Abstract

To understand why “institutions” are vital in an ethical and political sense, in our present moment of history, we have to understand how institutions are vital in a philosophical and ontological sense, for human beings in general. This is what we attempt in a paper which is also a synthesis of what we call “critical vitalism” on this particular theme, which is central to it. We thus show that every institution is the setting of explicit rules for a vital human practice, that democratic institutions answer the specific danger of what we call political violations between human beings and finally that they have to be critical institutions to answer the full range of human polarities and possible violations, up to language, discussion and science. The critical vitalist approach to institutions thus shows how some critical institutions are vital in more than one sense, in general and toda.