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Rationalism
The conviction that Man is born with the capacity to mentally and intellectually understand and embrace the world logically in its entirety. Interestingly enough rationalism offers no logic for its own basic assumption: that the world can be grasped and understood through logic. See, by way of comparison, transrationalism.
After Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s revolution, rationalism, blind faith in man’s ability to solve all the mysteries of life through his reasoning, had to be replaced by transrationalism, a rationality that realises its own limitations as an intersubjective discourse within the phenomenology that mankind is reduced to (see The Global Empire). For rationalism is based on a logical ‘optical’ illusion: within itself rationality is consistent and looks convincing. However, the problem is that when rationality is viewed from outside, it falls down completely since it is not founded on anything that in itself is rational, it is based only on blind faith and nothing else. Kant’s problem is that he wanted to place rationality above reason, but he never succeeded in stating logically how this would be possible. Kantian rationalism is thus not founded on anything other than Kant’s own highly personal, autistic temperament. Blaise Pascal argues for a transrationalist epistemology as early as the 17th century, long before Kant, but it was not until the American and European pragmatists at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century that transrationalism acquired its formulation in detail.
When the Enlightenment eliminates God as the cohesive factor for metaphysics – either, as the deists do, by anaesthetising Him, or as the atheists do, by killing Him off – the focus is shifted onto the individual, the idea of Man himself as the existential atom and the very cornerstone of existence and the social model. Thus, metaphysics no longer allows any angels who come to prophets to hand down the truth, which is already perfectly formulated by God, from God to Man. Man must instead construct his own metaphysics, and Man reckons that this is best done by deriving the truth directly from his/her own lifeworld, by basing a world view on empirical facts and defending it with logical arguments. However, this ambition requires in itself an unfounded and illogical faith in Man’s innate ability to take in and understand all of life with his limited intellect and imperfect access to information. This blind faith is rationalism – the irrational core of individualist metaphysics that gives the individual divine qualities. The individual is made into a being that suddenly grasps, comprehends and has mastered absolutely everything in her own wishful thinking.
Everything that deviates from capitalism’s two human ideals – different forms of the capitalist himself as master and different forms of the factory worker as slave – is branded as an expression of psychological disease that must be remedied or, in the worst case, eliminated altogether from the social body (with Nazism’s and Stalinism’s mass purges during the 20th century as an entirely logical consequence of this reasoning). This is because capitalism’s industries not only necessitate demands for a constantly increasing level of education among the general public, but also the medical treatment of a steady stream of newly created psychopathologies as a normatively necessary practice. In their study Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno show how this constantly growing production of pathology ultimately degenerates into skull measuring and the race theories of the Nazis and the Fascists in the 20th century. Fascism and Nazism are, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, quite simply rationalism taken to its ultimate conclusion. With blind faith as a foundation, one can place on top of it any logic at all; sooner or later the result will always be socially (self-)destructive madness.
According to Kant and his followers, rationalism is a necessary linchpin in individualist mythology. Individualism requires blind faith in Man’s own thinking – given time and necessity – being able to understand and solve all the world’s riddles and problems. While rationalism does accept that the individual is not omnipotent today, for the individual is evidently a mortal being, but with the individual’s omnipotence – since she actually is a latent god – according to rationalism, the solution to the problem can only be a matter of time. From the early 19th century onwards, individualist metaphysics becomes as conveniently as it is effectively self-fulfilling: individualism is proclaimed from the universities, and at the same universities, professors and researchers are also organised as individuals, encased in increasingly specialised subject area atoms, where they devote their days to quoting one another within closed coteries under the pretext that they are engaging in some sort of objectively true knowledge production. And as long as one stays within the mythology of individualist metaphysics – and why wouldn’t you, if you are part of the elite that reap the full rewards of it – it is hard to see the individualised human being in relation to the atomised world in any other way. The external signals that interfere with the generally held mythology are of course immediately removed by the system itself.
Evolution is quite simply such a strong and captivating metaphor for many of the 19th century’s intellectuals that they very much want to make it the fundamental ethical principle, as if it were the task of the righteous in some bizarre way to speed up a history whose development is of course anyway preordained according to their own determinist conviction. For Marx, the Communist revolution of the proletariat, for example, is a deed that he must command his readers and disciples to carry out, in spite of the fact that, according to his own view, it will take place anyway because of the historical necessity that he himself and Friedrich Engels describe in their writings. In a similar manner, Comte regards his social evolutionism as so perfect that strangely enough he wants to turn it into a secular religion. Social evolutionary ideas continue to thrive in Europe up until the mass murders of Nazism and Stalinism around the mid-20th century. Then, if not before, the danger of arguing for a militant ethics based on a vulgar natural determinism and driven by alienation’s ressentiment rather than by religion’s search for benevolent dialogue with one’s fellow man, becomes manifest. In this way the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century are the dark flip side of the Enlightenment. Rationalism without consciousness of its own fundamental blind faith is, as Habermas’ gurus Horkheimer and Adorno show in Dialectic of Enlightenment, literally lethal for humanity.
