Keeping up with the events of the fast-moving Catalan crisis is hard enough; identifying the most appropriate categories to understand it is significantly more difficult. This task is complicated by the immediacy of the events and the urgency of finding an acceptable solution, as well as by the fact that it involves many different disciplinary and professional perspectives. Jurists, although they differ on technical details, have a normative perspective that begets clarity because the law is unambiguous; entrepreneurs, for their part, look at it according to their business interests. Communicators, meanwhile, attentive to the effectiveness of speeches and public pronouncements, often use their weapons at the service of the cause that is most dear to them...

Sociologists and social psychologists understand that citizens in general are inclined toward and pronounce one way or another based on other reasons, or rather a heart that, at times, could seem impermeable to reasons. In the latter case, a philosopher like Kant would speak of "passion." Unlike Aristotle, who thought that passioncan admit rational direction, Kant had a more negative view of it: the passions are for him "cancers of practical reason" because they involve elevating to the rank of directive principle of behavior a particular inclination, that, being deprived of reason’s exclusive ability to compare, cannot fully take onlife’s complexity.

"Stubbornness" is the term that best reflects Kant's idea of ​​passion, who reserved a less negative metaphor for emotions, which he compared with a "drunkenness" that clouds reason, but only for a brief period of time when one recovers one’s senses, defined by the ability to reason and compare. In 2014, Henry Kamen, a British Hispanist living in Barcelona, ​​published a book entitled España y Cataluña: historia de una pasión (Spain and Catalonia: The history of a passion), a text that perhaps would raise the general level of mutual understanding and that warns that politics cannot be limited to the management of done deals or to the self-interested manipulation of history.

Unfortunately, few people actually read and those who do mostly tend toward texts that ratify previously adopted positions, which results in littlemutual understanding. If we could distance ourselves from our respective passions, we would see that the Catalan conflict not only reactivates, in the post-factual or post-truth regime of the post-modern world, the nineteenth-century debate between Enlightenment and Romanticism, but also exemplifies the conflict between two political philosophies: one that sustains the primacy of the law and one that sustains the primacy of the "people."

I put "people" in quotes because without minimal rational articulation that guarantees the rights of all people according to justice - that is, in the absence of the law - there is no people, only an amorphous crowd, even a dangerous mass. This does not reject the possibility that some laws may become obsolete and others may be perceived as unjust; hence, modern constitutions provide channels for their own modification and, in some cases,for conscientious objection.

The emotional culture that we inhabit, however, contains legal concepts (ultimately, products of reason)that barely penetrate consciousness, which is rather shaped according to emotions and passions, and educated (or manipulated) according to other parameters, frequently those offered by a sensationalist media.

The development of the Catalan crisis is far from the only example of this emotional culture in which we live. In it, nevertheless, emotions again are articulated around the concept of "identity," whether that refers tothe Catalan identity, or to the Spanish one. With this, a dialectical view of the problem emerges, which threatens to encourage and perpetuate it in an unfortunate spiral of misunderstandings and real or imaginary grievances between "us" and "them."

With an eye on similardynamics in other Western societies, it is important to note that there is something quitereactionary about trying to build political coexistence around the concept of cultural identity. This is especially true precisely at a historical moment in which Western societies are marked by so many forms of social fragmentation and exhibit so many different identity narratives.

Indeed, has there ever been a completely homogeneous culture? Thinking like this reveals an overly simplistic and stereotyped approach to "culture" because anintrinsic openness to change and to contact with people from other places is typical of all culture, which is, after all, a uniquely human task. If in the case of even geographically isolated ethnic communities we are likely to find internal contradiction and dissent, much less should we reject cultural homogeneity in larger social units, such as modern nation-states.

The political question is how to live together. The quality of a people is measured by the quality of its coexistence. Plato described politics as "the art of weaving." To rebuild a torn fabric we must rid ourselves of idolatries that subordinate the freedom of people to ideal constructs. The nation-state, at both the macro and micro levels, has always been one of them.