Philosophize this Flashcards
Consequences of reason: for and against reason/scientific method
early 20th century was filled with philosophers that had such a strong level of dissatisfaction with the legacy of the Enlightenment. That is: rationality, individualism and the scientific method as THE primary way of arriving at truth about things.
19th century with the philosopher Nietzsche
Nietzsche looks back on this moment in history and sees what the philosophers of the time did as an absolutely giant missed opportunity. Because, he says, hypothetically this was a moment when philosophers could have realized that one of the biggest problems with those faith based views of the world centered around the idea of religious certainty…was certainty.
What these thinkers DID, Nietzsche says, is throw out the religious certainty that caused them so many problems in the past and just changed the criteria for what makes something certain. RATIONALITY is now our path to certainty.
Rationality, to these critics, LEADS to cultural imperialism when applied at a societal level. Because if rationality is relative to the culture it’s being used in…and things like rational debates are the way that we determine political legitimacy…then what the goals of the Enlightenment produce are societies that appoint themselves as judge, jury and executioner of the rest of the world based on narrow parameters. Think about it: THEY get to decide the definition of what’s “rational” or “irrational” based on their own cultural makeup…and THEN they get to slap on their world police badge and be the moral arbiter of everyone else. The rest of the world constantly under this magnifying glass of their version of Rationality…the default way to view all other cultures becomes comparing them to this Rational ideal…how much do they deviate from the ideal society that WE’VE determined the values of? THAT becomes the new question when dealing with other cultures…knowing that if any point a culture becomes TOO “irrational” in how they set up their society…Rationality can ALSO become the justification for invading.
Rational analysis can CREATE values…because rational analysis always has cultural values embedded into it…but in order to justify any sort of values it needs to use the results of science…and modern science HAS to assume value neutrality. This became a big problem for modernity. This became the fate of science in the early 20th century political landscape. Science cannot provide us with any values on its own…the only thing it can do is serve as a tool… to justify values that are smuggled into it by culture…all while wearing that costume of value neutrality.
Beginning of the enlightenment
Enlightenment is often cited as the moment when Kant releases his famous essay titled What is Enlightenment?
Enlightenment as man’s removal of his self incurred tutelage. What he’s referring to is the tutelage of thousands of years of religious dogma. Later on in the essay he CHALLENGES the thinkers of his time to “dare to know” or “dare to think for yourselves” for once…in other words, we need another way OTHER than religious faith to be able to arrive at the truth about things, because faith, from these thinker’s perspectives has caused us a lot of problems historically.
Encourage to use reason instead of faith
The age of reason
This is the use of rational categories to make sense of things, proportioning our belief to the evidence, the political systems of the time take a strong turn towards the individual subject and mutually beneficial social contracts as opposed to teleologies or strict “roles” that people are supposed to play in a society.
Kierkegaard and discussion around limitations of classical rational thought
science and rationality during his time is supposedly producing some of the most comprehensive understanding of reality that we’ve ever had…but when it comes to certain aspects of what it means to be a human being…rationality just can not help you.
There is something about being a human being that’s lost when we’re using purely using rational analysis to try to explain it.
Professor LLoyd Kramer and time
The point is: when it comes to understanding the universe clocks might be the ultimate tool, but when it comes to understanding aspects of our human experience of the universe…the tool of rational analysis just cannot tell the full story.
Is science really telling us something about the truth? Richard Rorty
But on the other hand when philosophers started asking these questions about what we’re REALLY doing when we conduct science…what they started to realize is that there are aspects of science that are inextricably relative to the culture the science is produced in.
The best way I’ve ever seen this dynamic explained is by the philosopher Richard Rorty…so I’ll try to summarize his main points the best I can: think of the birth, existence and reproduction of scientific ideas the same way you would think about the birth, existence and reproduction of species in terms of Natural Selection.
So for thousands of years it was believed that the universe was designed by a Grand Designer…and there were many arguments philosophers had for this…not the least of which was just LOOK AROUND. How convenient that I drink water and there’s water around. That I exist in this very small range of temperatures and weather patterns, and that’s exactly what the world is around me. The point was: How could you NOT THINK this was a celestial hamster cage designed with your survival in mind? For thousands of years THAT WAS THE DEFAULT…sure, you had the sporadic thinker that came along and questioned it, but the onus was on THEM to prove why this theory had any merit that was so contrary to our deepest intuitions about reality.
Well you know the story: Natural Selection offered an alternative…this was a theory that explained how things could SEEM perfectly designed for the environments they were in, but the reality was just that all the beings that DIDN’T correspond with the environment died before reproducing.
Well scientific ideas exist in an environment as well. That is, the set of scientific and cultural biases that they were produced in. The scientific theories that correspond with these biases subsist, they’re rewarded with tenure, they may manage to reproduce.
There’s a sense in which if a slightly different culture had come to pass…the way we scientifically understand things would change as well. There’s a sense in which if a COMPLETELY different culture had come to pass…just as different creatures would have been able to gain tenure in a changed environment…a completely different way of scientifically categorizing the world could have emerged. So this in no way takes away from the utility of scientific ideas, but this does start to raise a very important question to the thinkers during the late 19th century…Rorty puts it this way:
“Are the longest lasting and most frequently relied upon theories stable because they match a stable reality? Or because scientists get together to keep them stable, as politicians get together to keep existing political arrangements intact?”
The bigger question that concerns this debate between these two groups: should thoughts be considered to be accessing the intrinsic structure of the universe simply because they correspond with human reason?
Human reason is always doing its work within the parameters of human ignorance. And that, human…that’s omnipresent throughout this whole process…is always subject… to cultural limitations. Just like we experience time and it’s not like we’re a bunch of giant clocks walking around…our experience of time is relative to the perspective of the observer…here are philosophers in the early 20th century saying that reason…and the criteria for what makes something reasonable or not are ALSO relative to the observer.
Because when reason becomes something that’s capitalized…then it becomes the standard against which every society is judged. See, to these critics…what happened at the beginning of the Enlightenment is we made this bold proclamation that the way to organize the relationship between government and citizen should be determined by reason. This marks a major shift not only in the way the western world typically structured their states, but also in how the citizen saw their role in the political process. This is the birth of the individual in modern western culture.
Rationalism when applied to the political process necessarily moves thinking towards a focus on the individual…and that it’s THIS SHIFT towards the individual person as the focal point that’s responsible for a centuries long progression of people becoming more and more narcissistic and self centered
