Interdividuality … a reflection by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

We receive our lives each day from without, from others who are not ourselves yet relate to us in some way. Man’s self is not contained only within himself but exists almost even more so outside himself. He lives in those on whom he loves, in those on whom his life depends, and on those for whom he lives. Man is relational, and his life, his very self, only exists by way of relationship. I, by myself, am not “I” at all, but am so only in relation to a “Thou,” and it is the “Thou” that makes me myself.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), The Divine Project: Reflections on Creation and Church, trans. Chase Faucheux, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2022), 103.