Open Access
Echoes of transcendence in a secular age
(ACAD Organisation, 2022) Sánchez Capdequí, Celso; Gil Gimeno, Francisco Javier; Sociología y Trabajo Social; Soziologia eta Gizarte Lana; Institute for Advanced Social Research - ICOMMUNITAS
This paper analyses transcendence in the secular age. In its origins, secular knowledge based on the model of the natural sciences seemed to have won the battle against religion and myth. This kind of all-knowing knowledge can be translated into physical or mathematical terms. In this scenario, the part of reality that cannot be translated into that language simply disappears. This is the case of transcendence understood as the basis of knowledge of the other-wordly (religion, myth, etc.). Modernity is identified with immanence, there is nothing beyond its limits. Recently, however, transcendence has returned to the public debate. It has abandoned its last religious form and adopted other forms such as the moral and the semiotic. This transformation in transcendence makes possible the construction of a field of analysis in which religions and cultures can recognize difference and put themselves in the place of others. In this transcendence there is no longer God alone, only the possibility of exploring and shaping different ways of being in the world.
Open Access
Sociological genealogy of a non-teleological concept of evolution
(Frontiers Media, 2024) Beriain Rázquin, Josetxo; Gil Gimeno, Francisco Javier; Sánchez Capdequí, Celso; Institute for Advanced Social Research - ICOMMUNITAS
The aim of this article is to carry out a sociological-conceptual genealogy of the evolutionist perspective (non-teleological) of approaching social reality. While during the first phases of modernity, a teleological and progressive conception of evolution was imposed, clearly manifested in the proposals of Auguste Comte or Herbert Spencer, in the last decades important bifurcations, processes, and developments have emerged that question the linearity and the finalist character of these positions. We consider that these approaches are closer to the nature of change and social phenomena, so it seems important to us to analyze some of the most outstanding contributions—in the form of sociological genealogy, as we have already mentioned—that have developed this perspective. In order to carry out our task, we have organized four sections: In the first, we make a critique of the sociological evolutionism represented by Comte, Spencer, and Parsons, focusing on the limits of their proposals and the blind spots associated with them. Second, we will analyze the anti-teleological cognitive approaches of Donald and the importance they attach to cultural transmission as a key element for understanding the evolution of both cognition and human societies. In a third moment, we will analyze the coexistence in Weber’s work between the dynamics of ‘disenchantment’ and ‘re-enchantment’ of the world in modern societies, understood as the two sides of the same coin that are in constant dynamic tension and that break with the evolutionary vision that goes from magic through religion to science, or from belief to knowledge. In a fourth moment, we analyze the relevance of approaches focused on what we have called ‘multiple evolutions’ (plural) that collide with each other—the conflicting simultaneity of the non-simultaneous—of their rhythms and directions, inspired by the works of Knöbl, Koselleck, Luhmann, Rosa, Eisenstadt, Abbott, and Zerubavel, which pave the way for the construction of a non-teleological approach to evolution.
Open Access
The persistence of sacrifice as self-sacrifice and its contemporary embodiment in the 9/11 rescuers and COVID-19 healthcare professionals
(MDPI, 2021) Gil Gimeno, Francisco Javier; Sánchez Capdequí, Celso; Institute for Advanced Social Research - ICOMMUNITAS; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
The aim of this paper is to analyze the persistence of sacrifice as self-sacrifice in contemporary societies. In order to reach this goal, firstly, we discuss how in the Axial Age (800-200 B.C.E.) an understanding of sacrifice as ritual worship or a ritual practice that involves the immolation of a victim became less prevalent and a new understanding of sacrifice emerges. This new notion of sacrifice focuses on individual relinquishment and gift exchange, that is, on a person sacrificing or relinquishing him/herself as a gift that is given in an exchange relationship for protecting a greater good (a god, a community, a person, a nation, and so on). Secondly, we analyze how this new sacrifice formula had an important impact on the understanding of sacrifice. Most notably, it led people to conceptualize sacrifice as a project or as something that persons could intentionally embrace. Thirdly, and as a result of the previous processes, we attend to the secularization of sacrifice, not in the sense of a de-sacralization of this phenomenon but in the way of sacralization of the mundane realm and mundane things, such as intentional self-sacrificial acts, in social contexts where there is religious pluralism. Insight into how the notion of sacrifice is secularized is found throughout the classic works of Marcel Mauss and Georg Simmel, and these works are discussed in section three. Fourthly, we study the sacredness of the person as a clear type of secular religiosity that develops self-sacrificial forms. Two of these self-sacrificial forms are the actions of 9/11 rescuers and COVID-19 healthcare professionals. A short analysis of both will serve us to illustrate how self-sacrifice is embodied in contemporary societies.
