully to the concrete circumstances of one’s life. The school is the community in which we learn to become craftsmen of a fraternal world: people capable of helping to generate more life, more meaning, and more fraternity.

However, this function is only possible if the school preserves its threshold condition – one that sets it apart from the forces of homogenisation, performance, and acceleration that shape contemporary societies. The school must be understood in terms of altertopia (the idea of a distinct or alternative place) and alterchrony (an alternative relation to time). As an altertopian space, it resists prevailing ways of thinking and sustains its own mode of existence; it is defined by a kind of non-realism and is oriented toward perspective rather than prospection. As the author writes, ‘altertopia is not isolation, but a condition for relation: to cultivate a place is not to withdraw, but to make relations with other places possible.’

As an alterchronian space, the school is a place that gives time – time to observe, read, speak, repeat, and mature – that draws us into an expanded temporality, which becomes, in itself, a form of resistance.

The author also foregrounds a crucial material dimension in education: ‘A materialism with an unexpected motto: touch! And let no one mistake this for disguised romanticism. Not at all. What lies behind it is the desire to become a subject.’ Genuine learning is not reducible to the transfer of information, but involves engaging directly with the world and forming a tangible relation to it.

This process of education, however, is never solitary: no one is truly formed in isolation, but always alongside teachers and peers who offer support and guidance throughout this process of growth. Within this framework, the figure of the teacher takes on particular relevance. A genuine teacher does not impose a path, but helps the student discover their own direction; their authority does not stem from power or coercion, but from their capacity to nurture growth. In this sense, authority – from auctoritas, linked to augere, ‘to foster growth’ – does not imply domination, but rather a generative force: the teacher has authority insofar as they help the pupil become who they are, enabling them to recognise themselves as origin and beginning. There is explicit instruction, but also – and perhaps above all – a silent form of teaching, rooted in the desire to learn and in the trust gradually built between teacher and student. Pedagogical authority is grounded above all in recognition.

The aim of education is not to produce self-sufficient individuals, but fraternal subjects. School should be a kind of sanctuary, a space where violence is not tolerated and where the first moral imperative is simply not to cause harm. From this refusal to harm follows, naturally, the call to companionship, care, and fostering of life. As the author writes: ‘If the teacher were to insist only on my capacity to be a poet and a craftsman of the world, the risk of pride and conceit would be immense. Instead, he tells me: you are alone. But others are there too. I am not called to become the world’s sole demiurge, but rather a fraternal craftsman.’

Genuine education fosters reflexivity, understood not as a form of inward withdrawal, but as the capacity to shape and expand the world. A reflective person is one who is able to give form to their own life while also contributing to make shared life more habitable for others.

THE FIVE REITERATIONS OF A MATURE LIFE
Maturity, according to Esquirol, is manifested in five key spiritual reiterations that can become habits of life. In a present marked by acceleration and the erosion of processes of maturation, reflecting on maturity becomes a way of reclaiming the time and attention required to grow. These reiterations arise from a threefold revelation of the world. The world presents itself to us in a triple dimension: as beauty and depth; as evil and suffering; and as a path (that is, as an open reality that invites continuation and response). Each of these dimensions gives rise to a distinct way of responding to the world. The first is the contemplative reiteration, which arises from the experience of the world’s beauty and depth. It consists in sustaining an attentive, grateful gaze toward reality, allowing oneself to be touched by its depth. The second is the medical reiteration, which responds to the experience of evil. It takes the form of care and accompaniment in response to suffering. It is not an occasional gesture, but a sustained fidelity that must be renewed each time evil reappears. The third is the cosmopoietic reiteration, which is linked to the world as path. It expresses a commitment to making the world more human and habitable – not from the arrogance of someone who seeks to impose a new order, but from the humility of one who observes reality and responds with measured, just action. The fourth is the reiteration of repose, which points to the need to pause so that thought may settle and become fruitful, for only what settles within us can take root. Finally, the reiteration of witnessing consists in living in a way that honours the value of life. It is the capacity to show others, through one’s own actions, that despite suffering and fragility, life remains a valuable and wondrous experience.

Taken together, these five reiterations show that maturity is not a state achieved once and for all, but a continuous practice of attention, care, construction, repose, and witnessing. It is a way of staying faithful to the world and to others, living a conscious, reflective life that can give rise to meaning and shelter.

…

Ultimately, Josep Maria Esquirol’s thought does not constitute a closed system, but unfolds as a philosophy of human existence rooted in gratitude for life. It opens the way to a renewed encounter with the ordinary as a form of intimate resistance to the pressures of the present, gently drawing us toward a more rooted, hopeful, and dignified way of life.

Against the backdrop of contemporary nihilism, Esquirol counters saturation and sensory overload with depth. He grounds meaning in careful attention to what is near and concrete, while the infolding of feeling opens a space of interiority and reflection. Against a life increasingly shaped by instrumental rationality, the notion of the infinite wound recalls the irreducible dimensions of human vulnerability, mystery, and wonder. In place of experience mediated by screens and digital acceleration, the author reaffirms embodied presence, touch, hospitality, fraternity, the gift of the other, and re-encounter as the ground of human life. And in response to the dispersal and flattening of existence, he proposes inward gathering and poietic curvature: a form of action that reassembles life around the co-creation of an inhabitable, meaningful world. Where time is compressed into immediacy and education reduced to prospection, he affirms the altertopia and alterchrony of the ‘school of the soul,’ opening onto the spiritual reiterations of a mature life.

These reflections articulate an intimate resistance to the erosion of our humanity. As a final echo of this philosophy of proximity, it is worth turning to a poem by Wendy Cope, where the conceptual architecture traced above reappears in its most distilled – and most revealing – form.

The Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange –
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave –
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

– Wendy Cope