Eclipse of Reason

Justice, equality, happiness, tolerance, all the concepts that were in preceding centuries supposed to be inherent in or sanctioned by reason, have lost their intellectual roots.

Pragmatism reflects a society that has no time to remember and mediate.

All realities influence our practice, and that influence is their meaning for us.

Today there is almost general agreement that society has lost nothing by the decline of philosophical thinking, for a much more powerful instrument of knowledge has taken its place, namely, modern scientific thought.

Plato wanted to make philosophers the masters; the technocronts want to make engineers the board of directors of society. Posi

Far from excluding competition, industrialistic culture has always organized research on a competitive basis.

Positivists rely on the successes of science as a justification of their own method.

The process of subjectification has affected all philosophical categories.

In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation.

The crisis of reason is manifested in the crisis of the individual, as whose agency it has develop.

Individuality is impaired when each man decides to shift for himself.

The deification of industrial activity knows no limits.

The individual no longer has a personal history. Though everything changes, nothing moves.

The formalization of reason leads to a paradoxical cultural situation.

• On the one hand, the destructive antagonism of self and nature, an antagonism epitomizing the history of our civilization, reaches its peak in this era.
• On the other hand, philosophical thinking, whose task it is to essay a reconsiliation, has come to deny or to forget the very existence of the antagonism.

The definition of freedom is the theory of history, and vice versa.

Reason can realize its reasonableness only through reflecting on the disease of the world as produce and reproduced by man.

Fascism treated language as a power instrument, as a means of storing knowledge for se in production and destruction in both war and peace.

Philosophy helps man to allay his fears by helping language to fulfil it genuine mimetic function, its mission of mirroring the natural tendencies.