Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory by Martin Jay (review)

At the beginning of his academic career, Martin Jay discussed with Friedrich Pollock modernity's reduction of reason (following Max Weber) to scientific manipulation and control, i.e., to instrumental reason. Jay asked what the preferred, alternative form of reason might be. Pollock referred him to Frankfurt School founder Max Horkheimer's book, The Eclipse of Reason, but Jay was not satisfied. Over four decades later, Jay has provided his own narrative answer in Reason After Its Eclipse.

Jay's answer is not a theory, not a specific model of reason, but a rich intellectual history of Western ideas of reason, beginning with its birth out of myth and continuing down to the Frankfurt School attempts at resuscitation. The project has two parts. Part I, "The Ages of Reason," includes chapters on the Greeks to the Enlightenment, on Kant, on Hegel and Marx, and on the post-Marxian crisis of critique. Part II, "Reason's Eclipse and Return," covers the critique of instrumental reason by Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, ending with Habermas' neo-Kantian rationalism and its critics. Such a broad historical brush is not typical for discussions of critical theory (e.g., The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, The Blackwell's Handbook of Critical Theory), but proves useful for assessing the claim by Frankfurt Schoolers that the instrumental corruption of reason is inherent in the impulse to dominate from Homer on. For anyone curious about that long view, Jay's work is indispensable. As such, its details are too rich to summarize, although its broad contours say much about the approach.

Jay begins with the extrication of philosophy and science out of mythic thought, itself an ambivalent origin. Aristotle judged that fiction may convey more general truths than history. Still, Plato warned, since philosophy offers a more transparent access to reality, reason must shun myth. But the birth of reason would not be easy: "Even the most resolutely anti-mythic thinkers of the era appreciated the difficulty of expressing ideas and language utterly purged of narrative, allegory, and metaphor." In any case, the Greek watershed has proven impossible to escape, as Derrida acknowledged (3). In his rich account of this birth, Jay notes several key forks in the path. First, he contrasts the narrow church of reason—where reason is rigorously defined to exclude less disciplined avenues to knowledge—and a broad church of reason—where reason is expanded to accommodate marginal contenders. Second, reason may be conceived either noetically (think: intuitive grasp) or dianoetically (think: dialogue, dialectic). Far from being resolved by the ancients, these alternatives structure competing views of reason for the next two millennia.

The wedding of faith and reason in medieval culture did not so much reconstruct reason as subordinate it to faith until their contentious divorce in the modern period, after which reason attempted its autonomous selffulfillment. The narrow church of reason yielded modern Rationalism. Its practitioners believed that the world is not only fundamentally intelligible, but can be intuitively grasped as necessarily so, an ideal enshrined in Leibniz's "principle of sufficient reason," on which Jay sheds useful light as a pretext for Rationalism's metaphysical and epistemological overconfidence. When Leibniz's premise came to grief in Hume's skepticism about intuitive knowledge of causes, empirical concepts, and selfhood, Kant rehabilitated the ideal of necessary knowledge by supposing it to be part of the mind's construction of the world, salvaging epistemic confidence at the expense of much of traditional metaphysics. Jay's account of this episode is remarkable for its compression, clarity, and richness, paying respects to Kant's growth as well as to Kant's current commentators. Jay notes the importance of Kant's post-Humean reunification of reason with morality (an ideal of obvious importance to second generation Frankfurt School thought), even as Kant pluralized reason across his three Critiques (knowledge, morality, and aesthetic judgment). Jay's treatment of Hegel conveys the appeal of historicism, while not overlooking the difficulties posed by a teleology...