| There was an era, an era of emancipation from the historical progress of the subject. The ideologies of the preceding era that put the subject at the center of progress had weighed heavily on us. Messianic ideology, human engineering and global plans to save the world (the most egregious of these being Stalinism and Kampuchia, were part of the world enlightenment. There was a necessity to deconstruct this progress of the subject and to understand its dialectic. It began with Rockheimer. and Adorno's dialectic of the enlightenment and it ended with Foucault. The question now is: What next? And the key phrase for me as an intellectual is moral values, not ideologies. In a way, I return to Kant. I say that we cannot continue without a link between rationalism and values. Foucault was good as a teacher of the 19th century. He is not a good mentor for the 20th. He criticized the 19th century but left us without solutions. It can lead to a cynicism and he himself fell into a political misreading, vis-a-vis Iran. We cannot give up on the very problematic relationship between values and rationalism, even though it is full of contradictions. I'm sure the solution should not be shaped as ideology and absolutely not hermetic ideology. What is the answer? I don't know. But I know that this is where Kant is buried. |
