Reading Time: 12 Minutes
Inspired by Reason & Anti-Reason in Our Time by Karl Jaspers.
“What remains essential in view of the possible speedy end of everything we love? What are the criteria that still hold good when the end of everything is approaching? It is beneath human dignity to waver between a destructive fear which inhibits all activity . . . and a self-forgetful and blinkered ease in which old habits of thought continue and in which (we forget what is essential in) aimless thoughtless busyness, where work is done solely for the sake of work, regardless of the cause it ultimately serves.”
Karl Jaspers
German Psychiatrist and Philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883 – 1969) survived Nazi Germany despite his opposition to Nazism and his marriage to a Jewish woman. The Nazis planned to deport Jaspers and his wife to a concentration camp in the middle of April 1945. Fortunately, American troops arrived in Heidelberg (where Jaspers lived and worked) two weeks earlier, on April 1st, 1945.
After the war Jaspers wrote Die Schuldfrage (published in English as The Question of German Guilt). The essay exhorts all Germans – not just Nazi party leaders – to assume responsibility for Nazism, the holocaust, and the destruction it wrought. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book was not universally well-received in post war Germany. In symbolic demonstration of his disgust at the persistence of pernicious political attitudes in Germany, Jaspers relinquished his German citizenship, and, having earlier moved across the border to University of Basel in 1948, he became a Swiss national.
Karl Jaspers was Hannah Arendt’s tutor and supervisor before she emigrated from Germany in the 1930s, but during the Post War period a role reversal occurred in this relationship, and Arendt greatly influenced Jaspers in his later work.
The little-known masterpiece that inspired this essay – Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (Vernunft und Widervernunft in Unserer Zeit) – was first published in Germany in 1950. An English translation was published by Yale University Press in 1952.
Our Current Predicament
While the threat from demagogues and cults is especially conspicuous, enemies of clear thinking threaten from all sides. Anti-reason is extraordinarily adept at aborting good faith attempts to make sense of the world, and the forces of anti-reason don’t discriminate based on patterns of moral intuition that incline “left” or “right”. Ideology can be a particularly pernicious form of anti-reason because it co-opts the universal human need for coherence and converts it into its opposite: a system of beliefs that can lead to loss of contact with reality. In the words of Jonathan Haidt, ideology “blinds” and “binds”:
- Ideology blinds adherents to aspects of reality that do not conform to the ideology’s presuppositions.
- Ideology binds adherents to each other. The ideologues’ world can quickly become a battleground divided between self and other.
Ideological tribes owe their ascendancy to the tribes that oppose them. Opposing ideological tribes give each other oxygen by staking out positions that seem designed to enrage their adversaries. An increasing crescendo of reactivity can develop between tribes that the forces of Anti-Reason finds quite congenial.
Another source of confusion resides in the use of labels that badly misidentify ideologies and ideologues. “The growing strength of Anti-Reason, as it develops in the give and take between wizards and bewitched, is furthered by those who have not yet made up their minds, who take the absurdities of the magicians seriously and grant them a certain validity under the cloak of objectivity.” Labels that locate political beliefs exclusively with reference to the left-right continuum were necessary and relevant in the twentieth century but can be profoundly misleading in our present situation. In a society utterly deluged by disinformation, propaganda, and confusion, a far more sensible approach now would focus less on locating ideas or actions on the left-right political continuum and more on clarifying whether an individual or groups beliefs and communications are in contact with the way things really are.
Deceptive Realization
Individuals are born with an innate need to make sense of the world. This need for sense-making – “coherence” – can be fulfilled in two ways:
- Ongoing curiosity that employs reason as one of its tools.
- “Deceptive realization” manifested in belief systems antagonistic to reason.
Insofar as large swaths of the population harbor beliefs that have no relationship with reality, the situation confronting us today is eerily like that which Jasper’s had in mind when, in the mid-twentieth century, he composed Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time. The “road to disaster” that Jaspers described begins in the same place today that it did in 1920’s Germany, “with the betrayal of the simple truths that decent, honest (persons) take for granted in daily life”.
What’s the Difference?
What’s the difference between a good faith attempt to describe and improve upon the way things really are, and an ideologically mediated way of being in the world?
1. Reason Requires Thought.
Ideology Eliminates Thought.
Reason approaches every situation anew. It doesn’t assume that it knows the facts or what the facts imply. Nothing that belongs to reason or clear thinking “comes about automatically.”
