Do existencialismo sociológico à epistemologia insana: a ordem social como problema psíquico

Abstract

The praxeological approaches in social theory converge on the thesis that social order is not a given, but a contingent result of skilled conducts undertaken in a multiplicity of settings. The emphasis on the contingency of social order requires, however, an inquiry into why agents invest, after all, on the intelligibility, organization and predictability of their contexts of action. Each in its own way, the praxeologies of Peter Berger, Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens culminated in the view that this investment stems from a longing for ontological security (lato sensu), a vital yearning for an experience of the world and of one’s own existence as endowed with order, justification and meaning. Based on these authors, the first part of the thesis scans the social-psychological mechanisms for the production of ontological security, as well as some of the limit situations or “marginal threats” (Berger) which disturb it, such as dreaming, psychosis and death. The research program on “sociological existentialism” explores, therefore, the connection between the contingency of social order, as portrayed in praxeological theories, and the human existential impulse towards an ontologically secure experience of the world and of oneself. As for the study of “insane epistemology” or “heuristics of insanity” developed in the subsequent parts of the thesis, it deploys a methodological device that has proven fruitful in a variety of research domains on the conditio humana (from XXth century sychoanalysis to the most recent neuroscience), namely the plunge into the realm of the “pathological” as a path to illuminate “normal” modalities of action and experience. Resorting to this strategy on the plane of sociological characterizations of human conduct, the thesis mobilizes phenomenological and existential descriptions of schizoid and schizophrenic experiences not only to understand these in light of the praxeological theory of action, but also to deepen the praxeological theory of action in light of what such descriptions teach us about the multiplicity of ways of being-in-the-world exhibited by the anthropos. The sense of the self-evidence of reality inscribed in the “natural attitude”, the fundamentally pragmatic orientation towards the objectual and inter-subjective environment, the bodily engaged character of daily action, the practical reliance on tacit beliefs and skills (not only in the undertaking of routine tasks, but also as the indispensable background of reflexive deliberations) – these and other traces of our being-in-the-world, hegemonically included on accounts of human agency in contemporary social theory due to the influence of praxeological perspectives, are precisely among the subjective dispositions which are most radically transformed in various schizoid or schizophrenic processes. Based on the works of phenomenologically informed psychiatrists such as Louis Sass and Thomas Fuchs, the thesis defends that these transformations, despite their psychic and social costs, must not be conceived as mere agential and experiential deficits, but rather as complex existential attitudes which require as minute an account as possible – attitudes in which, for instance, the grounding on tacit beliefs is replaced with a hyper-reflexive compulsion, the pragmatic relationship with material objects gives way to a quasi-philosophical perplexity in face of their mere reality, the inter-subjective agreements that offer familiarity and order to social reality in a given culture are perceived in their radical ontological arbitrariness, and the estrangement from one’s own body ceases to be a playful Cartesian skepticism so as to become a profound existential experience.