Question

fantasticism is the base of communism give reason​

Answer 1

Answer:

The label “fanaticism” is increasingly attached to the perceived threat posed by religious fundamentalism. But rarely is the history of the term and the variety of its uses examined. Here, a philosophical history of “fanaticism” from Martin Luther to the present.

Since the spectacular arrival of the threat of terrorism put an end to our complacent post-communist interregnum, the Other of parliamentary democracies has been presented – in the media but also by ubiquitous psychological “experts” – as a “fanatic”. Prominent figures have identified fanaticism as a cultural syndrome, or even a deep psychopathology that could enable us to explain the supposed increase in supranational violence. Fernando Savater1 and Alain Finkielkraut2 (in El País and Libération, respectively) have recognized the emergence of a new global subject in the protests and polemics against the Mohammed cartoons published in Denmark – the “fanatic without borders”. While Savater’s text boasts an anti-clerical irreverence of a libertarian sort that spares no one, Finkielkraut, as shown in several of his recent works, shows an obsession for confrontation with “Islamic” intolerance, with “their” illiberal fanaticism. This seems again to reiterate, in French Republican guise, Huntington’s noxious theses on the clash of civilizations. In both cases, the spectacle of fanaticism, in its rapid circulation through the global media, is the object of observation and opinion, rather than the causes of fanaticism or the realities from which it originates (realities like that of the concrete intolerance towards Muslim immigrants in Denmark).

The introduction of the concept of fanaticism into the debate on today’s ideological conflicts indeed seems to lean more towards cultural and psychological causes than political, strategic, and material ones. Fanaticism often appears as an invariable that transcends historical events, or even, in an Orientalist and racist vein, a characteristic of fantastical entities such as “the Arab mind”. The anti-historicity of the concept in part allows for its often arbitrary and hypocritical use. Fanaticism, as we cannot help but notice with painful frequency, is often projected onto an enemy with which, by definition, one cannot negotiate. As Amos Oz writes in How to Cure a Fanatic, “it is enough to read the newspaper, or watch the news on television, to explain the ease with which people become fanatically anti-fanatic, anti-fundamentalist, with which they undertake an anti-Jihad crusade”.3 Words that ironically gain weight when one notes that the very same Oz, who advocates “imagining” the Other, was initially spurred by the recent war in Lebanon to abandon his own reasoning, proposing an apologia for Israel and a demonization of Hezbollah that fails any test, empirical or moral. Alone the Orwellian title of one of his recent opinion pieces gives us a sense of the dangers of partisan anti-fanaticism: “Why Israeli missiles strike for peace”.4

The growing use of the term “fanaticism” to identify the dangers of the present, particularly the exacerbation of religious politics and the terrorist phenomenon, is rarely accompanied by a reflection on the genealogy of the term and the variety of its applications. A look at its philosophical history allows us instead to view its many facets and to initiate a critique of its rhetorical and analytical functions. In this essay, I would simply like to assess a few moments in the history of this exquisitely polemical concept, moments that allow us to recognize the persistence of certain leitmotifs in the discourse on fanaticism, including the psychologization of politics, the problem of the universal, and the image of Islam.