Reason serves humanity best when it attacks currently accepted notions of reason
Evidence
If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate - in short, the emancipation from fear - then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 763
Categorization
- DEFINE: Crisply captures the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s redefinition of enlightenment as emancipation from fear, not rational accumulation.
- DEEPTHINKING: This encapsulates the Frankfurt School’s dialectical reversal of enlightenment — reason against reason — in one dense aphorism.
- XREF: connects to: Reason adapts humans to power rather than unifying subject and object; Reason was originally conceived as a subversive power that transforms reality toward truth — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 487; Human freedom to begin new things resists the tyranny of logical deduction (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Reason was originally conceived as a subversive power that transforms reality toward truth
#corroborates(0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 487 - Philosophy’s task is resisting the status quo’s suggestive compulsion
#corroborates(0.85) - Kant located moral worth in reason’s autonomy from habit and inclination
#exemplifies(0.75) - Human freedom to begin new things resists the tyranny of logical deduction
#corroborates(0.72) - Escaping monologic reason requires replacing philosophy of consciousness with communicative rationality
#corroborates(0.72) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 383 - Life’s needs rather than independent reason determine what counts as truth
#qualifies(0.70) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 857 - Reason works as conscious projection that holds subject and object apart.
#qualifies(0.70)