The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason
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● Reason is subjective and unreliable in reaching truths about reality; ● Reason’s elements—words and concepts—are obstacles that must be unpacked, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked; ● Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all; ● Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason; ● The entire Western tradition of philosophy— whether Platonic, Aristotelean, Lockean, or Cartesian—based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to be overcome. Postmodernism would draw heavily from Heidegger, but as we will see later in the next chapter, much of the fumbled grasping for the metaphysical that is still found in the German (idealist) tradition due to religious commitments will be rejected by the atheistic postmodernists. The idea of Being and Nothing as something discoverable, as the source of contradiction we are trying to reach, will come to be rejected. Instead, to postmodernists, there is no “source;” contradictions are merely the inevitable result of using an uncritical empirical and thus conforming lens on otherwise independent phenomena.
Reason’s Collapse from American Philosophy We have reviewed the collapse of reason on the mainland of Europe, but how did this occur in Britain and North America? Much of the English-speaking world, even up to the early 20th century, honored the Enlightenment project,
