viernes, 4 de octubre de 2013

La rebelión de las minorías culturales

    
     El grave  problema político que se está manifestando literalmente en las calles en una parte de España, en Cataluña, con las peticiones por parte de una minoría  denominada "nacionalista catalana", para decidir unilateralmente sobre la separación política y la ruptura de un Estado moderno, que se ha mantenido secularmente unido desde los Reyes Católicos, puede ser visto no solo como un problema especificamente español sino, y a la vez,como un problema más general, que hemos denominado ya hace algunos años, el problema de la "rebelión de las minorías", en relación con el problema, más amplio, de la denominada por Ortega y Gasset "rebelión de las masas". A ello hemos dedicado un libro ensayistico titulado La rebelión de las minorías (2006), que quizas pueda pueda tener más actualidad hoy, ante estos nuevos fenómenos, que entonces. Ofrecemos, por ello, a continuación, al lector interesado, un texto de dicho libro como invitación a poner en relación estos fenómenos políticos con otros fenómenos manifestados recientemente en las reivindicaciones de otros grupos minoritarios, como las minorías homosexuales, las sectas religiosas fundamentalistas, etc., en el sentido de que señalan hacia una característica de la época o  Zeitgeist, que permite ponerlos en relación con la intención de captarlos de una forma global, más filosófica, a como se suelen plantear en los medios periodísticos. 
 
