At least I agree with this bit of Edouard's conclusion. Maybe not
so strange to see it after just writing in a back-channel
discussion about teloi and development-in-society, on the
contradictions of rationalism and communitarian values (the
latter including, in my view, core ethics in our community):
"Phosgene gas (WW1) and the Final Solution (WW2) are the excesses
of rationalism. They kick us in the butt and say, if we forget
_communitas_ we are going to drive ourselves extinct. Back we go
to the premise of compatibility: rationalism serves ethics. In
Peirce's time, this was easy, since ethics could still seem not
only universally valid but self-evident. Rationalism could serve
ethics because, absent a choice of ethics, rationality had
nothing to work its tricks on. (Rationality is, after all, just a
system for setting up and deciding among alternatives.) But
history marches on. Following WW2 euroculture has to meet global
cultures on more equal terms. Why not Zen ethics? (1950s) why not
Hindu ethics? (1960s) why not no ethics? (1980s). So Habermas
wastes half his life trying to prove that rationality leads to
currently reasonable local ethics. (This is not a completely
impossible project, because a lot of current local ethics is the
product of rationalism, but it doesn't solve the universalist
problem it was posed as.)"
I think Leigh Star has already done an exemplary job of
dissecting the cracks in arguments from arbitrariness. I imagine
Edouard himself could show that while "we're all gonna die" does
have _some_ consequences for our view of life, these probably do
not include the pervasive, "so nothing matters" that his current
pessimism favors. I am no anthropocentrist; we are a small part
of a big and very old system, and our role in this system is
something we currently tend to overestimate. A thermodynamic
pessimism should make allowance for the fact that quite a lot can
be done, and matter, along the way to endpoints on various
fractal scales of organization of matter: a human life, a
community's span, a culture's history, a planet's bio-phase, a
universe between fire and ice.
But yes, our rationalism and its tools are quite subversive the
deeper _communitas_ on which our survival, and maybe that of some
ecosystems, depends. We play it safe by using rationality
selectively, but inevitably it colonizes more and more territory.
We don't want to know the origins and functions of rationality
too clearly, or why it is so antagonistic to communitarian values
that long antedate it and without which we know we will perish at
our own hands. We don't want to have to face the contradictions
on which our comfortable lives rest. We will leave that to those
who will face the inevitably catastrophic consequences, and hope
it won't be us. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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