Whereas reason is diametrically opposed to dogma, ideology is based on a small number of irrevocably fixed ideas.
Ideology demands very little of us. It requires only that one “fit” a situation into a pre-existing conceptual schema. One of ideologies’ primary functions is to free the ideologue from mental work. Conversely, reason and clear thinking are often shunned because they are effortful.
2. Reason Emphasizes its Own Limitations.
Ideology Claims it is Absolute Truth.
“The effectiveness of magic depends on the compliance of the bewitched…The masses have followed the magicians again and again. The fraud has been perpetrated by the promise of absolute knowledge, by the claim that the magician’s thought and action are of transcendental importance.”
Anti-Reason identifies itself as truth and yet wants to know nothing of truth. Under the name of truth anti-reason “gives currency to everything that is inimical and alien to truth, to the perversions of truth.”
Anti-Reason opposes much more than science and reason encompasses far more than just science. Reason is the need that leads to the demand for science. Reason acknowledges science as one of the many ways in which truth may be made recognizable to us.
Reason is non-totalistic. Unlike dogma or contrived conceptual systems, it refuses to provide an explanation for everything.
Reason “knows that it is lost if it clutches prematurely at a part of truth and makes it the ultimate and absolute truth.”
3. Reason Seeks Insight into that Which Undermines It.
Ideology Ignores Everything that is Inconsistent with It.
Reason wants to illuminate the origins of anti-reason and the powers that destroy insight, knowledge, and life. In this sense, reason is attracted to what is most alien to it.
Ideology is perpetuated by patterns of emotionality and thought that ignore aspects of reality inconsistent with its core concepts. Ideology causes “blindness” in its adherents, insofar as it is predicated on patterns of perceiving and interpreting that do not acknowledge salient facts. The “blindness” it facilitates allows ideology to gain traction even when its tenets clash with reality.
4. Reason Demands Humility.
Ideology Craves Power and Control.
“In selfless humility… the individual (who reasons) has a chance to take a minimal part in helping to create an atmosphere in which truth can thrive.”
Although belief in reason is a kind of “faith”, its character is fundamentally different from ideology and religion. It begins with knowledge of its own limits. It not only knows its own powerlessness, but powerlessness is “the condition for acting in real freedom and for arousing freedom in others.”
Unlike ideology, clear thinking cannot engage in propaganda. It cannot hypnotize. It has nothing tangible to offer the individual beyond the promise of affording her a glimpse into the way things really are.
5. Reason is Open and Boundless.
Ideology is a Closed Mental System.
Reason attempts to take as much as possible into account while simultaneously acknowledging the infinite nature of the universe within which it operates. It strives to include everything and is boundlessly open. It is accessible to everyone. By engaging in it, strangers are connected.
Ideology excludes everything that does not conform to its own dictates. It does not accept the other but turns all those who do not automatically comply with it into the other.
6. Reason Opposes Self-Deception.
Ideology Captivates.
“There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery-not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational-not for the prudence of unprejudiced sight and hearing but for the capricious surrender to the darkness… not for science but for wizardry disguised as science…not for rationally founded influence, but for magic…for adventure, blind unrestraint and blind obedience to a force that tolerates no questions.”
While clear thinking carefully uses language to seek truth – all the while recognizing that language is limited in its capacity to capture reality – ideology justifies itself in jargon. Ideological rhetoric and buzz words provide adherents with a sense that they belong to something powerful and transcendent.
7. Reason Strives to Know Reality.
Ideology is Convinced it is Reality.
Whereas reason is the demand that can lead to greater contact with reality, ideology thinks it already knows reality.
Whereas ideology already knows the answer, reason never stops asking questions it has not already answered.
8. Reason Connects.
Ideology Divides.
“(The) human being (who reasons) will be related to all human beings as if they were all one great family. This is not a natural process but only becomes possible when one is reborn through Reason…Reason is able to turn the authentic personal existence of a human being into new possibilities of constructive living-and when that happens, the authentic personal existences of isolated people come upon each other, calling out to each other across the world.”
Reason transcends the personal. All have access to it. Reason regards self-concern as a threat to its pursuit.
Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time.
Anti-reason prioritizes the self and is predominantly concerned with advancing selfish interests. It scans the world for things that it can use to justify itself. It conceals its motives by using language to describe itself and its objectives that reflect the opposite of its real intentions.
