Beyond the daily monitoring of events, it is not easy to identify the most appropriate categories to understand the Catalan crisis. It is complicated by the immediacy of these events and the urgency of finding an acceptable solution, but also by the fact that it involves many different disciplinary or professional perspectives. Jurists, even if they differ in technical specifications, are mostly clear about it, because theirs is a perspective rules and regulations, and the law is clear and unequivocal; businessmen decide according to business interests; communicators, for their part, attentive to the effectiveness of speeches and public pronouncements, often use their weapons in the service of the cause they hold dearest...

Sociologists and social psychologists could corroborate that citizens in general are inclined or pronounced in one direction or another on the basis of other reasons, or rather of a heart that might sometimes seem impervious to reason. In the latter case, a philosopher like Kant would speak of "passion"; unlike Aristotle , who considered that the passions could admit rational direction, Kant attributed a negative content to this term: for him the passions are "cancers of reason internship", because they lead to elevating a particular inclination to the rank of directive principle of behavior, which, being deprived of the exclusive comparative capacity of reason, cannot be made position fully aware of the complexity of life.

"Obstinacy" is the term Spanish that best reflects Kant's idea of passion, who reserved a less negative metaphor for emotions, which he compared to "drunkenness" that clouds reason, but only for a short time, because then one recovers one's sense, the ability to reason and compare. In 2014, Henry Kamen, a British Hispanist living in Barcelona, published a book graduate Spain and Catalonia: history of a passion, a reading that could perhaps raise the general level of reciprocal understanding and warn that politics cannot be limited to the management of fait accompli or only to the interested manipulation of history.

Unfortunately, few read, and those who do tend in a very high percentage to lean towards writings that ratify previously adopted positions, so that progress in reciprocal understanding is minimal. 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 discussion between Enlightenment and Romanticism, but also exemplifies the conflict between two political philosophies: that which upholds the primacy of the law and that which upholds the primacy of the "people". 

The reason for the quotation mark "people" is that without a minimum rational articulation that guarantees the rights of all persons according to justice - that is, in the absence of a law - there is no people, but only an amorphous multitude, even a dangerous mass. This does not deny the possibility that some laws may become obsolete and others may be perceived as unjust; hence modern constitutions provide for the channels of their own modification and in some cases also for conscientious objection.

A feature of the emotional culture in which we live, however, is that legal concepts, after all, children of reason, have little penetration in consciences: these are rather molded according to emotions and passions, educated (or manipulated) according to other parameters, often those offered by the media in core topic impressionistic.

The development of the Catalan crisis is far from being the only example of this emotional culture in which we live. In it, however, emotions are once again articulated around the concept of "identity": either to underline the Catalan identity or to underline the Spanish identity. This favors a dialectical vision of the problem, which threatens to entrench and perpetuate it in a lamentable spiral of misunderstandings and real or imaginary grievances between "us" and "them".

Thinking also of analogous dynamics that are now spreading in other Western societies, it is important to note that there is something -much- reactionary in trying to build political coexistence around the concept of cultural identity, precisely at a historical moment in which Western societies are marked by so many forms of social fragmentation and exhibit so many and so plural identity narratives. 

Has there ever been a completely homogeneous culture? Those who think this way have an excessively simplistic and stereotyped approach to "culture," for it is characteristic of every culture - after all, a human work - that it is intrinsically open to change, to contact with people and persons from other cultures. If even in the case of geographically isolated ethnic communities we must be willing to encounter internal contradiction and dissent, all the more reason to rule out cultural homogeneity in larger social units, such as the modern nation-state.

The political issue is 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 mend a torn fabric, it is necessary to get rid of idolatries that subordinate people's freedom to ideal constructs. The nation-state, in macro or micro version, has always been one of them.