Nordicum-Mediterraneum (Dec 2008)
Beyond the Reductionist Thinking-Doing
Abstract
Drawing upon Castoriadis’ work, modernity is conceived to emerge as a conflict and mutual contamination between the two great projects of the West, the project of freedom, which has been pursued by different social movements as individual and social autonomy, and the project of the unlimited expansion of "rational mastery" over the world, which has been pursued by the institutions of capitalism as a ceaseless economic growth, associated to a ceaseless scientific and technological development. Both these projects have been emerged within a reductionist logic-ontology, which presupposes the determinacy and the identity-unity of being, and which thereby posits an imperative upon the Western thinking-doing: to provide a rational foundation of its projects – of freedom and of "rational mastery". As en epoch, postmodernity is defined by the retreat from the project of autonomy and by the increasing domination and globalization of the project of (pseudo-)rational (pseudo-)mastery. As an intellectual current, it has deconstructed the reductionism of modernity and thereby relativezed its political and socioeconomic projects, falling however into a political embarrassment and into the principle of "anything goes".