Because totalism separates the soul from the body, it considers itself able to neutralise the soul and make it independent and reliable, disconnected from the body’s many chaotic, emotional storms and unpredictable whims. The soul thus becomes a command centre for pure thought and it rewards the human being with a kind of chic essence. Rationalism is thus also an essentialism. This essence is of course not just constant throughout life; it also makes the soul immortal. Thereby the rationalists can construct social ideologies without interruption, according to which obedient and subservient slaves are rewarded with a life after death, as free-floating souls without ties to their corruptible and despised bodies.
Rationalism is based around the idea that the human mind can process information about its surroundings to such an extent that nothing in it need appear the least bit mysterious or inexplicable to the mind. Everything can be experienced, everything can be understood. As long as the human being gets the time needed to process her sensory impressions and organise them logically, everything can be incorporated and appraised, and none of all this that is incorporated and appraised will ever be contradicted by any other conclusions that reason gets to think through to the end. However, the problem is that rationalism per se is not grounded in any kind of reason, but instead in a sort of quasi-religious wishful thinking and a blind faith that does not permit any criticism whatsoever. There is not even any reason at all behind the belief that the soul should be able to exist independently of the body. The independence of the soul is rather a product of the agrarian society’s need to be able to hold all its members accountable in relation to the rapidly expanding and successively ever-more powerful law.
The syntheist response to rationalism does not entail any flight back to the irrational. It instead continues dialectically to transrationalism: the idea that reasoning first and foremost must embrace the insight of one’s own built-in limitations in relation to one’s environment. Man is a highly limited creature in both time and in space, and moreover completely dependent on the strictly limited quantity of sensory impressions he has the time to assimilate from a rapidly expanding universe where much more information is produced every moment than any active participant, let alone any passive observer, ever has the time to process. Existence is literally rushing away from the human being; it does not lie down obediently, neatly packaged in his narcissistic bosom, ripe for consumption.
Just like syntheism, as a whole transrationalism and its basic condition can be viewed as both a logical deduction and a historical conclusion. There is no rational foundation per se for naturally limited human rationality to ever have the capacity to comprehend everything in a constantly expanding universe. Plato’s and Kant’s variants of rationality get caught in their own trap; they are both per se founded on a blind faith and not on any kind of rationality. Humanity has repeatedly surrendered itself to rationalism as a social ideology, but the results are frightening. Sooner or later, rationalism – in spite of considerable achievements in civilisation – invariably degenerates into totalitarian utilitarianism. Therefore Plato is quite correct in claiming that a consistently practised rationalism must develop into a dictatorship. Anything else is impossible.
Monotheistic fundamentalism is the religious version of the Enlightenment’s rationalist fantasy. Note how the sectarian leaders who want to maintain their superiority vis-à-vis the rest of humanity always position themselves as the enlightened. Monotheistic fundamentalism is a rash and furious ratio, literally founded on an idiotic divinity that lacks a raison d’être, where this ratio is frenetically maintained by the practitioner’s manic conviction that he himself would disintegrate and be annihilated if he really were to recognise God’s non-existence. This explains why the fundamentalist does not care whether he lives or dies (which makes him such a resolute terrorist, frustratingly difficult to defend oneself against). The threat to the fundamentalist’s fantasy is not physical death, but the disintegration of blind faith. So what is this, if not theological rationalism in its purest form?
Kant is thus right about factiality, things might be completely different from how things stand for the moment. But Kant’s rationalism – his blind faith that everything that occurs is subordinate to a divine wisdom, and that his own human ratio is fully sufficient to embrace everything that happens given time – results in his never developing this factiality fully and not drawing the inevitable conclusion. It is thus Kant’s unfounded rationalism which forces him into determinism, not the other way around. Therefore the relationalists must also leave Kant behind and seek other allies in the history of philosophy. The syntheist Quentin Meillassoux finds such an allied thinker in the empiricist David Hume – one of Kant’s strongest rivals in the 18th century – not least for the reason that Hume provides support for the conviction that one and the same material and existential vantage point can give rise to an infinite number of different outcomes. Existence outside the correlation in question is neither stable nor fixed and therefore philosophy cannot in all honesty pretend that this is the case. Hume and Meillassoux are thereby joined in a strong factiality, from which Meillassoux constructs the philosophical school that goes under the name speculative materialism.