 "Un nuevo fenómeno político-social comienza a arribar a nuestras playas políticas provocando una profunda división en el país: la equiparación en derechos y consideración social de las minoritarias uniones entre homosexuales con las mayoritarias uniones heterosexuales. El pasado gobierno de Zapatero parecía estar dispuesto a que la voluntad de una minoría social homosexual se equipare a la mayoría heterosexual en la consecución de iguales derechos, incluidos los derechos de adopción y crianza de niños.
    El fenómeno ocurre en otros países y no es por ello privativo de España. Por ello para analizarlo a fondo es preciso ir más allá de la mera constatación de enfrentamientos con la Iglesia o con la mentalidad católica tradicional, etc., que sostiene una única forma valida de matrimonio, orientado a la procreación, etc. Pues dicho enfrentamiento no nos parece que sea un episodio más del tradicional choque entre reacción y progreso en la extensión de las libertades individuales o sociales. Se puede buscar otra explicación diferente y que además fue iniciada aquí en España antes que en otros países supuestamente más adelantados que nosotros en materia de pensamiento. Dicha explicación remite y pone de actualidad una de las obras del pensamiento español del siglo XX más leídas y traducidas: La rebelión de las masas de Ortega y Gasset.
     Las manifestaciones inmensas contra la Guerra con ocasión de la intervención militar de EEUU y sus aliados en Irak han vuelto a poner de actualidad un fenómeno que ya Ortega percibió en los años treinta del pasado siglo en la formación de aglomeraciones de muchedumbres en los sitios públicos que tratan de imponer y forzar, con su mera presencia y manifestación pública, posiciones políticas a gobiernos legitima y democráticamente constituidos, saltándose cualquier trámite de debate o discusión previa. La enjundia del fenómeno no reside, como ya lo vio Ortega, en que sean masas o muchedumbres las que ocupen ahora el lugar antes reservado a los reducidos intelectuales, estudiantes u obreros que hasta hace bien poco eran los únicos que ocupaban las calles para protestar. Pues el fenómeno de la masificación es en principio un fenómeno positivo en el sentido de que como consecuencia del desarrollo del liberalismo político y los avances técnico industriales, la parte de la población que hoy tiene acceso al disfrute del ocio y de las preocupaciones, que antes eran exclusivas de una minoría social de clase media y alta, es inmensamente mayor. De ello los propios gobiernos deberían ser los primeros en felicitarse.
     El problema no está aquí. El problema está en que, debido al creciente predominio de la demagogia sobre la democracia, determinados partidos políticos tienden a defender los principios de la democracia como una nueva forma de régimen absolutista en el que la democratización no tiene límites. Es decir, no entienden la democracia al modo liberal, esto es como democracia con límites marcados por la separación y equilibrio de poderes que inventaron Locke y Montesquieu y que los griegos no conocieron en su práctica política, aunque si fueron ya entrevistas por dos de sus máximos filósofos, Platón y Aristóteles. Sino que la entienden como que el ser ciudadano de un país democrático hace a todo el mundo igual tanto en su derecho a votar, lo cual es ciertamente legítimo, como en cuanto a sus opiniones sobre todas las cosas sin límite ninguno. 
     La masa se convierte así en rebelde e indócil, pues le está permitido, por el carácter absoluto de la democracia, que cualquiera iguale su opinión con la de otro ciudadano cualquiera por muy sabio que este sea. De dicha igualación en cuestiones por naturaleza desiguales en su conocimiento y tratamiento, como puede ser lo que tiene que ver con materias de tipo moral y jurídico que, por muy científicamente que se presenten, son siempre prudenciales, resulta un ambiente de supresión de toda barrera crítica o prudente y de imperio del todo vale. Es entonces cuando la masa se encuentra desarmada ella misma por ceder al deseo de hacer lo que le viene en gana y no sujetarse prudencialmente a ninguna opinión que se presente mejor fundada o documentada que otra. En tal estado anímico una minoría bien organizada puede, acogiéndose a que, en determinadas cuestiones, todo es legítimo y da igual ocho que ochenta, conseguir que la mayoría acepte que derechos limitados por minoritarios se equiparen, a todos los efectos y sin ninguna limitación, con los derechos mayoritarios. En tal sentido se buscará que una lengua minoritaria hablada por centenares o miles de personas busque equipararse a todos los efectos con una lengua internacional hablada por millones o cientos de millones de personas. O que grupos cuyas prácticas sexuales corresponden estadísticamente, con una frecuencia histórica y no meramente circunstancial, a una minoría social, pretenden equipararse con las conductas sexuales mayoritaria que han marcado y siguen marcando la norma social. Si lo consiguen, por neutralización de las masas que se muestran indóciles a todo sentido común, presas de sus propia estupidez, habrán conseguido imponer una especie de tiranía, indicio de la cual es eso que se empieza a llamar lo “políticamente correcto”.
     Uno de los síntomas de la tiranía es la arbitrariedad del déspota que conduce a actitudes que justifican los mayores caprichos o estupideces colindantes tantas veces con lo ridículo y lo cómico. Estupideces, sin embargo, que pueden resultar trágicas, pues mofarse de ellas irrita sobremanera a los tiranos. Seguir diciendo cuando se habla en español A Coruña o Lleida, en vez de La Coruña o Lérida, como hacen tantos locutores de radio o televisión debería llevarnos a decir London o Beijing en vez de Londres o Pekín. Pero no deja de ser chistoso recordar, de modo políticamente correcto, aquella famosa película de “55 días en Pekín” como “55 días en Beijing”. Y si se hace tal ridículo sólo es por el miedo a los nuevos tiranos. Platón ya detectó, ante la primera democracia histórica, la causa que la llevaría a su destrucción, la demagogia asambleista a que se prestaba la democracia directa que condenó a muerte  al  mejor  ciudadano ateniense, Sócrates. Buscó como solución, primero una forma pura de gobierno, la aristocracia o gobierno de los mejores. Pero en su experimentada vejez, ante los problemas de encajar una forma pura en una realidad impura como la política, se inclinó por la mezcla diferenciada de varias formas como la monarquía con la democracia, la aristocracia con la democracia, etc. Aristóteles, su discípulo, continuaría en esta dirección. En tal sentido ambos filósofos son precursores de las formas democráticas modernas que incluyen la llamada separación de poderes, desconocida en la democracia griega.
     La democracia indirecta o representativa y la separación de poderes es lo que caracteriza la democracia moderna. Por ello cuando se pretende violentarla para transformarla en una tiranía encubierta se trata de desmontar la solución platónico-aristotélica, esto es la separación de poderes, politizando a la justicia o judicializando la política, rompiendo, en definitiva, el equilibrio en la separación de los poderes autonómicos. A todo esto estamos asistiendo en los últimos tiempos".

