[A-List] Re: Substance and rationality -- A-List digest, Vol 1 #311

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It would have been good to hear Gunder or Lou on "Western" rationality.
Robert's philosophical background information is impressive, and it would be
good to hear more on the Shiva / Vishnu relationship, and the many debates
Robert alludes to.  The dispute between Kant and Herder (and Jakobi, and
Hamann) is that between the German enlightenment (more religiously oriented
than the Anglo-French Enlightenment, and already influenced by the
romanticism of Rousseau) and romanticism.

The bourgeois mechanistic, positivist, atomist, individualist and hedonist
Anglo-French Enlightenment saw (human) nature as the war of all against all;
rationality consisted in enlightened self-interest, that is, deferment of
immediate gratification for more long-term profit by the pursuit of
contractual commercial relationships in politics and economics.

Romanticism was an attempt to return to an older tradition of spiritual
enlightenment -- an account of rationality (the human mind's criteria of
validity) found in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics.  Its nature gets a
distorted hearing at the midwinter traders' festival of Christmas, and its
name on Valentine's Day.  The conduct of the rest of the year is reason --
working for a living, exploiting, pursuing the nation-state's interest, etc.

The imperialist imposition of Anglo-French Enlightenment on the rest of the
world (the white man's burden) gave rise to the concept of "Western
rationality" against a range of obscurantisms from primitivism to
Orientalism.  The  Liberal imperialist Weber saw rational religion as
Protestantism, economics as capitalism and politics as bureaucracy; he
embraced them but also saw them as a groundless (irrational!) choice, and
one which had become an iron carapace.  The Frankfurt School developed such
thinking into their concept of a "dialectic of the Enlightenment", the
transformation over time of [bourgeois] reason into its opposite.

Robert is right to say that reason is one and indivisible; but the word has
been stretched to cover everything from logic and mathematics to the
Anglo-French Enlightenment (light being a metaphor for reason).  Hence the
problem for Sabri, Tariq, Michael  and me.

Marx hoped that one day "there will be none but reasonable relations between
human beings".  Every day would be Christmas.

The first chapter of a book of mine on the subject (_Deals and Ideals: Two
Concepts of Enlightenment_, London, Greenwich Exchange, 2000) can be read at

http://www.greenex.co.uk/philosophy/deals.html


James Daly
james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx