The Gathering of Reason: Second Edition

Introduction

1. Reason—the very word now bespeaks crisis, failure of every available sense to fulfill what cannot but be intended. The crisis is radical, for in every other instance reason would serve as that to which recourse would be had in order to isolate and resolve crisis, in order to open up and appropriate a fulfilling sense. Even to thematize the conceptuality of crisis is already to lay claim in deed to a certain resolution of the crisis of reason—that is, such crisis withdraws, renders provisional, the very possibility of its being thematized as such. The crisis is so radical that even this schema itself, that of crisis, has been emptied in such fashion as to accommodate almost anything that becomes somehow problematic; the schema of crisis has itself entered upon a crisis. Recourse to reason in the face of crisis (to use this schema provisionally ) is a strategy deeply embedded in the Western tradition. More precisely, it defines the turning by which this tradition was founded and subsequently constituted. The founding turn is traced in the Platonic dialogues—most openly, in that swan song sung by Socrates in the Phaedo in hope of charming away fear in the face of death, the absolute crisis. Among the Socratic incantations there is one in which Socrates, looking back into himself, back into his past, away from death, retraces the way to philosophy: he tells of how he began with a wondrous desire for the wisdom to be had by investigating natural things, of how, disillusioned, he turned in vain to the teachings of Anaxagoras, of how finally he came to set out on a “second sailing in search of causes.” This second sailing, the founding turn of the tradition, Introduction 1 commenced through a turning away from the immediately present, in which Socrates foresaw a threat of blindness: fearing that he might suffer such misfortune as befalls those who look at the sun during an eclipse, fearing that his soul might be blinded should he look directly at things with his eyes, he decided, as he tells his interlocutors, that he “must have recourse to ó and examine in them the truth of beings.”1 In the tradition thus founded, the Socratic recourse to óo was translated into a recourse to ratio, reason. The translation served to establish the recourse in a definitive course: Withdrawal from the immediately present for the sake of a reappropriation of those beings in their truth became a matter of recourse from the sensible ( ò ’ ó) to the intelligible ( ò o ó). Through recourse to reason the shallowness of inarticulate immersion in the immediate and particular was replaced by the depth and comprehensiveness of theoretical knowledge. Man was translated into rational animal. Today that translation has become radically questionable. It is not primarily a matter of man’s now proving resistant to the translation, not a matter of a contemporary testimony to an inevitable resurgence of irrationality. On the contrary, contemporary man, technological man, attests to an insistent rationality of unprecedented consistency, reconfirms the translation through the pervasive rationalization of all sectors of human life. What has become questionable in the highest degree is not the rationalization of man but rather the very rationality that defines that translation; it is reason itself that has come into question , that has become suspect. The juridical metaphor is appropriate— or rather, its very inappropriateness serves to announce the abyss opened up by the crisis of reason: Reason, previously constituting the tribunal before which all disputes, all differences, were to be resolved, is itself in dispute, appears to harbor difference within itself; it is itself to be summoned before a tribunal and required to give proof of its identity against the charge that it is sheer prejudice, a mask for other interests . But the very demand for proof—to say nothing of the demand for resolution of difference—is inconceivable apart from reason, and the possibility of a sufficiently detached judgment and resolution is threatened from the very moment the summons is issued to reason. Could reason ever be so detached from itself as to be capable of constituting its own tribunal? Can such distance ever be opened up within reason?2 2 THE GATHERING OF REASON Without suppressing the difference, one may nonetheless discern in the Platonic-Socratic turn an image of the crisis of reason. Even before the translation into reason, the profound ambivalence that haunts all recourse to óo...