Critique of Ideology and Diagnosis of Time: Kant and the dispute over the Enlightenment

• Grant number: 24/18753-0
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - Brazil
• Start date: May 15, 2025
• End date: March 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Rúrion Soares Melo
• Grantee: Rúrion Soares Melo
• Visiting researcher: Daniel Tourinho Peres
• Visiting researcher institution: Faculdade De Filosofia E Ciências Humanas/Ffch/Ufba, Brazil
• Host Institution: Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/22387-0 - Crises of democracy: critical theory and the diagnosis of present time, AP.TEM

Abstract

The Visiting Researcher's activities will articulate the diagnosis of time, the critique of ideology and the crisis of democracy within the broader framework of the crisis of modernity. "Crisis of modernity" is understood as the crisis of a figure of rationality, for which the exercise of reason, with its claim to universality, and the institution of norms, with their claim to validity and efficacy, are two sides of the same coin. It is not a question of abandoning the project of modernity, its universalist and normative perspective, but of seeing its most fundamental moment in the exercise of critical activity. Now, the inseparability of criticism and norm is constitutive of the modern project as elucidated by Kant in a 1784 text based on the idea of Enlightenment, as he understood it. To use Koselleck's categories, the concept of Enlightenment, as elucidated by Kant, is based on reflection on a space of experience, but also on a horizon of emancipatory expectations. It was because the horizon of expectation asserted itself as linked to the space of experience that it was more than just a longing for emancipation, more than just a utopia. Similarly, it was because the space of experience somehow pointed to a horizon of aspirations that we could see in the experience an anticipation capable of guiding practice.So, this project goes back in time in relation to the Thematic Project to which it is linked and proposes, once again, a return to Kant. However, this return will not lose sight of the links with the two subprojects that make up the Thematic Project, "Subproject I - Critical Theory in the face of the crisis of democracy" and "Subproject II - Public sphere and the crisis of democracy: economic, cultural and political dimensions of counter-publics". With the first subproject, the research shares the centrality of the aesthetic dimension, of art and culture. Culture, according to the bet made here, is the zone that allows the transaction between the universal and the particular, a transaction in which both poles participate. Thus, the crisis of democracy is also a crisis of culture, which is why the research will address the issue that the Thematic Project formulates as individuals abandoning their commitment to democracy. If law, if the rule of law, is intended to be normative, the same must be said of culture. It does, after all, convey a normative claim. Moreover, if integration through the law is intended to be emancipatory to any extent, i.e. if it is not simply domination, we need to think critically about its link with culture. In turn, the emancipatory dimension of culture will be based on its relationship with art, which makes the limits of culture a problem.The proposed research also dialogues with Subproject II - Public sphere and the crisis of democracy: economic, cultural and political dimensions of counter-publics. However, the concept of the public sphere will be broadened. Rather than a "social space in which public opinion can be formed by means of rational discourse", the public sphere is understood in this research as that space in which, not without dispute, a common subjectivity is formed and in which a multiplicity of perspectives and interests, languages and discourses are present, and not just "rational discourse" oriented towards consensus. (AU)