RESEARCH
— We investigate “pathologies of civilization” in Western societies. This inquiry involves the study, interpretation, and critique of existing explanatory models, as well as clarifying their ontological roots.
Within this framework, it becomes necessary to revisit diagnoses of the present that renew diverse traditions and graft them onto a philosophical–ontological reflection.
— Philosophy itself has an “inner history” in which it has regarded itself as a therapeutic activity.
— And all of this entails, in parallel, a philosophical inquiry that enables us to develop the very concept of “social pathology” and other related notions.
SOME CONCRETE LINES OF RESEARCH
CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY
—› Philosophy, besides being ontology, ethics, epistemology, etc., has also understood itself as therapeia since its Greek beginnings. Already in the Socratic–Platonic world...
Plato’s philosophy as a whole can be seen as the construction of a great therapeutics meant to free human beings from the many problems that darken their existence. In fact, it was Socrates himself who conceived philosophy as therapeía or epimeleía, that is, as a cure or care of the soul, consecrated to the god Apollo.
Socrates says in the Charmides (156d–157a) that bodily ills cannot be treated without first healing the ailments of the soul. But the “incantations” by which the soul is healed are “beautiful discourses” that aim to make philosophical reflection and reason the center of human life.
Thus the theme of the therapeutic incantation runs throughout Plato’s work, from the early dialogues to the Laws. Essentially tied to healing by the word, it evolves across the dialogues: from rational discourse linked to philosophical dialectic to its construction as a political instrument, designed to mediate with diverse irrational factors within the pólis.
Socratic therapeutics has antecedents in the world of the Sophists. Antiphon of Rhamnus (87DKA6) is credited with composing a method consisting in an “Art of Avoiding Distress.” But the most systematic conception of philosophy as therapeutics—and of the ruler as an expert in the art of curing the ills that affect the soul—is found in Plato.
In the Gorgias, the philosopher is the critical alternative Plato offers to the realist politician, held
responsible for having caused a sickness in the city (518e4–519a1). In the Republic, the ideal city is built
on the recognition that we face not a healthy state, but a “feverish” one (372e7–8).
—› In Aristotelianism
Subsequent psychological, ethical, political, and philosophical reflection can be linked to the idea of a sick city, which requires a therapeutics and a clear awareness of the illnesses that afflict it. The treatment of emotions and passions is developed in greater detail in Aristotle, both in the theory of persuasion (Rhetoric) and in the ethical writings, where they come to form a very important aspect of êthos.
The “therapeutic persuasion” of emotions allows us to establish connections with the Stagirite’s practical philosophy, with decisive receptions in the twentieth century (for example, in Gadamer’s hermeneutics).
—› In Hellenistic philosophy
If the theme of salvation through knowledge is central as early as the Protagoras (356d), in Hellenistic philosophy it becomes the dominant horizon. The superiority of ethics over ontology goes hand in hand with the conception of philosophy as a “therapy for human sufferings,” as Epicurus defines it.
“Empty is the argument of that philosopher which does not enable one to cure any human suffering. For just as there is no benefit in a medical art that does not drive out the diseases of bodies, so too there is no benefit in philosophy if it does not drive out the suffering of the soul.” (Epicurea, collection of fragments and testimonies edited by H. Usener, Leipzig, 1887)
Stoicism, too, drew attention to the need to develop therapies—or policies—attuned to personal singularities and to the historical–cultural context. The theory of passions constitutes the core around which the therapy is articulated.
“The knowledge of emotions provided by reading Stoic sources is indispensable for determining what emotional health means for an individual and for a political community.” (M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2001; Spanish ed. Paidós, 2008)
—› Is it not possible to recover the conception of philosophy as a therapy of civilization—of culture—in a supra- or trans-individual sense?
EXISTENTIALISM
—› After the publication of Sein und Zeit (1927), many psychoanalysts with a Freudian background moved toward existential analysis.
L. Binswanger, É. Minkowski, M. Boss and others held that illness always has an existential character. Health would be the possibility of experiencing Being.