Open Access
The hegemonic character of techno-functional neo-immanentism and its relationship with culture wars
(MDPI, 2023) Sánchez Capdequí, Celso; Gil Gimeno, Francisco Javier; Echeverría Esparza, Pablo; Institute for Advanced Social Research - ICOMMUNITAS
This paper analyzes the social processes that have led to the consolidation of a technocratic secular order and the type of cultural struggle that has made this possible. To this end, it first proposes a reconstruction of the technocratic consciousness in the course of the secularization process that culminates in the technological determinism or technological solutionism of the social present; then, the analysis focuses on the neo-immanentist tendency of techno-functionalism, in which the secular context and the text of secularization become one and deplete a social explanation; thirdly, it reflects on and deals with the open nature of secular life, in which context does not determine social texts (inter-actions) and opens the way to the existence of different life options that compete with each other and even turn on—rebel against—institutional design. This reflection, then, focuses on the specific features of the culture wars in Western Judeo-Christian culture and its globalizing tendency. Finally, the document closes with a conclusion that analyzes the road travelled and introduces the new challenges arising from the arguments presented.
Open Access
Play, game, and videogame: the metamorphosis of play
(MDPI, 2018) Gil Gimeno, Francisco Javier; Sánchez Capdequí, Celso; Beriain Rázquin, Josetxo; Sociología y Trabajo Social; Soziologia eta Gizarte Lana
The question, the Fragestellung, which drives this paper is, can football video-games be analyzed from a religious perspective? We can answer positively, at least, provisionally. First, in order to demonstrate our approach, we will take into account the different conceptions on play drawn along sociological theories. Second, we will analyze Francis M. Cornford’s contribution to the already forgotten but essential work by Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: The Social Origins of the Greek Religion, in which he established an elective affinity between the origin of the Olympic Games and the annual ritual dedicated to the Daimon-God Dionysus, in which he was elected the best Kouros (Young hero-King) of the year. At the very beginning, play, ritual, and competitive games (helped by self-reflexivity as well as collective reflexivity) were united, and that constellation is still there in modern times with the creation of modern sport. Third, in modern advanced societies the football game-sport creates meaning, and succeeded throughout two main processes such as the sportification and progressive rationalization of violence. Fourth, we built an ideal type of two competing strategies, in which created a new type of hero, the sports hero, the modern celebrity. Finally, fifth, we analyze how in our digitalized societies the football videogames are a sort of play on the play of which comes out a religious transcendence associated with it, 'Throughout the videogame I become myself in my idol'. We explain this comparing two ideal types, the Dionysian-Messi versus the Apollonian-Ronaldo.
Open Access
El símbolo: ese desafío que no cesa. La filosofía hermenéutica de Andrés Ortiz-Osés
(Editorial San Esteban, 2022) Sánchez Capdequí, Celso; Gil Gimeno, Francisco Javier; Institute for Advanced Social Research - ICOMMUNITAS
La filosofía hermenéutica de Andrés Ortiz-Osés ha dejado una huella de calado en el panorama intelectual nacional e internacional. Su trabajo profundizó en las desventuras del símbolo en un entorno cultural que tiende a incidir en los antagonismos y que, por ende, olvida y reprime dimensiones de la realidad que no se someten al pensamiento binario. Si la herencia occidental de la filosofía clásica apuesta por la búsqueda de la verdad, siempre Una y Excluyente, la hermenéutica de Ortiz-Osés explora los trazos del sentido en el intento de la integrar la realidad toda y varia sin dejar a nada ni a nadie fuera de su red implicativa. El símbolo es el hogar lingüístico del hombre en el que perduran los planos del significado, de la comunicación y de lo innombrable. Todo está en él sin que sus miembros se unifiquen y sin desvincularse por completo. Sin embargo, la modernidad burguesa hace peligrar esa red simbólica por el predominio del entendimiento abstracto frente a la multiplicidad sensorial. Por otra parte, en la modernidad tardía es la reacción compensatoria de Eros la que hace estallar y celebrar la fragmentación sensorial sin noticia de articulaciones narrativas tendentes a lo universal.