“Liquid” Identity and Otherness in the Phenomenon of Religious Alienation: The Loss of Critical Thinking and the “Barter” of the Self in the System of Communion

Abstract

The “interior space” (Guardini, 1997) is inevitably influenced by the “external space”, which can be the mother, the inter-personal relationships, the local community with all its particular declinations (community of peers, scholastic, academic, working, etc.) or society in general; yet the educational relationship (Kanitsa & Mariani, 2017), in particular in the parental and religious sphere, has the main function of “forming” the pupil, as a child or adult, student, or faithful; in the same way, also the whole society in which one is immersed is understood as an “external environment” which continuously influences the formation of an individual. Indeed, for the purposes of this analysis, is interesting to note what Marcuse writes about the constitution of the “conceptual paradigm” of a society: he warns of the fact that when a society is imbued with a certain ideology, it seems that it is “inhabited” by a paradox; since “Ideologies in particular tend to remain entangled in the dilemmas of the paradox, especially if their metaphysics is anti-metaphysics” (Marcuse, 1999, p. 189). What intervenes as a matrix and “interferes” in the educational process, and so what constitutes the original source from which an education springs out and which, therefore, creates an “educational interference” (Demetrio, 2020, p. 5), is undoubtedly multiple and multi factorial, not reducible to a single root. Precisely for this reason, in this investigation, various paradigmatic educational sources will be taken in consideration, also crossing the Global and Digital (Byung-Chul Han, 2015) dimensions typical of our age, since they act as a “stimulus” and so they are understood as “educating forces”. These “forces” appear to be marked, each internally, by a paradoxical logic: they could be realized, indeed, not only as “educational forces” but also as “alienating forces”. It seems that we face a “power” then, which, taking the place of the authentic and beneficial “religious” or parental “care”, “sets” a new bond of Attachment (Bowlby, 1972, 1975, 1983), capable of emulating some significant aspects of care or relationship, infusing instead, discomfort, pain and, ultimately, alienation. The aim of this study is, therefore, to thoroughly investigate this “inner space of consciousness” (Guardini, 2002, p. 41), when happens that it is “violated”, voluntarily or unconsciously, by those who invade it, giving to an individual, at the same time, identity and the alienation of the identity.