The Hellenistic Philosophical Schools and Contemporary Philosophy (II)



In a previous article with the same title, published in this Blog (The Hellenistic Philosophical Schools.. ), we sketched a comparison that sought to show the similarities between Contemporary European Philosophy and the Hellenistic tendencies, with the aim of specifying the most presently general tasks that present themselves to philosophy. The most outstanding thing of this comparative analysis, which follows a tradition initiated during Hegel's time by a young Marx modern emulator of Epicurus, was the comparison of Stoicism and Positivism, which, together with the historical-political diagnosis embraced by many nowadays, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, comparing the USA with the new Rome, took us to consider the possibility that Positivism, because of its greater influence in the USA over other main contemporary tendencies, such as Marxism or Vitalism, both seriously discredited because of their respective influences in Soviet Communism and Nazism, it had the chance of being raised to the form of the official philosophy of the USA, in the same way in which Stoicism got to be in the 2nd century the official philosophy of the Roman Empire. But we also considered that Positivism should renew itself deeply, refound itself, just like Panaetius' and Posidonius' Middle Stoicism did. We think that the same is happening with the positive philosophy of the Embodied Mind defended by Georges Lakoff and others against the Analytical Positivism predominant at the start of the Cold War but today in clear decadence and creative exhaustion.

Lakoff & Johnson, in their famous work Philosophy of the flesh (1999), propose abandoning the standing points of Analytical Positivism in order to progress towards those of a positive philosophy that relies on the spectacular advances made by the “Cognitive Sciences” in the last decades in Artificial Intelligence, Neurology, Cognitive Psychology or Linguistics, which would be revitalizing philosophical standpoints such as the later Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology. However, we believe that they still fall too short, for they should also take more into account Piaget's Genetic Epistemology, in so far as it entails an essential methodological modification in regard to Husserl's Phenomenology and the Gestalt Psychology, upon which many of his brilliant analyses about perceptual knowledge rested. A modification that we could formulate as the move from a methodology of descriptive analysis, characteristic of Phenomenology, to what could be called a constructivist operatological methodology, exercised by Piaget's Genetic Epistemology. But, since the great Swiss psychologist didn't want to give his discoveries philosophical grounding, because of his scientistic prejudices, such grounding is still awaiting for those of us who consider that the culmination of a scientific revolution motivates unavoidably a reform of Philosophy. Hence our proposal of the possibility and necessity for a philosophical refoundation of Positivism as Opetatiological Positivism (see in these Blog: “For a refoundation of Positivistic Philosophy”).

But the need of refound Positivism must not only take into account the present state of development of the “Cognitive Sciences”, as Lakoff & Johnson do, but it is rather necessary to recover also some historical-philosophical coordinates, generally forgotten nowadays, which strongly characterized the originality of Positivism itself as a philosophical movement. Because Positivism is to be found today strongly divided and seriously weakened in the unity of its commonly accepted assumptions, which leads to bitter polemic and to disorientation in many cases. An intelligent attitude, when we get lost in our way, consists in retracing our steps, return to the starting point in order to see if our loss is due to our having taken from the beginning a wrong direction and if it is possible to orient ourselves again by rectifying. For this reason, if what here is at stake is to refound Positivism, and not merely to patch it in order to go on, we must return to its origin, we must reread the founders of the movement, the French Positivism of the beginnings of the 19th century. In this sense and in connection with the issue in which we are engaged about the comparison of Contemporary and Hellenistic-Roman philosophy, it is a good idea to read what the Count of Saint-Simon wrote: “the period of time that presents the greatest analogy with our own is that in which the civilized part of the human species has gone from polytheism to (mono)theism through the institution of the Christian religion. This period of time is, then, the only one in which we must look for some probable traces of the general course that the present events will follow. For, in this memorable moral revolution we can distinguish with great clarity the following two sorts of action: on the one hand, the Christian doctrine has been systematically coordinated by the philosophers of the School of Alexandria; on the other hand, it has been preached and extended by men coming from all classes, even from those whose particular interest was in greatest opposition with the new system. Absolutely the same will happen with the industrial doctrine. Only the positive sages will concur in its formation. However, all classes of society, without excluding that of the idle owners, the legists, the military and even the princes, will provide it with apostles animated with the greatest zeal. All will be called upon and many will be chosen” (Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Du Système Industriel, Oeuvres de Saint-Simon, E. DentuÉditeur, Paris, 1869, vol.6, t.II, pgs.61-62, the translation is ours).

