In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ix Preface We are rational animals, creatures endowed with reason. Yet our lives often seem irrational. We live lives of superstition, of faith, of fear, of nationalism, and reason often seems to be something we leave to those we think of as having more time or more education than we do. I grew up in two worlds: a world in which people had little time or money for formal education, where street smarts were more important than book smarts, and where you had to be careful not to let a black cat cross the street in front of you, and another world of books, imagination , and college-preparatory education with the idea that I would become a priest, one of those who, at least in my neck of the woods, were the smart ones. When I discovered Voltaire and the Enlightenment in high school, I found a world of promise, of hope for humanity based in the full development of human reason for everyone. Voltaire’s cry of Écrasez l’infâme stirred me, though not against the Church. A friend of mine in graduate school said he wanted a bumper sticker that read, “I’ll let prayer in school when you let thinking in your church.” I learned how to think in and through the Church, always challenged by priests and nuns, always challenged by the educators in my Catholic high school to think through things. Yet every day that I walked to school or to church, I witnessed the idiocy of our world: the poor and homeless, the hungry, people needing jobs in an era of cutting. We still lived under the imminent threat of nuclear war in the 1980s—not that we drilled for nuclear bombs, but we perceived the threat in the movies and stories we had. The infamy Voltaire warned against consisted in the prejudice and superstition and fear that I saw so much in the everyday world. Preface x The present work has its roots deep in that experience of confronting an irrational world while being educated to believe that reason should direct our lives, that reason is the higher faculty of the human person. It arises from the fear found in Voltaire’s “The Story of a Good Brahmin,” in which a Brahmin, passing a poor woman doing her laundry , notices that she seems happier than he is, and wonders if it is because he is overeducated. Does reason lead, in the end, to happiness or to misery? Through the years of studying philosophy, of being awakened to the satire of Monty Python, of learning politics and then learning about social justice and about the challenges of those like Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault to the twentieth-century world, the question of reason and happiness stayed with me. It took the form of the question of “enlightenment”: does reason lead to a better, more just world? This book says little of happiness, but it does address the failure of reason in modernity to bring about a just society, a society in which people can attain fulfillment. I argue that we rely too heavily on a conception of rationality that is divorced from tradition and, therefore, incapable of judging ends. Without the ability to judge ends, we cannot debate about the good life or the proper goods we as individuals and we as a society should pursue. I argue, in short, that the project of enlightenment failed because it was based on a deformed notion of reason as mere rationality, and that a critical theory of society aimed at human emancipation must turn to substantive reason, a reason constituted by and constitutive of tradition. Substantive reason comprises thinking about and acting on the set of standards and beliefs within a particular tradition. “Reason” names a set of social practices that involve the asking for and giving of reasons, the evaluation of those reasons and the asking for and giving of such, and, importantly, the evaluation of the good. It is the complete inability of enlightenment rationality to evaluate ends and the ability of substantive reason to evaluate ends that make the one unsuitable and the other suitable for a critical theory of society. The argument remains committed to the promise of reason to help individuals achieve a good and just society and a good life. It requires, however, a complete revolution in the way we approach social life at every level. It ends with some suggestions of what work is required to begin that...

Share