Abstract
It would surely be a gross understatement to say that the vocabulary of rationality has become problematized in the philosophical situation of our time. Admittedly, the question “What does it mean to be rational?” has been asked by the learned and the vulgar alike for some time; and it has been taken for granted that philosophers, both by disposition and training, are those best equipped to answer the question. Indeed, it could well be said that in the tradition the question “What does it mean to be rational?” has been indissolubly linked with the question “What does it mean to be a philosopher?” To do philosophy, it has been assumed, is to put into play, in a variety of ways, the claims of reason; and to be a philosopher is to take on the mantle of the guardianship of rationality.
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Notes
Although Heidegger dearly had much to do with the currency of “the end of philosophy” thematic [see particularly Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973)1, in more recent times the thematic has received variegated expressions in the academy. One is reminded particularly of the collection of essays under the title After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, eds., (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), the first printing of which was sold out three months after its publication.
Trans. by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987).
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
New York: Verso Press, 1987.
The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Volume One, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Volume two, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
“But whereas Habermas thinks that the cultural need which ‘the philosophy of the subject’ gratified was and is real, and can perhaps be fulfilled by his own focus on a ‘communication community,’ I would urge that it is an artificial problem created by taking Kant too seriously. On this view, the wrong turn was taken when Kant’s split between science, morals, and art was accepted as a donnée, as die massgebliche Selbstauslegung der Moderne.”, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), p. 167.
“Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodemity,” p. 173.
The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957), p. 39.
Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans Rosemary Sheed (Penguin Books, 1984), p. 22.
Molecular Revolution, p. 18.
David James Miller has provided an illuminating account of the interplay of “critique” and “criterion” in the originative Greek notion of krino (kpww), which carries the related senses of “picking out”, “separating”, “puffing asunder”, “distinguishing”, “deciding”, “judging”, and “assessing” as these notions play in the actual context of life within the polis and its requirement for concrete deliberation and action. See his “Immodest Interventions” in Phenomenological Inquiry, Volume 11, 1987.
Charles Taylor has paid particular attention to the articulatory function of reason in his effort to think beyond the foundationalism of the modem epistemological paradigm, and specifically as it was illustrated in the thought of Husserl. “But if we purge Husserl’s formulation of the prospect of a ‘final foundation’ where absolute apodicticity would at last be won, if we concentrate merely on the gain for reason in coming to understand what is illusory in the modern epistemological project and in articulating the insights about us that flow from this, then the claim to have taken the modern project of reason a little farther, and to have understood our forbearers a little better than they understood themselves, isn’t so unbelievable. What reflection in this direction would entail is already fairly well known. If involves, first, conceiving reason differently, as including—alongside the familiar forms of the Enlightenment—a new department, whose excellence consists in our being able to articulate the background of our lives perspicuously,” “Overcoming Epistemology” in After Philosophy, pp. 480–81.
See particularly his essay “Interpretation and the Science of Man,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol XXV, No. 1, Issue 97, 1971.
Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 4.
“Overcoming Epistemology,” p. 481.
This thin sense of the historical comes to the fore in the Dialogues of Claire Parnet and Gilles Deleuze. “Future and past don’t have much meaning, what counts is the present-becoming: geography and not history, the middle and not the beginning or the end, grass which is in the middle and which grows from the middle and not trees which have a top and roots,” Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habherjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 23. The pulverization of the present into an evanescent “present-becoming” precludes any full-bodied sense of historical presence as the chronotopal intersection of a reclaimed past and an anticipated future.
Kai Nielsen has developed a quite similar approach to the issue at hand in his strategy of “wide reflective equilibrium,” which I would consider to be another way of stating the dynamics of transversal rationality. For Nielsen, “wide reflective equilibrium” basically falls out as an amalgamation of a non-foundationalist, Rortyian, pragmatic reflection with a Habermasian critical theory of society developed along the lines of emancipatory interests. See particularly his artide, “Searching for an Emancipatory Perspective: Wide Reflective Equilibrium and the Hermeneutical Circle,” in Evan Simpson, ed., Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning (Edmonton, AB: Academic Press, 1987). Nielsen gets maximum mileage out of the vocabulary of “shuttling back and forth” and “rebuilding the ship at sea.” These well-placed metaphors enable him to articulate what we would call the transversal play of beliefs and practices across both a retentional and protentional field, as well as to highlight the nautical-like character of our philosophical travels, making do with what we have on board in transit. “We shuttle back and forth between considered convictions, moral principles, ethical theories, social theories, and other background empirical theories and those considered judgments (at least some of which must be distinct from the initial cluster of considered judgments) that are associated with or are constitutive of or partially constitutive of the moral principles, social theories or other background theories. (The association will be such that they are standardly appealed to in justifying those principles or theories.) In such shuttling we sometimes modify or even abandon a particular considered conviction; at other times we abandon or modify a moral principle or come to adopt some new principles; and sometimes (though of course very rarely) we modify or evan abandon a social theory or other background or even come to construct a new one. We move back and forth—rebuilding the ship at sea—modifying and adjusting here and there until we get a coherent and consistent set of beliefs. When we have done that, then we have for a time attained wide reflective equilibrium,” Anti- Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning, pp. 148–49.
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Schrag, C.O. (1994). Transversal Rationality. In: Stapleton, T.J. (eds) The Question of Hermeneutics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7_4
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