As it is known, Saint-Simon sees modern society as an unstable society, in crisis and in transition to a new society, organic and stable in comparison with Greco-Roman civilization. Greco-Roman civilization was characterized by the constitution of a society critical of the old organic societies and acted opening a transitory phase that prepared an organic society of a new type and that would remain stable almost for a millennium during the medieval times. Neither Saint-Simon nor Comte shared the Voltairean prejudices against the European Middle Age, seen by the enlightened as a period of relapse and barbarism. On the contrary they considered it a true overcoming, in many aspects, of the old pagan period: “Today is not the first time that the human genre finds itself in a moment of transition form a social regime to another founded on a different philosophical system. A similar transition already took place approximately in times of the Roman Imperial Government. The philosophical revolution undertaken back then consisted in the step from polytheism to (mono)theism. Once finished the revolution, once (mono)theism was organized, the corresponding political revolution, which consisted on the step from the old social order existent among Greeks and Romans to the one established among modern peoples” ( C.H. de Saint-Simon, L`Industrie, ed. cit., vol.3, t. II, p. 23). Saint-Simon himself points out hereafter to Socrates as the one who starts the critique to pagan polytheism that will lead to Plato's and Aristotle's monotheism, and that of the Stoics. The School of Alexandria of the christian Clement will initiate, as Saint-Simon points out, the fusion of Christian beliefs with the Greek philosophical monotheism, specially the Stoic and Neoplatonic, that will influence decisively in Cappadocian Patristic and Saint Augustine.

This medieval order, in Saint-Simon's opinion, was superior to the old one because of the development of monotheism as a more rational religion than the polytheist religions, not in an absolute sense, but in a functional positive sense, for it was what corresponded to the degree of knowledge achieved by Greek science and philosophy that made possible that already in Cicero's time, just how the French author reminds us, two Roman haruspices, cultivated in Greek philosophy, when scrutinizing the bowels of the sacrificed animals in order to predict the future, couldn't stop looking at each other trying not to laugh. The Roman educated class had by then stopped to believe in polytheistic religion and was beginning to get closer to christian monotheism, more in line with the Stoic philosophical monotheism that starts to prevail in the Rome of Cicero. In a similar way, according to Saint-Simon, Modern Philosophy consistently with the tremendous advance in human knowledge that entails the scientific revolution in the Renaissance, will start to ridicule Medieval Theology to the point of calling into question the Idea of a monotheist God, from which science can prescind, already with Kant and Laplace, when explaining the formation of the Solar System. However, Saint-Simon and Comte, unlike the conclusion that would lead Marxism to eliminate any belief or religious practice as false, irrational and characteristic of fanatic superstition, consider that religion is not going to disappear, but it will rather transform itself in a religion without God, that Saint-Simon will call, with the title of a later work, Nouveau Christianisme, and Comte, the Religion of Humanity. In short, two forms of religious Humanism, one of them evolutionist and the other disruptive. Even the old Schelling, who preconized by then the foundation of a positive philosophy from Munich and Berlin, against Hegel's speculative Idealism, considered that neither Pauline Protestantism and Christianity would be the culmination of Christianity, but that there would be a future Christianity which would overcome it, the one that inspires the Gospel of John, in which the unity of the Church of Peter and the freedom of Pauline Protestantism will reconcile themselves. A christianity that will reconcile itself and “will merge with science and universal knowledge” ( F.W.J.Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, S.W. XIV, p.321).

