Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the
Absence of Reason
Dylan Trigg
Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves
homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense…for their fate is hard, their hopes are
uncertain; it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them—but to what avail? We
children of the future, how could we be at home in this today? We feel disfavor for
all ideals that might lead one to feel at home in this fragile, broken time of transition;
as for ‘realities’ we do not believe they will last. The ice that still supports
people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing; we
ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too
thin realities.
Nietzsche (1974, p. 338)
can we still maintain that reason is the mechanism by which progress can be realized?
Despite the West’s fall into cultural pessimism, the sovereignty of reason has apparently resisted exhaustion.
Conflict invariably ensues when the principle, led by the claims of reason, exceeds its universality in relation
to a temporal present, so becoming distinctly fetid.
I think he is saying here for example the ideal of democracy is thrown into the limelight by some results of democratic votes and by the condition of ‘truth’ in the time of widespread access to means of dissemination of ideas – memes – formation of ‘belief groups’ – all the things that act against the finding of ‘truth’ given that ‘truth’ itself is hard to define and is mutable. taicbw
The divergence between universality and the temporal present is compounded as ideas are mistaken to
be intuitive, humanistic, or otherwise innate: terms which justifiably warrant suspicion. In the absence of such suspicion, the familiarity of reason prevents it from disbanding.
conflict between preformed principles like reason and on the ground contemporary events taicbw
Disillusionment and dogma
are the likely consequence as a society adjusts to the void between a static
principle and the mutable world in which that principle exists
reason resorts to defining itself negatively.
A lack of reason, led principally by “irrationalism,” generally, but imprecisely,
suggests anti-intellectual emotionalism and vague intuitionism.
If intuition is reactionary, then being overly exposed
to contextual circumstances, its judgment is said to be contingent
Reason, meanwhile, is said to derive from an atemporal and placeless
(non)environment in which context is subjugated by necessity.
the messy contingent present versus the timeless placeless principle (eg kant ‘disinterested delight’) taicbw
Through suppressing the particularity of context, aesthetic
universality is acquired at the expense of actual experience
Similarly, rational
progress is won as reactions and instincts, particular qualities, are suspended.
Precisely what this progress entails remains an obscurity
characterized by conceptual insecurity
Yet into this space of obscurity, a va-gue set of themes united by their commitment to the idea of permanency, be it political or philosophical, take precedence.
II
This book is an attack on the notion of rational progress which underlies those regimes
[he limits his use of the word ‘reason’ to “the mode of rationality as a homogenizing agent which defines and identifies the particular in accordance with a static prin-ciple already established in the past.” ]
he further says he does not attack methodological reason
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