Förnuftet känner inga gränser

"For reason, there is nothing beyond, as there is in a mere opposition of the understanding, because in speaking of a beyond reason is already encompassing this beyond, which is within reason and not beyond it. In this Hegel was right, for in thinking of anything as beyond something else, even if this something be the whole of what is finite, one is already thinking of two sides and of either side as caught up with its opposite through some infinite that is neither this side nor that side, neither here nor beyond, but simply all-encompassing. There is no going beyond this true infinite, since going beyond it is always still only reinventing it. Reason, in its own infinite movement, is always already beyond any attempt to set any limits beyond which it cannot go. [...]

There is no way of setting a limit, because reason is always already beyond that limit in its encompassing movement. What we have demonstrated, however, at the end of metaphysics, is the existence of, or rather the necessity of affirming, a Being that totally transcends anything reason can encompass in its grasp."

Oliva Blanchette, Philosophy of Being: A Reconstructive Essay in Metaphysics (CUA Press, 2003), 526

Om Kant i Döda poeters sällskap

Via en serie tweets fick jag mig nyligen Upplysningens valspråk av Kant till livs:

"Upplysning är människans utträde ur hennes självförvållade omyndighet. Omyndighet är oförmågan att göra bruk av sitt förstånd utan någon annans ledning. Självförvållad är denna omyndighet om orsaken till densamma inte ligger i brist på förstånd, utan i brist på beslutsamhet och mod att göra bruk av det utan någon annans ledning. Sapere aude! Hav mod att göra bruk av ditt eget förstånd! lyder alltså upplysningens valspråk."*

Det där med "att göra bruk av sitt förstånd utan någon annans ledning" har kanske en lite annan klangbotten idag än vad det hade 1784. Kant exemplifierade då omyndigheten med: "Har jag en bok som har förstånd i mitt ställe, har jag en själasörjare som har samvete i mitt ställe, har jag en läkare som bedömer dieten i mitt ställe osv, så behöver jag inte anstränga mig själv".
Idag väcker valspråket andra sorts frågor: Är mitt förstånd verkligen mitt? Är det möjligt att göra bruk av sitt förstånd utan påverkan och ledning? Har Upplysningen gjort oss till myndiga och mogna människor? Jag kom att tänka på en träffande text av Stanley Hauerwas som problematiserar en oreflekterad tilltro till det fria förnuftet:

"Both Kant and the utilitarians assumed that the task of the ethicist was to explicate the presuppositions everyone shares. Ethics is the attempt to systematize what we all perhaps only inchoately know or which we have perhaps failed to make sufficiently explicit. Such a view of ethics can appear quite anticonventional, but even the anticonventional stance gains its power by appeal to what anyone would think upon reflection. This can be nicely illustrated in terms of the recent movie, The Dead Poets Society. It is an entertaining, popular movie that appeals to our moral sensibilities. The movie depicts a young and creative teacher battling what appears to be the unthinking authoritarianism of the school as well as his students' (at first) uncomprehending resistance to his teaching method. The young teacher, whose subject is romantic poetry, which may or may not be all that important, takes as his primary pedagogical task helping his students think for themselves. We watch him slowly awaken one student after another to the possibility of their own talents and potential. At the end, even though he has been fired by the school, we are thrilled as his students find the ability to stand against authority, to think for themselves.

This movie seems to be a wonderful testimony to the independence of spirit that democracies putatively want to encourage. Yet I can think of no more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themselves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well enough trained to think. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that their problem is that they do not have minds worth making up. That is why training is so important, because training involves the formation of the self through submission to authority that will provide people with the virtues necessary to make reasoned judgment." **

Själv funderar jag på om det kan vara så att Upplysningens upprop mot traditionsbaserat förnuft parat med dess negativa frihetssyn har gjort oss blinda för en annan sorts omyndighet. John Milbank sätter ord på något av detta:

"I can choose anything anywhere, but these choices will always be for the choices of others, selecting me. Since anything can now be mine, nothing will really be mine. Since I am offered absolute Kantian liberty without the guidance of education of my judgement, I will be perfectly manipulated: absolutely controlled in my important choices (for the exploitative outlet for sub-standard coffee for example, or the exploitative lifestyle website, that some poor individual imagines they have freely invented), and within this allowed a measure of predetermined indifferent laxity (a shot of this or that sickly flavour to disguise the third-rate coffee-blend, the sub-choice of lifestyle that gives me the illusion of interacting with the Internet . . .)"***

Om Kants upprop gällde frigörelse från blind auktoritetstro och självförvållad omyndighet, så är samtidens stora fråga var det finns resurser som kan att leda människan ut ur hennes självförvållade kommersialisering, ensamhet, och vilsenhet. Om Upplysningens valspråk på sin tid var ett stridsrop för frihet, är det idag snarast ett uttryck för konformism. Den viktiga politiska frågan idag är inte så mycket bristen på frihet, utan bristen på gemenskap. 

--
* Ur «Vad är upplysning» Immanuel Kant, Symposion, 1989
** Stanley Hauerwas - Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community
*** John Milbank. Being Reconciled. Routledge, 2003. s.290

Påve mot positivism

Via I Think I Belive hittade jag ett intressant utdrag från Benedikt XVI tal vid hans besök i den tyska förbundsdagen nyligen. Talet, som är värt att läsa i sin helhet, finns här!

Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else – and that is broadly the case in our public mindset – then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary. Indeed, an essential goal of this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch one.

The positivist approach to nature and reason, the positivist world view in general, is a most important dimension of human knowledge and capacity that we may in no way dispense with. But in and of itself it is not a sufficient culture corresponding to the full breadth of the human condition. Where positivist reason considers itself the only sufficient culture and banishes all other cultural realities to the status of subcultures, it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity.

I say this with Europe specifically in mind, where there are concerted efforts to recognise only positivism as a common culture and a common basis for law-making, so that all the other insights and values of our culture are reduced to the level of subculture, with the result that Europe vis-à-vis other world cultures is left in a state of culturelessness and at the same time extremist and radical movements emerge to fill the vacuum.

Om förnuftets brister

Stanley Fish skriver om Habermas, religion och upplysningstro i N.Y Times:

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments.
(...)
The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield.
(...)
The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”