Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales

ISSN 1012-1587/ ISSNe: 2477-9385

Depósito legal pp. 198402ZU45

Portada: S/T. De la serie “RETORNO”

*La obra que se publica es un fragmento del original, y se le ha dado

un giro de 180° por motivos editoriales. Su original va en horizontal

Artista: Rodrigo Pirela

Medidas: 40 x 70 cm

Técnica: Mixta sobre tela

Año: 2009

Año 38, Especial No.30 (2022): 14-19

ISSN 1012-1587/ISSNe: 2477-9385

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7527496

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. FEC-LUZ

EDITORIAL

As a tenacious worm that corrodes the fruit of democracy.

On the value and usefulness of ethics and philosophy in times of

political change and

emotionality of the action

That we are going through difficult times is one of the most

shockingly evident truths of the current era of political uncertainty, as the

French philosopher Marc Crépon would say. These times we are

experiencing seem to be wandering through our social interstices as if

they were the air that bathes our corporeality, thus internalizing

themselves in each of our thoughts as if they were pores of our vital

organ of thought and action.

Certainly, the brain produces in us a great provocation about the

signs of time by making us "transpire" and, consequently, accelerate our

pace on our way to the coexistence we see as lost, to the point that it is

also revealed that these "cerebral pores" transpire anguish, fears and

anxieties, due to the exhausting rhythm caused by the accelerated changes

of existence. Stumbling blocks are found along the way like stones that we

bump into, bringing with them the risk of disconcerting falls in convivial

environments. Hence, "going through life" has also become a survival

risk.

This metaphorical walk through the ruts of life in society,

produces the illusion that living is in a world in which our freedom is

strengthened because it is both self-care and heterocuous, as CRÉPON

(2021) would say, to ensure it at all costs; however, this illusion

paradoxically raises the signs of political decadence, despite our

experience of being free: freedom, the product of dazzling illusions

otherwise passionate and rational of good life, fades at the same speed

that we idealize it, beyond our own circumstances. In this way, freedom

becomes the main victim of our own desires and wishes in the transit of

wanting to live a shared life. And I say "wanting to live", because life is

precisely the intention of perpetuating oneself as a living being, individual

and singular, beyond the rationality that characterizes us, and beyond the

plurality characteristic of the social sphere.

And it is this last feature that makes us sociable and existing

beings around the meaning of life itself, because with the evanescence of

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the sense of freedom, the sense of coexistence also fades away. All this is

a consequence, logically, of the signs of the "difficult times" we are living,

not only because of the post-pandemic effects, but also because of the

effects of the same urgencies and needs that are arising as we try to

perpetuate life on the face of this very deteriorated planet. It is not a

whim to generalize the analysis of these circumstances, since the locality

of life is no longer a common characteristic of all beings; of none. In the

case of humans, we are "planetary citizens", as passionately expressed by

MORIN (2005), that other French thinker who has bequeathed us so

much for the understanding of our times of complexity. Therefore, by

possessing the instrument of reason, it makes us responsible for the rest

of beings, who only possess the spirit of survival, to think in the

Aristotelian sense.

By virtue of this planetary generalization of our existence, it is

increasingly vulnerable to the signs of decadence of political institutions,

due to the ever-emerging intentions of power that characterizes any

model of social coexistence that has been chosen, precisely. It seems that

the political model par excellence that we have chosen in the West is

failing precisely as a result of the emergence of passions that have been

gaining ground in this world of shared life, which, as can be seen, is less

rational than emotional. The emotionality of life has been replacing the

way of life of being rational, as another philosopher of our time would

say, who has devoted memorable pages to think democracy as a principle,

in terms of discourse theory.

Indeed, Habermas is bequeathing us a valuable framework of

reflections on this political coexistence that we have tried to perfect in

the West; however, that same intentionality of action and rationality that

is supposed to characterize it, has been diluted by the designs of our time:

emotions have gone viral to the point of becoming the fifth pillar of

democracy. They are what Crépon himself describes as harmful to

political coexistence, since they transform institutions in such a way that

when the emotionality of action permeates them, the democratic turn is

blurred from the political map by means of "urgent" attention to the

requests of citizens in need of assistance, thereby creating a welfare State,

to such an extent that it is redefined as "procurer of existence", according

to Habermas' contemporary thinker, Enrst Forsthoff (SPECTER, 2013);

according to this conception, the value is not for the State directly or in

itself, but for the one who comes timidly and crestfallen to extend his

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hand to receive benefits: this conception elevates emotionality to the level

of political theory.

In the sense indicated, the emotionality of action is prolific in

reproducing itself at the rhythm of urgent needs, which the political

actors themselves, the agents of the emotionality of action, are capable

of reconstructing it and making it regenerate at the speed that these

agents need it, and so it is detected by the strategic sector of political-

emotional action. Emotions, when they enter the political plane,

transform the whole geostrategic structure of politics, since it is easier to

govern by hearing and heart than to govern by reason. Passions are then

a breeding ground for government based on the emotionality of action, an

issue that is increasingly spreading throughout the globe.

