Esperança, Kant e o 'mal radical' (e mais umas coisas)
Human improvement depends upon happening that have not yet taken place, and that in fact may never take place — it requires a “contingent event” in order to be realized. But nonetheless, the “phenomenon” of a capacity towards such improvement is in itself perfectly and altogether real. (...)It is for this reason that the denial of our potential or predisposition towards improvement is a secular version of what the Christians call a “sin against the Holy Spirit” — in Kant’s terms, such a denial is “radical evil”, in that it negates the very potentiality that makes any sort of moral choice thinkable in the first place. (Hence, Kant insists that human beings have a predisposition towards betterment in precisely the same way, and for the same reasons, that we all also have a “propensity to evil” or depravity).
In the grander scheme of things, this means that we must reject, on Kantian grounds, all ideologies that declare that humanity is incapable of betterment because human beings are inherently limited and imperfect (such is the tenor of the anti-”utopian” rejections of anything that goes beyond the limits of contemporary predatory capitalism), and all ideologies that declare that the narrow self-interested maximizing behavior of Homo oeconomicus cannot ever be transcended, as well as all ideologies that limit the prospects of emancipation to any particular group, nation, religion, etc. And in the narrow, tawdry limits of contemporary US politics — to move from great things to small — this is why the boundless cynicism of the Republican Party must be rejected as evil. The Democrats may well be playing games with our hopes for betterment, hypocritically encouraging those hopes only the better to betray them, etc., etc.; but at least they represent a world in which such hopes stil exist. Shaviro, The Pinocchio Theory
nota: quando critico utopias (como neste post) não o faço em nome de qualquer tipo de realismo ou pragmatismo puro (tipo Henrique Raposo ou os conservadores tradicionais). O que rejeito são 'utopias científicas tipo Marxismo e hiper-liberalismo que acham que existe uma 'receita' para todos os problemas. O que autor do texto que refiro acima defende é algo inteiramente diferente. Ao contrário do que defende John Gray, utopia não degenera necessariamente em Black Mass. Eu diria mais: o verdadeiro pensamento político não existe sem uma certa relação com a utopia.