Comte's Religion of Humanity, which defiantly breaks up with Christianity, all together with its Positivist Calendar of sages, its temple in Paris dedicated to his adored Clotilde de Vaux, etc., was ridiculed as a pars pudenda of his work by Stuart Mill and remains today as one of the extravagances of him who Ortega called “brilliant madman” (a recent and large revision and study of this final phase of Comte's work can be found in Mary Pickering's Auguste Comte. An Intellectual Biography, 3 vol., Cambridge University Press, 2009). However, Saint-Simon's evolutive proposal of a new Christianity that locates its dogma not in divine biblical messages – before many of which an educated person cannot help laughing, just as it happened in Cicero's time with the Roman haruspices – but in the moral massages of the Gospels which preach the search for fraternity and peace among humans, seems today more sensible and adequate to the new Rome, the USA, where civil society finds itself less secularized than in Europe, being this way Christianity largely dominant. Another issue is that the humanist belief, that today manifests itself strongly and daily in the identification of crimes against Humanity and human rights violations with cardinal sins, is not univocal, but it is rather understood in different ways, sometimes opposite in metaphysical humanism, christian humanism or positive philosophical humanism. But, in spite of this, other religions such as the Jewish or the Muslim have more difficulties. In them the figure of a God-Man is not conceived and, therefore, their contact with modern philosophical humanism causes retrograde and fanatic fundamentalist reactions, more dangerous in the case of Muslims because of its larger number of followers.

However, as it happened in Rome, the development of a new religiosity that corresponds with the developmental level and knowledge at which modern Humanity has arrived presupposes the development and systematization of an appropriate philosophy. In the same way that Roman Stoicism was appropriate to the level of knowledge of its time, with its new Ideas of Equality of the Human Genre, or of cataleptic phantasy as an affirmation of the rational possibility of certain knowledge against the skeptical doubt or the cynical imposture of so many that thought of this as supreme wisdom. New ideas that opened the way to a system of rational and stable beliefs, triumphant since emperor Constantine, with whose spiritual leadership a new organic society was able to crystallize as the Medieval in Europe. A society politically divided in succeeding reigns, but ideologically united by the international institution of the Catholic Church. Without the stability and the secular order reached by such a medieval society, according to Saint-Simon, it would not have been possible to develop the new forces of industry and science that, incubated in their womb in the revival of the city with is forums and the creation of the Universities, will end up yielding a modern society alternative to the medieval society, but that is still going through the crisis typical of the transition state in which it finds itself and which characterizes the present Western Civilization as they did, in their time, the Greco-Roman.

The Hellenistic Philosophical Schools and Contemporary Philosophy (I)

   

The origin of Contemporary Philosophy is usually situated in a series of philosophical movements that agree in opposing in an innovative way to Hegel's philosophy. The young Marx considered Hegel as a sort of Aristotle of Modern Philosophy (see in this blog, “Hegel y Aristóteles”) who opened a new age in the development of philosophy similar to that of the hellenistic philosophical schools that came after Aristotle with the Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, etc. Schools that will not be now merely Schools of Knowledge, as the Platonic Academy and the Aristotelean Lyceum basically were, but Schools of Salvation, in the sense that in them knowledge is subordinated to the saving action of the individuals. This is why in such new schools supreme knowledge was practical knowledge, Ethics.

We can, this way, following Marx's indication, generalize such comparison between the third century before Christ and the nineteenth century. Accordingly, Marxism would be a philosophical movement alternative to modern society, just as Epicurism wanted to be alternative to the Antique society. Marx himself in his beginnings took his admired Epicurus as a model, who he saw as a precursor of enlightened critique to religion and as the creator of a philosophical movement that advocated an alternative lifestyle to that one of the society of his time, getting to have a lot of followers scattered over the Greek and Roman cities (the lecture of Benjamin Farrington's book, The Faith of Epicurus, Littlehampton Book Services Ltd, 1967, is very illustrative in this regard). We can say, thus, that Marxism is a sort of modern Epicureanism in which the friendship that united the Epicurean communes is substituted by the worker's fraternity in the fight for an alternative to the society of their time. This society would show itself as utopian, since Epicureanism began to loose strength as a social movement around the 2nd century AD and Marxism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was not foreign to the successful performance in the transformation of society of an opposite philosophical tendency, as was Stoicism in the ancient world and Positivism in the modern. Because if Epicureanism and Marxism set the goal of their efforts in the achievement of a happy life, of a paradise on Earth, Stoicism sets its principal objective in the triumph of the Virtue that would enable to reform from the inside the political society really existent and the Positivism in the Comtean combination of Order with Progress, renouncing alternative utopias that promise a purely illusory world. Hence, Marxism and Positivism are so different philosophies and so opposite as Epicureans and Stoics were in ancient times.