9. Reason requires Freedom.
Ideology Captures.
Reason exists and persists by decision. It does not happen automatically but arises from freedom.
Reason’s confidence in truth implies unremitting striving after truth. This striving occurs even when the world is permeated by unreason and anti-reason. It searches incessantly and cannot be certain of the outcome of its efforts.
The surrender of reason prepares people for the loss of freedom. People cease to know what freedom is. Those who renounce reason are “ready for any kind of totalitarianism and follow the ringleader to destruction, crime and shameful death along with the rest of the herd.”
10. Reason Self-Corrects.
Ideology Sports an Attitude.
While both the thinker and the ideologue hit and miss the truth, the thinker who employs reason incessantly corrects the content of what she considers true.
One without regard for truth examines his own gestures, modes of expression and ways of impressing others. He seems to be blind to the difference between truth and untruth, reality, and appearance. His own motives are often invisible to himself.
11. Reason Requires Responsibility.
Ideology Extinguishes Seriousness.
“Wherever (anti-reason) reigns its violence make careful study and inquiry impossible. It permits arbitrary action and destroys self-control. It favors the violent passions of the moment and extinguishes seriousness.”.
Beginning to think for oneself “is the beginning of serious responsibility”.
Anti-reason cannot be debated or argued with. It constantly changes and does not allow itself to be grasped. Refutation seems to give it new life, like a mythical snake in which two new heads grow for every head destroyed.
12. Reason Seeks to Penetrate into the Essence of Things.
Ideology Misses the Point.
Ideology obsesses and makes everything about that which it is obsessed. It turns all of reality into examples of the problem that preoccupies it, even aspects of reality that would otherwise appear to be utterly inconsistent with it. In so doing, it misses the point of what is really happening.
13. Reason Loves Conversation.
Ideology Doesn’t Listen and Loves to Rant.
“Reason is confronted again and again with the fact of a mass of believers who have lost all ability to listen, who can absorb no argument and who hold unshakably fast to the Absurd as an unassailable presupposition-and really do appear to believe.”
Reason loves conversation and demands that the risk of communication should be taken again and again. It engages in conversation and seeks the truth by listening, asking, and testing.
Ideology precludes real communication. It bores, antagonizes, or threatens all who do not give themselves over to it.
14. While it is Possible for Anti-Reason to Win,
Reason Never Loses All Hope and Can be Re-born at Any Time.
“So long as life has not been destroyed, Reason is able to turn the authentic personal existence of a person into new possibilities of constructive living…and when that happens, the authentic personal existences of isolated people come upon each other, calling out to each other across the world.”
Since reason is often unrealized in the world, it can lose hope as well as well as illusion. It is not easy to overcome such hopelessness: “There is only one way to overcome this (feeling of hopelessness) … Anyone who seriously wants to escape from the fog of the irrational, knows from his own freedom the basic experience that is never a gift of nature: he has the certainty that is not supported by any objective guarantee-he goes his way conscious of serving the truth without possessing it. He tries to save Reason … to let its imperturbable patience speak despite the impotence of an apparently dying echo.”
Reason has never completely disappeared. The task of reason in the face of threats is to endure tension and to do what is essential.
Reason refuses to accept the inevitability of doom. Even when humanity’s self-destructive path is fully considered, reason still regards the forecast of ultimate catastrophe as uncertain. Past experiences of unexpectedly favorable outcome make a deep impression and serve as a guide for Reason in its basic attitude, which is to “endure the tension of uncertainty, to be conscious of the constant threat of disaster but not to overlook the range of possibilities in what may appear to be the most hopeless situations, and above all to keep on hoping; in any case to live, taking all the intellectual precautions possible and to decide one’s course of action as conscientiously as may be within the limits of the possible, in the activity of production – like the peasants on Mount Vesuvius who bring their glorious fruits to maturity under the constant threat of the all-engulfing lava.”
Notes:
All quotations are from Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (Vernunft und Widervernunft in Unserer Zeit), by Karl Jaspers, first published in Germany in 1950. An English translation was published by Yale University Press in 1952.
Workosophy 
Another masterpiece! I see your muse has returned!!
I love the metaphor of the wizard and the enchanted – reminds me of Jerry Post.
With a vengeance (and with reason!!)
Daven
Thank you Daven! Much appreciated! Yes, Jerry Post would have been particularly adept at describing these times.