La quête du sens : Action et argumentation

Abstract

The Quest of Sense: Action and Argumentation

The category of Action, being the last of the material categories predicted by Eric Weil in his Logique de la Philosophie, constitutes the discursive center of our time, subjecting all other discourses to the idea of a history reoriented by the formal category of Meaning, in which violence proves to be insensate and the individual revolt loses its reason for being. It becomes clear, then, that such a perspective supposes the progressive decline of the warlike politics, to allow the history of an effective freedom. However, notwithstanding the many improvements, this equation is not only slow to materialize, as our age is increasingly marked by uncontrolled and uncontrollable violence. How should we understand this state of affairs? The hypothesis we intend to stress is that Action presupposes a set of conditions that makes it particularly vulnerable either to the generalized incomprehension of its ends or to the intervention of other categorical discourses with their alternative worldviews. To this end, we analyze extensively the logic of the category and of the attitude that it involves, stressing the constitutive fragility of its rationality, which requires, as a sine qua non condition, what we suggest being a democracy of meaning.

Keywords: Eric Weil, Action, Meaning, Resumptions, Democracy, Contemporary politics