Ideologia e apertura: oltre l’impero dell’epistemico

Abstract

How to reformulate a normative, and not simply descriptive, concept of ideology consistently with the “linguistic turn”? Does the perception  of being “thrown” in a horizon of “reasonable pluralism” enjoin us to relinquish the normative notion of ideology? The article suggests that the fact of reasonable pluralism enjoins us not to give up, but to reconceive ideology along “practical” lines on two entirely new bases.  The first basis (offered by Arendt and Rawls) consists in taking distance from the idea that right things are right because they ultimately reflect something true, and that ideologies then necessarily embed some kind of epistemic inadequacy. The second basis draws on the theories of self-constitutions (Korsgaard, Larmore, Frankfurt), which posit that a subject becomes a subject by making (and keeping) certain commitments. Action that radically violates these constituting commitments detracts from the subjecthood of the subject and brings a quality of wantonness to it. Ideology can then be reconceptualized as interference with the relation of the subject to its constitutive commitments. Ideology reduces the subject’s openness to the world, leads the subject to an ungrounded closure vis-à-vis the world, or exposes the subject to a destructive dispersion beyond its ability to recover integration.