Defending the Enlightenment Today! A gloss on José Luis Villacañas' freudo-republicanism

What denies a republican State is not the war itself, but the fact that the State has been taken over by interest groups. These globalized and transnationalized groups make the State “an apparatus” hijacked by interest groups, thus denying the possibility for its members, i.e. citizens, to deliberate on matters of the Common Good. As José Luis Villacañas has proposed in his reading of Kant, in a State where the illusion of power without citizen deliberation has become a reality on a planetary scale, the tension between perfect and imperfect rationality is not possible. This tension is what makes possible the healthy condition of the res publica, which has been denied the minimal rationality made possible by the Enlightenment, that is, the role of the intelligences to understand, foresee, and improve their worlds of life. Through the philosophical work of the Spanish thinker and his exegesis of Kant’s work, this chapter will develop the hypothesis that only a determined defense of the “birth of understanding” that made the Kantian project of the Enlightenment possible, can revitalize a project of a res publica that opposes and contains the pathologies generated by interest groups, as well as the phenomenon that some theorists have recently called global warfare. If republicanism, as a theoretical and political program, is viable today, it is because it is still possible to defend the equality of intelligences—individual and collective—capable of deliberating the future of their lifeworlds.