Historicity of reason

With the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel put forward the historicity of a reason which develops its forms through the history of the world. The Hegelian discovery is the historical character of reason, and this awareness of historicity determines contemporary rationalism. A fixist conception of reason, such as it still appears in the categories of understanding of which Kant intended to paint the complete picture once and for all, now opposes a dynamic conception of reason, always linked to the historical and epistemological context in which it unfolds.

The progressive conquests of rationalism are therefore made against reason itself, so that in looking back on a past of errors, one finds the truth in a true intellectual repentance. Past errors: hasty generalization of knowledge, verbal habits, pragmatism, substantialization, naive realism which are all obstacles that science raises in front of itself. To specify, to rectify, to diversify, these are dynamic types of thought which escape from certainty and unity and which find in homogeneous systems more obstacles than impulses. The rational mind, within the framework of the sciences, must be a critical mind always alert to its own factors of inertia, always quick to question its own conquests. Then remains the most difficult task: to put scientific culture in a state of permanent mobilization, to replace closed and static knowledge with open and dynamic knowledge, to dialectize all experimental variables, finally to give reason reasons to evolve.

In the same vein, Karl Popper, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, attempts to show that the character of a scientific theory is its refutability. One cannot indeed, from singular experiences, however numerous they may be, conclude that a law is universal. But it can be tested: it suffices to show a single observation contrary to a universal statement to be certain that this statement is false. The true is therefore not the simple reciprocal of the false, so that one cannot verify a hypothesis, but only try to invalidate it. A theory will therefore only be held to be true as long as it withstands the experimental tests to defeat it. That is to say, therefore, that science progresses by refutation and experimentation: nothing is definitive, the truth is always provisional.

Reason is no longer conceived as a closed and rigid system of principles determined a priori, but rather as a plastic and dynamic reality, as a constructive process, to which the very history of knowledge bears witness. What is considered to be a rational explanation therefore depends closely on the historical context in which it is formulated, the state of knowledge, and the evolution of observation and experimentation techniques. The concept of probability, for example, introduced into the complex models of particle science, or that of the local model, could not intervene as a rational explanation within the framework of Galilean or Newtonian physics. Thus science progresses by successive overcoming of outdated forms of reason. True irrationality therefore appears rather as a regression towards anachronistic forms of explanation.

Such is meant to be critical, expanded rationalism: a rationalism rid of its metaphysical prejudices, intimately linked to the development of the sciences, which is constructed by going beyond its own historical forms, and stemming from a dynamic conception of reason.

Contemporary critique of modern rationalism

Hans Jonas, in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, was one of the first to criticize the Cartesian dualism between body and mind: “Cartesian dualism left speculation on the nature of life at an impasse : so intelligible that became, according to the principles of mechanics, the correlation of the structure and the function inside the res extensa, that of the structure accompanied by function with the feeling or the experiment (modes of the res cogitans) was lost in the separation and thereby the fact of life itself became unintelligible at the very moment when the explanation of its temporal effectuation seemed assured.”

Cartesian dualism and the absence of finalism in technoscience are for Vittorio Hösle, a disciple of Hans Jonas, the main causes of the ecological crisis.

The Italian sociologist Franco Ferrarotti calls into question mechanistic rationalism, of which Descartes is one of the sources.

According to Jean-Claude Larchet, by making reason the main faculty of knowledge of man, we relegate to the background his spirit or intellect, faculty of contemplation of supernatural realities. The valorization of reason and the rational approach to phenomena not only favors the development of a form of philosophy which frees itself from theology of which it was until then only the servant, but also the development of the sciences, which will develop considerably from the 17th century following the Copernican revolution.

(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)