(DOWNLOAD) "Community and Nihilism (Report)" by Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Community and Nihilism (Report)
- Author : Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 203 KB
Description
1. What is the relationship between the terms 'community' and 'nihilism'? The answer that comes from the various philosophies of community--but also from a widespread interpretation of nihilism--goes in the direction of a radical opposition. Nihilism and community are not just in a relation of alterity, but in one of open contrast, which does not admit points of contact or areas of overlap. They reciprocally exclude each other: where one is present--or, when one is present--the other is absent, and vice versa. Whether the opposition is located on the synchronic level or along a diachronic trajectory, what matters is the clarity of the alternative between two poles that seem to acquire a meaning precisely from their irreducibility. Nihilism--in its most distinguishing connotations of artificiality, anomie, and senselessness--is perceived as that which has made community impossible, or even unthinkable. On the other hand, community has always interpreted itself as what resists, restrains, and contrasts the nihilistic drift. This is basically the role assigned to community by the communal [comuniali], communitarian, and communicative conceptions which, for more than a century, have regarded it as the only barrier against the devastating power of nothingness which pervades modern society. What changes, with regard to this scenario, is the order of succession that is attributed at each turn to community and modern society, not their rigidly dichotomous character. If Ferdinand Tonnies put community before society--according to a genealogy which was then appropriated by all the philosophies of decline, betrayal, and loss originating both from the Right and the Left at the turn of the twentieth century--contemporary neo-communitarians across the Atlantic reverse the stages of the dichotomy, yet without questioning its basic structure. It is community--or better, the particular communities into which the Tonniesian archetype has been fragmented--that follows modern society in a phase marked by the crisis of the state paradigm and the proliferation of multicultural conflict. In this case, community is no longer understood as a residual phenomenon with regard to the sociocultural forms assumed by modernity, but rather as an objection to the insufficiency of the latter's individualistic-universalistic model: it is the very society of individuals, the destroyer of the ancient organic community, that now generates new communitarian forms as a posthumous reaction to its own inner entropy. Even from this perspective, what re-emerges is the reciprocal exclusion of community and nihilism: community advances or withdraws, expands or contracts itself, on the basis of the space which has not yet been 'colonized' by nihilism. When Habermas opposes a communicative to a strategic rationality, he remains within the same interpretative paradigm, with an additional, defensive emphasis: the 'unlimited community of communication' constitutes, at the same time, the point of resistance and the reserve of meaning in face of the increasing intrusiveness of technology. The fact that community is understood as a transcendental a priori--rather than a factual one, like in the more rudimentary approach of the neo-communitarians--does not change its basic hermeneutic frame. Even in this case, community, considered as a possibility if not a reality, is understood as the borderline and the wall that contains the advance of nihilism. It is seen as something full--a substance, a promise, a value--that does not let itself be emptied out by the vortex of nothingness. It is another configuration of the battle between the 'thing' and the 'nothing' that functions as a presupposition for the entire tradition we are examining: against the explosion--or the implosion--of the nothing, community holds back the reality of the thing: or rather, it is the very thing that opposes its own annihilation.
 "Community and Nihilism (Report)" by Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}