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Transrationalism
The conviction that the human being is a Darwinian product that has developed a consciousness for the sake of her own survival and not in order to be able to logically grasp the world as a whole. All rationality must therefore comprise the insight of rationality’s own built-in limitation. See, by way of comparison, rationalism and the principle of explanatory closure.
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.
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.
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.
According to Hegel, absolute knowledge is nothing other than the fundamental and historically necessary insight that reason is always relegated to a framework within which it must be limited. For Hegel, absolute knowledge is a metaknowledge, an historical consummation of epistemology, which comes down to a humble insight into its necessary built-in limitations. Transrationalism leads to paradoxism, which gets its clearest expression in the Hegelian subject’s insight into its own illusory foundation. The paradoxist subject appears before itself as the starting point and centre of existence, but at the same time is a gaping empty hole; an illusion that arises as a by-product of language and the small child’s need to eternalise, to divide itself and its surrounding world into delimited, cohesive phenomena.
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 foundation for this transrationalism – the conviction that rationality only functions within those areas where it is possible, and that critical thinking must be fully conscious of and discount this limitation in its world view – is laid with the Renaissance and Romanticism to then be consummated with syntheism. This means that syntheism’s connection to its previous sister epochs is cultural rather than epistemological. In addition, there is a strongly pragmatist connection: We humans are our actions just as much as we are our thoughts. To be a syntheist is to act based on one’s richest knowledge of the state of existence, but it is above all to always dare to act, and then draw valuable conclusions from this truth as an act. Or to personify syntheist activism: its heart does not get its nourishment from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s rationalist idealism, but from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Romantic pragmatism. We act with an open, contingent and indeterministic future as the backdrop; a backdrop that we can know a lot about, but never everything, before we act. And in this situation, we honestly have no more reliable resource to use than intuitive reason, the ideal of the Renaissance and Romanticism.
Syntheism takes the logic connected to the subject’s pathological origin to its utmost limit. For if it is a pathological necessity for us to consider ourselves as subjects in order to be able to understand ourselves as agents, we must also admit our pathological need to establish phenomenal objects in existence in relation to this subjectivity – our respective subjects as fellow humans are of course each other’s objects to start with – and the optimal object has of course historically speaking always been God. There is thus nothing wrong with or even particularly remarkable about talking about God as an actual phenomenon; not as long as we regard God as a borrowed illusion in the existential equation in the same way and with the same importance as we talk about the ego. God is neither more nor less than the name of the empty backdrop against which the equally empty ego constructs its more or less functional fantasy world filled with fabricated meaning. This is ultimately the way in which we create meaning: we invent it, we create fictions around which we weave meaningful stories, which then form the basis for all human values. There is thus no deeper human activity than play. Even the best science is based on a playful attitude to the mysteries of existence rather than some kind of strict logic. Here we return to transrationalism: Logic follows strictly on from play, not the other way around.
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.
The truth about existence is so deep, so complex, so multifaceted, that it is impossible to reach, since it lies infinitely far from the outermost limit of Man’s perception and the power of mankind’s imagination (designed by the process of evolution for functional orientation in our environment, not for revealing the truth), on the other side of the border to psychosis. This means that quite irrespective of whether Man likes it or not, he is forced to outsource the deepest truth to theological mysticism. For what is the concept of God seen at the deepest level, if not the ultimate truth about existence which Man, with his mental limitations, never can reach? We therefore place the deepest truth with Syntheos, the God that we create based on the insight into our mental limitations, and we place it in the open-ended future, while at the same time we generate both scientific and existential truths through our actions. The truth as an act is not just the most important principle within ethics; according to transrationalism it is also the only possible truth within epistemology.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58