The eternalist world view exists because the human being needs it: physics on the other hand manages splendidly without eternalism in our mobilist Universe. The perception process transforms the mobilist field into an eternalised thing. The abstract thing thus does not exist in an ontic sense, it must instead be understood as a kind of concrete field. Evolution has conveniently developed perception into a highly efficient information prioritisation mechanism, rather than into the ontological truth producer that Kantian rationalism in its superstitiousness desires it to be. It is thus the perception that freezes the concrete field in space–time and decodes it as a delimited fictive. The key word here is intensity. A phenomenon is mainly a kind of noumenal intensity. The higher the activity and complexity within a concrete field, the higher the intensity. The physicists Julian Barbour and Lee Smolin have defined complexity in a physical sense as multiplicity. The greater the difference within a subsystem, the greater the variation. Self-organised systems organise energy flows as feedback loops, for both positive and negative feedback. Thereafter it is simply a case of multiplying the variation by the activity in order to be able to calculated the intensity of the phenomenon in question.
After all, we live in a mobilist Universe, and thus relationalism is the only possible way forward towards a deeper understanding of existence, however difficult and complicated that path may seem. Pantheos offers no incentive whatsoever in terms of making it simple for us in the way that rationalism in all its forms would like to believe. No incentives whatsoever can exist in a state of bounty, since an incentive by definition requires a scarcity. Rather, physics only becomes more and more complex the more deeply we delve into it. And why would Pantheos want to have it any other way? God apparently loves to play hide-and-seek. The only theory of everything that stands the test of time is therefore the relationalist metalaw which says that eternally valid theories of everything are in principle impossible. When the physicists’ megalomaniac boyhood dreams of the great unified theory of everything thus collapses in the face of the ruthless principle of explanatory closure, this is where the syntheists take over and enthusiastically pick up the only reasonable ethical imperative that remains: Go with the flow!
The concept of information stress is not particularly old, but with the advent of informationalism we have been forced to relate to this phenomenon and create strategies for managing it to some extent and preserving at least an illusion of overview and control. This means that our only possibility of embracing the world as a whole under informationalism arises if we complement the ontic relationalism for the natural sciences with ontological relationalism.html">social relationalism for the social sciences. We are now being forced to realise that we are not only constantly forced to eternalise the mobilist world around us in order to make it understandable and manageable (see The Global Empire), but that in addition our new eternalisations on top of our earlier eternalisations – because of the explosive expansion of the Universe and the sheer quantity of information – are constantly being moved further and further away from the fundamental mobilist ontics of existence. This insight means that we are reduced to trying to manage our relations with both the surrounding world and ourselves, our own identity as ethical creatures, through transrationalism – and with the starting point in a conception of existence as an open entirety, not through rationalism based on a conception of existence as a closed logical construction in all its constituent parts.
It is Hegel who digs the Cartesian subject’s grave. His logic is a redoubled contingency. His rationality is a redoubled irrationality. Hegel’s most brilliant insight lies in that thinking starts and ends with paradox and inconsistency. Thinking is nothing other than a production of problems; it is only activated at all when it is confronted with enigmas. Hegel’s stroke of genius is the insight that knowledge reaches its absolute limit, is transformed into what Hegel dramatically calls absolute knowledge, just when it understands and acknowledges its own built-in limitations. Hegel thereby pokes holes in rationalism; the blind faith in the scope of human logic as the foundation for epistemology, which his predecessors Spinoza and Kant cultivate and celebrate. Hegel instead opens the door to transrationalism, the idea that Man’s thinking is founded on his conditions for survival and based on an extremely narrow perspective, as a contingent phenomenon without any chance of being able to embrace and comprehend in advance the enormity of existence.
Hegel’s role as a magnificently emergent phenomenon in the history of philosophy all of his own is difficult to overestimate. He realises that it is in the oscillation between the experience of an intense being and being convinced of one’s own non-existence that the paradoxist subject resides. Hegel’s transrationalist understanding of the existential experience sounds the death knell for the jewel in rationalism’s crown, the Cartesian subject. Hegel bases his transrationalism on an epistemological necessity: no truth is ever complete in a contingent universe. The stronger an emotional truth experience is, the more clearly it is revealed that it is based upon a kind of mystical, hidden core of epistemic incompleteness that the truth experience intensely tries to conceal precisely through a desperate overemotionality (compare with the fervour of the newly-saved sect member).
