It sometimes surprises you that people set such great store in the powers of human reason. There is a kind of latent (or explicit) fanaticism, a dryness of soul, when reason is held to be the all in all...one of Pascal's two "extravagances". If there are 'good reasons' to do something then are there bad ones as well? The old problem stems, perhaps, from an overblown conception of the capacity of human beings to make sense of it all, believing we could somehow see-through magical thinking-everything sub specie aetrerni. Is there some deep theoretical/aesthetic/religious impulse that wants to arrest time, to "spatialize" it? (Is this not just a version of the old 'tree of life, tree of knowledge'?).
From where does this fanaticism of rationality come? Is it that when we lose the sense of first principles, final ends, what remains is a shadow of authentic reason, a purely mechanical and abstract version of thinking? I'm sure the firebombing of Tokyo or Hiroshima were both, in some sense, rationally planned. And it shudders to make one think-and this is Bettelheim's point-that the deployment of reason in the Camps was far from being a throwback to 'medieval irrationality' but, instead, a modern version of bureaucratic rationality taken to the extreme.
At a more mundane level, the reason one sees in the academy is more often than not awfully one-sided and shallow. And it is accompanied by the most insufferable pettiness and arrogance. Theoria, Jonas informs us, used to be thought in relation to "higher things"; now, just about anything can be brought within the circumference of the theoretical cast of mind. You have to ask yourself again: if this counts as intelligence then what of ignorance!
Can one really know something without loving it (Wendell Berry's acute question)?
If rationality becomes reduced to mere 'requirements'-such as logical consistency-then not only is it a very poor cousin of Reason; more: it is a dangerous, unmoored 'tool' in the hands of political demagogues. Goya: "The sleep of reason..." which can, undoubtedly, be read in two ways. One way lie the Gulags, the Camps, the great clearings of human settlements.
This is something of a caricature but to the extent that it is true there is much merit to it: The French follow Reason; the British follow, tentatively, the path of reasonableness.
There is a particular religious approach that dovetails with this set of attitudes, even thought it comes to it from a vastly different perspective. That approach, somewhat sceptical, mindful of our partial sight and limited capacities, must also embody humility: I do not know, I cannot know everything-and knowing isn't everything! In Muslim circles this is recognized by the well know refrain: "But God knows best".
Bellow has a nice line, too: Not the search for perfection (which is to follow Descartes); but an acceptance of an imperfect understanding, which is Jewish. I love that line. It reminds you immediately of his wonderful story, A Silver Dish...
'And it is in abstraction that Goethe saw the fatal loophole through which reason could escape into an illusory freedom from its commitments to what is of the senses, of feeling, of the will.'
This emancipation of reason from the totality of the human person.
What is our relation to the world, to nature, to other beings when reason becomes excessive, a "plaything for mathematics"? Does it dim our ability to attend with "spontaneous care to the duty of the day"?
"The living revelation of the unfathomable in the particular."
{Quotes from Heller's Disinherited Mind}
From where does this fanaticism of rationality come? Is it that when we lose the sense of first principles, final ends, what remains is a shadow of authentic reason, a purely mechanical and abstract version of thinking? I'm sure the firebombing of Tokyo or Hiroshima were both, in some sense, rationally planned. And it shudders to make one think-and this is Bettelheim's point-that the deployment of reason in the Camps was far from being a throwback to 'medieval irrationality' but, instead, a modern version of bureaucratic rationality taken to the extreme.
At a more mundane level, the reason one sees in the academy is more often than not awfully one-sided and shallow. And it is accompanied by the most insufferable pettiness and arrogance. Theoria, Jonas informs us, used to be thought in relation to "higher things"; now, just about anything can be brought within the circumference of the theoretical cast of mind. You have to ask yourself again: if this counts as intelligence then what of ignorance!
Can one really know something without loving it (Wendell Berry's acute question)?
If rationality becomes reduced to mere 'requirements'-such as logical consistency-then not only is it a very poor cousin of Reason; more: it is a dangerous, unmoored 'tool' in the hands of political demagogues. Goya: "The sleep of reason..." which can, undoubtedly, be read in two ways. One way lie the Gulags, the Camps, the great clearings of human settlements.
This is something of a caricature but to the extent that it is true there is much merit to it: The French follow Reason; the British follow, tentatively, the path of reasonableness.
There is a particular religious approach that dovetails with this set of attitudes, even thought it comes to it from a vastly different perspective. That approach, somewhat sceptical, mindful of our partial sight and limited capacities, must also embody humility: I do not know, I cannot know everything-and knowing isn't everything! In Muslim circles this is recognized by the well know refrain: "But God knows best".
Bellow has a nice line, too: Not the search for perfection (which is to follow Descartes); but an acceptance of an imperfect understanding, which is Jewish. I love that line. It reminds you immediately of his wonderful story, A Silver Dish...
'And it is in abstraction that Goethe saw the fatal loophole through which reason could escape into an illusory freedom from its commitments to what is of the senses, of feeling, of the will.'
This emancipation of reason from the totality of the human person.
What is our relation to the world, to nature, to other beings when reason becomes excessive, a "plaything for mathematics"? Does it dim our ability to attend with "spontaneous care to the duty of the day"?
"The living revelation of the unfathomable in the particular."
{Quotes from Heller's Disinherited Mind}
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