The above arguments give rise to the foundation of the so-called

"populism", which becomes a predator of democratic institutions to the

point of undermining them and endangering the very political regime that

sustains it; or to put it in the words of the Frenchman paraphrased in the

title of this commentary: political emotions and the populism that

underlies them, are a worm that devours the fruit that houses it, that is,

democracy is transformed into sweet and juicy ripe fruit ready to be

gobbled up by the small caterpillar before being transformed into a

beautiful butterfly. In other words, politics permeated by emotions is

what makes the democratic regime, which is supposed to be the most

viable for peaceful political coexistence (HABERMAS, 2010; DAHL,

2021)), given the intentions of protection that it contemplates, become a

boomerang that then hits the very foundations that support democracy,

until it collapses and lies motionless before the fierce predators of the

inhospitable forest in which the worst of wild life is found. Emotionality

in politics inaugurates a style of society that is harmful to itself.

In any case, the emotionality of action has been justified in the

field of politics, which, in the context of the procuratorial theory of

existence, has been advancing to such an extent that the most stable

regimes from the democratic point of view have been shaken to their

foundations, beyond the political interests supposedly held by the

democratic leadership, with the well-known determined aims of attaining

power at any cost, and most seriously, reconfiguring the legal foundations

of democracy in order to leave the doors open to the procurer-of-

existence interests; these always lurk behind the processes of

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manipulation of emotions for political purposes. For all these reasons,

the theory of the emotionality of action seen from the perspective of the

justification of power encompasses ethical and philosophical aspects of

the exercise of politics.

With reference to the ethical aspects, the theory of the

emotionality of action that derives from the theory of the State as

procurer of existence is nothing more than a discursive framework that

attempts to capture the emotions of the citizen, who demands

precisely what is contemplated in the political offers for the solution of

problems. The theory of action from the emotions reconstitutes and

gives life to a psychic structure conceived for the political domain, thus

founding a political psychology based precisely on the urgent needs,

which are used as support for the package of offers that is designed for

the purpose of controlling emotions. Foucault has already given answers

to this, especially with regard to the control of corporeality, but extended

to the extremes of domination from all angles of the political system.

The core ethical issue is, then, the management of emotions for

the control of power, taking advantage of the offer to find the offerer

with a clientelism eager for promises and thirst for illusions, always

welcome in order to feed hopes, which are the last to be lost; but they are

lost. Poverty and ignorance are two essential elements for a good design

of promises of political change "destined" to attack poverty and

transform the citizen's discomfort into individual and social well-being

and wealth, not only material but also spiritual: this is the dream of every

citizen subjected to the punctilious exercise of power. The emotionality

of action, from Crépon's perspective, is a destructive weapon of ethical

values by slipping surreptitiously and assuming commitments that cannot

be carried out, with the consequent disillusionment and loss of tranquility

and social peace. However, it does not fulfill the objective of power

control.

With respect to the political issue derived from this emotionality

of action, the emotional agent knows perfectly well that his offers must

be made in accordance with what the offered party wants to hear, and

therefore, the mechanisms of design and control of the discourse are

articulated in a coherent manner in order to capture the political favor of

those who most need the support of a third party to get out of poverty

and exclusion. The agent of the emotionality of action knows perfectly

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well the meaning to be given to the discourse, to sustain it, and if

possible, to "risk his life" in favor of the poor and excluded. The

representative of the procuring agency of existence specializes in

designing speeches to be heard in the same terms as the needs of those to

whom he addresses himself. The offered will then be in tune with

whoever sounds the music to his ears.

There is no reason to think that from this political perspective, the

agent of the emotionality of action will always keep open the political

acoustic shell where he plays the music that keeps him in power. Hence

the dangers involved in this sense of politics, because his job is not to use

democracy to solve the problems of society as a whole, but to stay in

power, logically at any cost. For this reason, where the rules of

democracy are weak, a democratic sense of little strength is imposed. And

this is the moment when the agents take advantage of the emotionality of

the action. For this reason, the latter will always depend on the histrionic

qualities of those who exercise politics, as actors who are tele-guided

towards paths of domination, which, for the same reason, are always

winding, steep and unreliable.

These are the reasons why ethics and philosophy will always be

preordained in terms of providing tools of analysis that allow to clarify to

the actors of politics, especially to the targets of the theory of the

emotionality of action, the core issues from which it is intended to

control their emotions for political purposes. Ethics and philosophy

serve the purpose of establishing certain lines of demarcation of political

action in terms of passions, especially when these are unbridled. The

worm that is the emotionality of action gradually engulfs the fleshiness of

democracy like ripe fruit until it devours and destroys it. Transformed

into a State procurer of existence, populism is a weapon of democratic

destruction. These are the signs of our times for which we must be

prepared.

Dr. José Vicente Villalobos-Antúnez / Editor-in-Chief

ORCID:http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3406-5000

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REFERENCIAS

CRÉPON, Marc. (2021). Tiempos difíciles, Ediciones Universidad

Católica del Maule, Santiago de Chile.

DAHL, Robert A. (2021). La democracia, Editorial Ariel, Barcelona

(España)

HABERMAS, Jürgen. (2010). Facticidad y validez. Sobre el

derecho y el estado democrático de derecho en términos

de teoría del discurso. Editorial Trotta, Madrid (España).

SPECTER, Matthew G. (2013). Habermas: Una biografía

intellectual, Avarigani Editores, Madrid (España).

MORIN, Edgar (2005). Introducción al pensamiento complejo.

Editorial Gedisa, Barcelona (España)

.

UNIVERSIDAD

DEL ZULIA

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales

Año 38, Especial N° 30 (2022)

Esta revista fue editada en formato digital por el personal de la Oficina de

Publicaciones Científicas de la Facultad Experimental de Ciencias, Universidad del

Zulia. Maracaibo - Venezuela

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