Nevertheless, both Epicureans and Stoics had in common their strong commitment to human rationality as a sound instrument of truth knowledge and guide in life. They were considered “dogmatic” philosophies in the sense that they rested on rational principles in consistency with which they deployed their philosophical statements, which were taken to be wise. A school had risen against this strongly rationalist position that would eventually undermine it and subject it to a devastating critique: the Skeptic School founded by Pyrrho. It is in the time of Arcesilaus and Carneades, well advanced the Hellenistic period, when Skepticism achieves quite a success in his fight against the weakest aspects of Stoicism, e.g., the astrologic beliefs. Furthermore, Skepticism reaches a new form of ataraxia or mind imperturbability with the discovery of the impossibility to attain absolutely true knowledge and the conformity with knowing the merely probable. Such critiques influenced the renewal of Stoicism undertaken by the so-called “Middle Stoa”, by Panaetius of Rhodes, who develops a critical Stoicism, rejecting, for example, the astrology and its inexorable predictions of the future, and recovering the classic Platonic legacy taken by the founder Zeno, commencing in this way a transcendental renewal because of its later influence in the Roman Stoicism following Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Epicureanism suffered, without being able to renew itself, the skeptical criticism, practically disappearing in the 2nd century AD. This was due also to the success of the Stoicism renewed during the rationalization of the Roman Empire at the time of the great emperors of the 2nd century, when it became an official ideology (see Renan's book, Marcus Aurelius and the End of Ancient World, Ulan Press, 2012).

The equivalent of the critical function that skepticism carries out regarding Epicureans and Stoics is, we think, in contemporary philosophy Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's Vitalism, in the sense that its main critical strength is aimed against a fundamental belief common to both Positivism and Marxism: the belief in historical Progress. The idea of the Eternal Return that Nietzsche associates with his Zarathustra allow him to introduce the possibility of overcoming progressivist humanism, outlining the figure of an ultra-human beyond, in an overcoming of the ideologies of Modernity, that proclaims the Irrationalism of life, of Nature as Will, against History. Nietzsche's influence opened the possibility of new forms of positive philosophy, such as those engendered in Husserl's Phenomenological Movement (who went so far as to say ¨We are the true positivists¨), specially in Max Scheler and Heidegger or Ortega y Gasset. At the same time, it caused a political reaction against Marxism which took to the Second World War and the following Cold War. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the lose of influence of Marxism starts to be perceived, as well as the need to limit the development defended by the dominant positivistic philosophies of Order and Progress, because of biological, ecological, climatic, population factors, etc. It appears too clearly in the global political horizon the supremacy of the new Rome, the USA, where positivistic philosophy is today the most influential compared to Marxism or Nietzschean Irrationalism, although it seems that a deep renewal of such Positivism can be discerned in George Lakoff's and his follower's work, who are inspired in Husserl's later phenomenology of the Lifeworld, as a key to explain cognitive processes.

However we don't believe that Phenomenology yet represents the appropriate philosophical movement for the revitalization of Positivism, today in crisis due to the degenerative specialism to which the Analytic Philosophy has driven philosophy. It seems to us that the overcoming of Husserl's or Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological Positivism is possible through an operatiological Positivism that incorporates in a philosophical manner the renewal of the theorization of human knowledge introduced by Piaget in the picture of the so-called “Cognitive Sciences” of the second half of the 20th century. In this direction we have proposed some basic approaches in the book “Introducción al PensamientoHábil” (2007).

Manuel F. Lorenzo

(Translated into English by Luis Fernández Pontón)
 
"The Hellenistic Philosophical Schools and Contemporary Philosophy (II)"