Arte e Educação - Fundação Bienal do Mercosul

supported by reason, by the universality of
enlightened reason that imposes its model (of
universal rationality) as a parameter for the good
and the just. The supposition that the will of the
majority is the true, just and good will is founded
on the absolutism of this reason elevated to the
status of a god. The democratic solution is, at the
most, a reasonable solution, no more than that. Its
consistency lies in the fact of being supported by
a logic that operates on the principle of the
excluded middle, the logic of either this or that, in
which force will be greater on the more numerous
side (as if quantity were a neutral criterion). The
exercise of democracy could be represented by
the attempt at gathering together individual
preferences into a general preference by grouping
them according to the criterion of proximity of
intention and then consolidating that result as a
kind of social will. However, as democracy does
not imply unanimity, individual wills will always
be suppressed under a social choice of the collective
well being.
We perhaps therefore have to direct our attention
towards the origin of this expectation of
universality to make a detour. If we consider the
Greek intention of submitting to justice as a full
act or absolute value based on material practices,
we have to consider that this contains a set of
given conditions when this justice is confined to a
particular social sphere. The Greek model of
democracy necessarily implied social inequality. If
we consider the medieval Christian world, we also
find inequality of conditions between individuals
as a condition for consideration of justice. Both
the metaphysical model and the theological model
propose individual realisation through altruism,
through renunciation of the self in favour of the
other. Or at least, as Rorty explains, They ask us to
believe that what is most important to each of us is
what we have in common with others (Rorty, 1991:
xiii), trying to make us believe that the source of
individual realisation and the source of collective
realisation are the same. The human being thus
came to be considered as a human-being-in-ademocratic-society,
so that that search for an
identity, for an essence, for a truth about existence
became converted into a search for freedom,
equality and solidarity in the broad sense of social
progress. We are not defined by an a priori, or
internal or deep-down “me” but by the paradox
of the possibility of autonomy on the same scale
as sociality, the possibility of personal selfrealisation
alongside the social well being, the
possibility of authorship and self-creation at the
same time as producing a fairer and freer society.
These conditions are incompatible, and according
to the same author it is not a case of trying to
construct a theoretical (or practical) model that
“would let us hold self-creation and justice, private
perfection and human solidarity in a single vision”
(Rorty, 1991: xiv).
What direction should be taken, then? I am happy
to try to avoid this struggle for a model that seeks
to unify all this in a utopia of universal fullness
and harmony. We should try to examine a
situation in which attainment of social justice
shares space with the realisation of individual and
private projects. We should consider the
contingency of our beliefs, desires and plans in
understanding that there is no possibility of
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