Approaches to 21st century culture: the dilemmas of utopia

Abstract

Plato interpreted a clash between philosophy and poetry, which marked the aesthetics and politics of the Athenian thinker, in the dialogues Ion and The Republic, but other authors who have faced this same dilemma made original contributions, starting with Aristotle; then Kierkegaard and Lezama with their aesthetic theories that are neighbors of Christian theology, and the same thing happened with 20th-century Latin American literature. The place that does not exist, the platonic U-topy raised on the maximisation of the conflict between thought and poetic expression, contrasts itself by the dissatisfaction of desires and cultural needs that is imposed on its imaginary citizens, compared to other utopian societies that have emerged from various aesthetic and political creations. This disjunction is projected from classical Old Age to the 21st century, from which we can try to appropriate this issue to give it a way out.

The horizon of Greek thought had been decanted towards the end of the 6th century B.n.e., setting aside the epic and theogony - no more or less than the legacy of Homer and Hesiod - so that philosophy and cosmology would emerge, on the urban stage governed by law (nomos). These were made possible by appeals to mathematical demonstrative formulation and by knowledge of the logical meaning of the implication (Segura 1991:189). However, the aesthetic facts did not end in that rational endeavor that prospered through an indeclinable vocation, based on the strict discernment between physical nature and the world of human conventions. Although the social acceptance of the logos was advancing, which did not yet mean its universal validity, it is also true that a field continued to persist that continued to be nourished by non-rational discourses such as myth, poetry, the religions of mysteries and a few others that resisted, empecinatedly, the transformation of the magical-mythical universe (Gauchet 1985:204).