In an era when the public conversation seems to swing between instant outrage and paralyzing skepticism, this book invites us to re-ask what sustains — and at times overflows — our decisions: passions, moral identities, and digital environments.
We now reproduce a fragment from The Attic of Reason (Plaza y Valdés), a book edited by Concha Roldán, María G. Navarro and Xandra Garzón Costumero.
*****
It is incontestable that the rise of digital societies and the unstoppable march of online interaction modes are generating vertiginous changes across our planet, a transformation that in turn affects the understanding of the human and social sciences, as well as the research methods used in these fields. The current forms of interpersonal interaction, both among individuals and with public institutions, as well as in the realms of work and entertainment, are deeply influenced by digitalization. In the context of a globalized world, the problems we face today are significantly different and require an integrated and digital approach to be adequately addressed. This unstoppable process has transformed our world to the core and has also placed scholars of Philosophy, especially specialists in Ethics, Political and Legal Philosophy or Epistemology, before the dizzying pace of events that mark the path toward 21st-century research.
In this book crystallize the reflections and discussions of a consolidated interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and egalitarian team, which began from the research project that gives the title, The Attic of Reason: Cultivation of Passions, Ethical Identities and Digital Societies, to face the challenges that new forms of collaboration and research must confront. The plurality we encounter in the fields of study encompassed by the work of each contributor, the variety of countries, universities and research centers of origin, as well as differences in ages, gender, and life practices, make ours a fundamental research endeavor. The collective reflection we have engaged in at each of the meetings that have taken place has been fertile precisely because of this diversity of profiles, origins, and ways of understanding a globalized yet diverse world.
With qualitative approaches and methodologies that seek to adapt their methods to sociopolitical phenomena whose meaning and impact are perceived as continually changing and renewing, we manage to apprehend the essence of digitized societies that are no longer susceptible to being studied as fixed snapshots, but must be understood as complex entities that develop in a rhizomatic fashion; and only with a sufficiently critical adaptive capacity will we be able to conduct a scientific study that is both serious and useful to society, as practiced in this volume. The usefulness of our studies stems from the need for philosophical reflection, thereby asserting the current relevance of authors who, even when retrieved from classical antiquity or the origins of modernity, anticipated their ways of understanding and explaining the world with millimetric precision in this digital society, as if their theories had been formulated centuries ago with our ways of living, feeling, and thinking in this 21st century in mind. And after all, both the dizzying experience of uncertainty that our globalized world endures and the loud demand for certainty and trust can only be approached reflectively through intellectual attitudes that claim the fruitful gain of cultivating concepts that guide us through the various hierarchies of values and show us the need to intervene responsibly in what uproots us from our belonging to Humanity: theory cum praxi, there is no other way to obtain results through scientifically validated procedures.
In The Attic of Reason: Cultivation of Passions, Ethical Identities, and Digital Societies we pose the question of how, in our globalized world where the “historical acceleration” yields to “mediatic immediacy,” we confront the need for a new conceptual articulation of reality, a task in which innovation does not shy away from inspiration from the past, even from approaches forgotten or that apparently led at their historical moment to “dead ends,” but that are worth rescuing from our attic to give them new luster and to include in our rational reflections elements that were marginalized or overlooked in earlier interpretations of the history of philosophy, such as the concepts that name and underpin the three parts in which we have divided the volume’s contributions: “passions,” “ethical identities,” “feminist perspectives,” “truth,” or “violence,” and which allow us to rethink politics and challenge digital spaces. To fulfill our research objectives we do not start from emptiness; rather, in the initial premises of the research project whose results we present in this collective volume converge the results obtained by its researchers over more than fifteen years of joint work, during which national and international networks have been woven and developed.
From the very title we ask what might have led Kant to replace the term “cultivation” with “gain” in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant applied these two nouns to the activity of knowing, that is, to the work undertaken to obtain a genuinely new gain, and only for that reason, and in a sense, a remunerated one. It is well known that the farmer who with arduous effort cultivates the land only obtains the new harvest when he endures uncertainty, the harshness of weather, and other hardships. Some may think with Kant that uncertainty does not seem an appropriate scenario to describe the kind of achievements expected from the activity of knowing, and even less, of knowing with certainty. It is always much easier to cultivate, investigate, and live in the certainty and tranquility of what remains and does not change. Nevertheless, it seems beyond doubt that any new harvest, any gain, is obtained as a consequence of cultivating certain passions and that, among them, perseverance, patience, and stubborn determination in relation to a society’s own transformations would do well to be highlighted. Be that as it may, we can be sure that the cultivation of passions is linked to that activity of knowing by which we obtain gains in some sense new. What is unsettling is the association of the intellectual achievements of the mental process of knowing with an element as resilient, powerful, and changing as the land. This association ultimately allows us to understand that our autonomy and freedom as subjects of knowledge, but also as moral agents, are exposed and eroded in that open, uncertain, labyrinthine environment that is our own field of cultivation. And thus, caught by the enigmatic relationship between the urge to cultivate and that to investigate and arrive at knowledge, the authors of this collective volume relate sociopolitical, moral, and ethical-legal phenomena to the particular cultivation of passions that occupies our era. An example of this is the experience we all have of the simplification of communications that demand a form of action guided by the zeal of immediacy and the imposition of always being in the agora that is the network. The lack of benefit, in addition to the false gain that arises from it, becomes evident when we observe the impact that the simplification of communications has on the traits that make up our identity, afflicted by being reduced to a like, an emoticon, or “280 characters.” In the absence of an environment that makes the genuine cultivation of passions profitable, we confront an onslaught of simplifying experiences that constrain us because they determine in advance how, when, and for what we must take responsibility, so it would not be an exaggeration to refer then to a general simplification of our subjectivity, forgetting that the very essence of our moral and civil identity lies precisely in assuming commitments, responsibilities, and promises, and in taking charge of our actions. Hence the commitment of our team to approach our research with a gender perspective, considering it a sine qua non, for we do not view it solely as a matter of ethics but also as something that constitutes an essential element of both vital communities and digital societies and, therefore, a way of looking and thinking that markedly improves the quality of our studies.
In this sense, the works presented here also give particular attention to the study of the performativity of current communicative processes. Although this task remains paradoxical because, in our era, the borders between virtual reality and the real world blur: we live in societies doubled by virtuality described as enhanced reality—“augmented reality”—with all that entails: the “virtual” is a necessary and complementary condition of the “old” existing. If avatars are each of the individuals in their role as citizens of the Net, forums and social networks become the squares and clubs of yesteryear, institutional portals the electronic window of our institutions, and even bitcoin the binary reverse of any currency. The banal empties existence. This rapid portrait of our time seeks to enumerate some commonplaces whose persistence in the third shared environment perhaps serves us here to defend the need to return to cultivating concepts, a task whose assiduous effort has been a constant in the intellectual careers of many of the members of this research project.
—————————————
Author: Various. Editors: Concha Roldán, María G. Navarro and Xandra Garzón Costumero. Title: The Attic of Reason. Publisher: Plaza y Valdés. Purchase: publisher’s website.