In this moment, all the political, scientific, social, economic and religious frameworks are forgotten entirely, I have lost everything but love, and I live only as an I, confronted with another I. Forgotten, too, is our multicultural society; I forget all the ideals that are concerned with social life. Just one ideal is left:  I meeting I, beginning new over and over again. I don’t want to say that science isn’t important, nor that we couldn’t have our inner beliefs and truths. I myself have well-defined ideas; I have studied natural and spiritual sciences. But in the moment when I stand there, encountering another I, all this knowledge and any absolute convictions about truth are forgotten.

I have been a physician for more than 25 years, sitting at a desk and seeing patients, every day, on and on. I always have tried to encounter them as one I to another I, in the full original forces of the encounter, forgetting what I didn’t need in that moment. Of course we fall out of the originality, we fail time after time – but we can always start again.

If I thus forget all political, economical and so on frameworks and I consider a problem in our time that is a huge problem in social life, I get rather unconventional ideas from this emptiness of remembrance. Of course the naivety will strike many people as rather insane. But in my opinion there will never be a possibility to find social solutions if we keep on trying to find them by using the old frames of economic, politic and religious systems. I know that the mighty forces in the world have their motives to keep on to these frames. I certainly don’t mean that my point of view will convince the world. But I want to think about these things – they are ‘philosophical reflections’.

The huge problem I want to think about is the problem of migration. On the 27th of May the European Commission published measures about migration. It all sounds very reasonable and it is clear that it is an almost insoluble problem, because there are many thousands of migrants who come over to Europe. The migrants are mostly refugees that are in great need. As it always is and has been this situation is also being used by people with bad intentions, who mingle with the migrants and accomplish all kinds of crimes. One could also say that in Europe we have enough problems of our own, so we aren’t able to care for all these migrants; we should keep them out.

But what if I stand before a migrant? He or she also has an I, is a human being as I am one. There are movies and books enough to understand what kind of misery migrants experience, not the least of which is how they are betrayed by the people they encounter while being on their way. So, what if I encounter a migrant on his way to an imagined safety? What if I forget all national, economic, religious, political theories and only am confronted with this I before me?

What if I widen this experience to all the ‘I’s’ that are migrating, on whichever side?
What does it mean, if someone goes through difficult circumstances, arriving in a world that he has hoped for – and is sent back home?

I know that this not  ‘global thinking’, that it seems naive and so on… But how can we ever become true human beings, imbued by humanity, if we cannot start from the individual human encounter? Can we find our moral intuitions in this individual humanity, and widen it then to global forms? It is the middle part of the three ideals of the social reform: freedom, equality and brotherhood. Equality  here is not thought about in juristic or political form, but in the form of I and I.

Trust, Drawing by Ruth FranssenTrust by Mieke Mosmuller