Modern rationality has expanded until almost nothing remains genuinely irrational or incomprehensible
Evidence
My sense is that, particularly after the diffusion of psychoanalysis but also with the gradual evaporation of “otherness” on a shrinking globe and in a media-suffused society, very little remains that can be considered “irrational” in the older sense of “incomprehensible”: the vilest forms of human decision-making and behavior — torture by sadists and overt or covert foreign intervention by government leaders — are now for all of us comprehensible (in terms of a Diltheyan Verstehen, say), whatever we think of them. Whether such an enormously expanded concept of Reason then has any further normative value (as Habermas still thinks) in a situation in which its opposite, the irrational, has shrunk to virtual nonexistence, is another, and an interesting, question. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 590
Categorization
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: is this ‘evaporation of otherness’ thesis testable, and does it parallel the flattening of affect the reader needs to explain?
- DEEPTHINKING: This inverts the usual story of modernity as disenchantment — here it is the expansion of comprehensibility itself, and it directly sets up the postmodern loss of perspective/depth that follows.
- XREF: connects to: Prevailing rationality represses all values it cannot operationally validate. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 6; Rationality becomes irrational once its success opens new possibilities; Dussel saw modernity as carrying irrational processes hidden from itself (+8 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Prevailing rationality represses all values it cannot operationally validate. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 6; Rationality becomes irrational once its success opens new possibilities; Dussel saw modernity as carrying irrational processes hidden from itself (+8 more)
Broader Connections
- Modernity’s reflexivity makes its own rational grounds ultimately puzzling
#complicates(0.85) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 124 - Modernity’s self-image as rational depends on denying its own tacit metaphysics
#complicates(0.85) - Rationality emerges from taboo rules rather than rules arising from rational reflection
#complicates(0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 135 - Humans rationalize arbitrary customs as rational or biological after settling on them
#complicates(0.80) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 117 - Modern faith in rationality has itself become a secular theology
#complicates(0.78) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 966 - Irrationality arises from pushing rational self-interest to extremes.
#complicates(0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 33 - The rationality of art grows as society’s irrationality grows
#complicates(0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 832 - Treating people as rational can glorify their unfreedom
#complicates(0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 478