The current rewriting of history enables the individualist epoch to be viewed with new, more critical eyes. For example, capitalism is exposed as the tyranny of numerical slavery par excellence. The deeper we delve into its exploitative nature, both ideologically and historically, the more clearly capitalism’s obsessive fixation with finally being able to mathematise all human thoughts and activities into a sum of dollars, a number of votes or a series of orgasms, emerges. No one illustrates this better than the American economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Gary Becker, who in his work reduces all human activities to a kind of constantly ongoing rational calculation of utility. His work is about a consummate capitalist logic that takes Becker all the way into people’s bedrooms and places of worship – according to him, even an act of sexual intercourse is nothing other than a calculated, selfish utilitarian venture worked out in advance. What Becker thereby reveals about the seat of his own ideology is how rationalism, individualism, utilitarianism and – in all cases calculating and profit-maximising – capitalism really are one and the same ideology. Becker quite simply takes the Kantian paradigm and its isolated, compulsively colonising, patriarchal subject to the end of the road. And there he finds nothing other than an eternally empty calculator, grinding away.
This means that syntheism is capitalism’s antithesis. It is not superficially and merely formally anti-capitalist, such as the capitalist ideologies socialism and conservatism with their saccharine dreams of a controlled, top-down market – as though a pragmatic domestication of capital really would be able to affect alienation; rather, historical experience says that it is the other way around. No, syntheist anti-capitalism is deeply and genuinely radical on account of its being seated in theological anarchism. The syntheist reply to capitalism’s pillaging is not to start an anti-capitalist, bloody revolution with dramatic riots on the streets – after which the system would in any case soon re-emerge, insignificantly modified, since it de facto emanates in an emergent way from our age’s specific information technology structure. Such an ambition is indefensibly naive and belongs more in the Enlightenment’s patriarchal rationalism than in syntheism’s relationalist renaissance. The logically consequential, syntheist response to late capitalism and its hyperalienation is – as the syntheist philosopher Simon Critchley writes in The Faith of The Faithless – not the pretentious revolution, but instead the discrete subtraction.
Rational thinking perceives intuition as magic. That which seemingly functions intuitively is regarded by rationality as something magical and fundamentally incomprehensible. Since religion respects and is partly based on intuition, religion cannot either be regarded as anything other than magic by narrowly limited rationality. Rationalism’s standard accusation against transrationalism is therefore to dismiss it as a bag of magical tricks – or quite simply as pure superstition. But what was magic yesterday is technological reality today. It is sufficient to study the four epoch-making information-technology paradigm shifts in history in order to conclude that this is the case. So while it is cynical to wish, on the other hand longing is a utopian act. And seen historically, longing for the utopia that today appears magically unrealistic is more of an expression of highly sensible forward planning.
If the truth is an act that generates an event, the genuine event creates a new truth. The truth event is followed by a decision that is followed by a loyalty vis-à-vis the decision about the truth. Aside from this there is no truth beyond the event. Here Badiou breaks radically with Karl Popper’s obsession with verification as the guarantor of truth. Badiou argues that verifications take decades to construct and that the proponents of truth wisely enough never wait for the verification before they act on the basis of the truth. He thus defends an active truth concept vis-à-vis Popper’s extremely reactive truth concept. He then divides up the development of the truth event into four phases which we go through, both as dividual truth actors and as an historical collective.
1. The revelation of the truth event.
2. The denial of the event as the truth.
3. The repression of the event as truth.
4. The resurrection the truth as the event.
But what happens to rationalism’s idea of truth as the correct assertion about existence? Like all other forms of transrationalism from Hegel onwards, syntheism does not deny that such a deepest truth about existence actually exists. But the enormous complexity in such a deepest truth, and the insufficiency of language and thought when it comes to even getting close to it, makes it unattainable. However not in the Kantian sense – where the noumenal object ends up outside our horizon because the phenomenal object gets in the way – but instead as a considerably more radical consequence of transfinite mathematics.
1. The revelation of the truth event.
2. The denial of the event as the truth.
3. The repression of the event as truth.
4. The resurrection the truth as the event.
But what happens to rationalism’s idea of truth as the correct assertion about existence? Like all other forms of transrationalism from Hegel onwards, syntheism does not deny that such a deepest truth about existence actually exists. But the enormous complexity in such a deepest truth, and the insufficiency of language and thought when it comes to even getting close to it, makes it unattainable. However not in the Kantian sense – where the noumenal object ends up outside our horizon because the phenomenal object gets in the way – but instead as a considerably more radical consequence of transfinite mathematics.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58