Читать книгу Error, Illusion, Madness - Bento Prado Jr. - Страница 12

Let us now turn to a central point in Error, Illusion, Madness in order to better understand the political consequences of a philosophical experience of this kind.

Habermas used to say:

No matter how consistent a dropout he may be, [the radical skeptic] cannot drop out of the communicative practice of everyday life, to the presuppositions of which he remains bound. And these in turn are at least partly identical with the presuppositions of argumentation as such.¹⁹

Even if we do not necessarily subscribe to a transcendental pragmatic standpoint, we could at least have a general grammar capable of regulating conflicts through the search for the best argument.

However, one of Bento Prado’s major critical strategies consisted in inquiring into the structure of subjectivity presupposed by philosophical positions that wished to salvage some form of normativity immediately accessible to the subject. Such deconstructions of normativity, which went as far as claiming that the common person is no more than a “pedagogical project,” were in fact initial moves in a redimensioning of experience, since the abandonment of a normative horizon led to the acknowledgment of the “unavoidable ambiguity of experience and the discursive anarchy that it opens.”²⁰

But how are we to understand this “discursive anarchy”? Such a defense of the ambiguity of experience, of the search for an irreducible heterogeneity, a defense that supposes a discursive anarchy that resists conceptual unification, could seem at first to be merely a profession of irrationalistic—or at the very least relativistic—faith. The case supporting that accusation appears to grow when we take into account the way in which Bento Prado used to assert the impossibility of providing a positive foundation for the universalizing criteria of judgment. Seeking support in a reading of Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, Bento Prado insisted that the universalization of criteria and systems of rules was not exactly the object of a more or less transparent communicational understanding. Rather it was an object of persuasion, and whoever says “persuasion” says more than just recognition of a better argument—and, against the wishes of some “conversational” conceptions of philosophy, recognizes no neutral arena in which the claims to truth of metaphysical interpretations could be tested.

On the contrary, whoever says “persuasion” necessarily says conversion, constitution of a conflictual field in which processes of identification and circuits of affects, libidinal investment, constitution of authority criteria, and so on all come into play. The field of persuasion is a battlefield, Bento Prado would often insist, not a placid arena of communicational understanding. That led him to statements such as: “The basis of a language game is not constituted by propositions susceptible to truth or falsity but corresponds only to something like a choice without any rational foundation.”²¹ It corresponds to a “pathological” decision, in the sense not that it is distorted, but that it is affected by a pathos that refers us back to the sensible. In a country haunted by the state’s use of “pacts” and “conciliations” allegedly animated by communicative rationality (since that was the official state ideology under the “Brazilian enlightenment” of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration),²² talk of “discursive anarchy” could not fail to have rather obvious critical resonances for the readers.

At any rate, we can see that this would be a risky philosophical operation for several reasons. First, to define rational argumentation as a conflictual field of persuasion implies, at least in this case, dismantling any strict dichotomies between the psychological and the transcendental, since it entails bringing seemingly psychological categories to bear on processes of rational argumentation. Ultimately, given that the transcendental guarantee itself is put at risk, it looks as though we will just end up dissociating matters of justification from matters of fact. After all, if the basis of a language game is made up of choices with no rational foundation, nothing can justify it except the objective existence of social practices that I take to be necessary.

To see how Bento Prado deals with this question, let us begin by paying attention to the construction of a crucial passage like this:

To persuade someone is to lead that person to admit precisely what has no basis, a “mythology,” something that lies far beyond, or below, the alternative between true and false, rational and irrational, or rather between reasonableness and madness, between cosmos and chaos.²³

There would be a “Nietzschean” way of interpreting this statement. If to persuade is to lead someone to admit to what ranges below the alternative between true and false, perhaps this is because truth and falsity are not the best criteria for evaluating what has the power to elicit our assent. Perhaps there are kinds of value that pertain, not to the description of states of affairs, but to the ways in which forms of life are structured. What persuades is not exactly the truth of a proposition, but the correctness of a form of life that becomes embodied when I act according to certain criteria and admit the value of certain modes of conduct and judgment. In this sense, the criterion of what persuades is tied to a value judgment concerning forms of life that carry a normative weight.

Yet the problem, far from finding a solution, has only become more complex. If I am not to fall into a new version of relativism, I must make explicit the criteria that would allow me to evaluate forms of life, for example to say that some are mutilated and pathological—since at the end of the day Bento Prado’s real inversion consists in showing to what extent the regulative idea of normality that inhabits certain conceptions of subjectivity is pathological—while others are closer to a fundamental experience. Hence a central statement such as this one:

Since language games and forms of life are internally connected, linguistic misunderstandings refer back to a disorder in life itself. And [Wittgenstein] adds that, if a disease perverts [the] use [of language games], this perversion must be traceable back to a perversion at the heart of the form of life itself. For philosophy, we must free the flow of life and broaden its sphere.²⁴