HORIZON
The project seeks to deepen the study of civilizational pathologies in their ontological dimension. The vertiginous transformations shaping our present —through the metamorphoses of new capitalism, the expansion of the information society, the accelerated development of technologies, and so forth— are reshaping the very physiognomy of life. This occurs not only at the intimate or individual level, but within the open space of the common. The expansive growth of new forms of discontent in Western culture reveals a fundamental and still unexplored root that calls for philosophical investigation.
Human problems are phenomena rooted in shared beliefs or in a pre-individual background of existence that constitutes the “world of meaning” we inhabit. This properly ontological dimension is the nourishing ground of philosophical reflection — the terrain on which this research aims to unfold, without neglecting necessary interdisciplinary openness, yet without reducing the philosophical-ontological specificity of the problem.
The project intends to approach such phenomena from the standpoint of a critical ontology that we consider necessary today. Its aim is to outline a renewed critical theory capable of investigating the ontological presuppositions of our Western way of life, thereby opening a space in which sociocultural pathologies may be described.
Civilizational pathologies exceed the individual sphere. It becomes necessary to relate psychological therapy and psychopathological inquiry —primarily oriented toward individualized cases— to a philosophical perspective attentive to the broader field of collective forms of life, inseparable from a critical diagnosis of contemporary civilizational processes.
The concept of “civilizational pathologies” does not proceed from an absolute analytical criterion. The pathological–normal opposition must be transcended. For this reason, the project presupposes the effort to reinvent the meaning of the term “pathology,” together with related notions such as “therapy,” “health,” and “illness.” A central purpose is to resignify these concepts while avoiding substantialist dualisms, and to promote a philosophy whose “therapeutic” character is oriented by an ethopoietic concern — that is, by a philosophical interest in the production of an éthos endowed with consistency and vitality within the lifeworld.
The research is intended to be interdisciplinary. It arises from the need to relate dispersed contributions from other disciplines —such as psychopathology, sociology, and anthropology— through specifically philosophical reflection. For it is philosophy that is able to connect social and cultural processes of discontent with an analysis of the being of the human as such, and of those existential phenomena that today lead human beings toward forms of world-understanding and practice that undermine or distort them (fictionalization of the real, emptying of meaning, etc.).
This implies rediscovering philosophy in its therapeutic dimension. Alongside its interdisciplinary vocation — and in a complementary way — this research is motivated by the need to incorporate the therapeutic element into philosophy in a reasoned manner: to recover its history and rethink it in the present.
The project is not in contradiction with critical approaches to therapy in its conventional and factual sense — such as those that view the political phenomenon of the pathologization of society as dangerous. From the perspective of this project, such phenomena are themselves pathologies of our Western civilization.