“I am a person who was born illegitimately. So what remains? What remains is this: I am… ‘Since I am, I have a right to be.’” (May, R. et al. (eds.), Existence, Gredos, Madrid, 1967 [1958])
—› Today, this ontological–existential approach is beginning to be taken up again:
W. Blankenburg argues that the patient’s questions point to a pre-theoretical “self-understanding-in” that they fail to attain. Illness would be uprootedness with respect to immersion in existence and the existential project in which the human being dwells.
Blankenburg, Wolfgang, Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit, Stuttgart, F. Enke Verlag, 1971.
—› Might it be that, in contemporary Western life, the human being drifts because they have transformed their being-in-the-world into a being-against-and-over-against-the-world? Are they not losing the responsibility of making themselves as a participant in the world, by taking themselves instead as its lord—of everything around them? And more still: by wanting to turn the world, thus dominated, into an un-world, transforming everything that exists into mere “standing-reserve,” like tins on the market— quantifiable, accumulable, available?
“From the moment when what is unconcealed confronts man no longer even as object but exclusively as standing-reserve, and from the moment when man, within the bounds of what is non-objectual, is already only the requisitioner of standing-reserve, then man stands at the brink of a precipice—he is about to fall headlong into that place where he himself will be taken as standing-reserve. Yet precisely this man who is threatened in this way parades about as the lord of the earth. Thus the illusion spreads that everything encountered exists only insofar as it is a human artifact. This illusion matures into a final deceptive appearance: it seems as though man, everywhere, encounters only himself. (…) Yet the truth is that today man nowhere encounters himself—that is, his essence.” (M. Heidegger)
HYPEREXPRESSION AND THE AESTHETICIZATION OF THE WORLD
—› How does power expand today? Perhaps it has abandoned repression in favor of the promotion of behaviors: what Foucault called “biopolitics.”
Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, 1976, ch. V; and Power/Knowledge / Microphysics of Power.
—› In networked capitalism (semiocapitalism), overproduction becomes hyperproduction of signs, saturating attention and generating pathologies of hyperexpression.
Berardi, F. [Bifo], “Pathologies of Hyperexpression”, Archipiélago, no. 76 (2007), pp. 55–63; and The Factory of Unhappiness, 2003.
—› Example: the hyperexpression of beauty that leads to a banal aestheticization of the world.
(Here you had pasted a long and very valuable block. If you want, I can “break it up” with internal subheadings so it breathes and doesn’t become a wall of text. In this version I leave it intact in content, but already placed within a clean typographic container.)
Baudrillard, Jean, The Illusion and Disillusion of Aesthetics, 1997; The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1991.
PSYCHOANALYSIS
—› That discontent in culture is growing—beyond individualizable anxieties—is no secret.
“Psychiatric consultations today receive multitudes of patients… making explicit the psychological ruin of the postmodern multitude…” (G. Rendueles, “¿Miserias sociales o malestares íntimos?”, Archipiélago, 76 (2007))
—› Does that civilizational discontent increase precisely through excessive well-being?
Cosenza, D.; Recalcati, M.; Villa, A., Civiltá e disagio, Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 2006.
—› Through the “iron cage” of capital and technical–strategic rationality?
Weber, M., The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, various editions.
—› Through motion in the void and the lack of thought?
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., What Is Philosophy?, Anagrama (Spanish ed.), 2005.
—› In Lacan: the subject’s constitutive “lack”; its disavowal leads to pathology.
Zupančič, A., Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, Prometeo, 2010 (Spanish ed.).
—› A sick culture due to the need to “fill” the lack at all costs? The precariousness of bonds as a civilizational symptom?
Miller, J.-A. et al., Ordinary Psychosis, 2004 (Spanish ed. Paidós); Recalcati, M., Clinic of Emptiness, 2008 (Spanish ed. Síntesis).
—› Identity-proneness as a cause of discontent: not when identity weakens, but when it radicalizes?
Žižek, S. (ed.), Lacan. Los interlocutores mudos, Akal, Madrid, 2010.
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