THE REVERSAL OF REASON INTO IRRATIONALITY AND THE SCHEME OF DOMINATION
The COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of collapse due to climate change and the erosion of biodiversity point to the aberrations of a development model that is based on the unlimited exploitation of natural resources and other living beings. More than ever, it appears necessary to reorient the economy
in order to put it at the service of people and the preservation of the common world.
To understand why ecological transition is a chance for re-initiating a civilizational process, we must explain the reversal of progress into regression, of rationalism into irrationality. A double amputation of reason explains its degradation. First, during late modernity, that is, after the eighteenth century, rationalism became instrumental and gave rise to the era of quantification. Whereas reason in Kant or Rousseau was viewed as the most appropriate way to develop a common project, it gradually became an instrument at the service of individual desires. By being cut off from truth, reason was reduced to
calculation. It lost its moral dimension as well as its capacity to distinguish the just and the unjust and could support the most barbaric and disproportionate enterprises.
The second amputation of reason is more ancient, since it is a consequence of the radical separation between civilization and nature that is specific to the Western world. It underpins the will to master inherited from the Enlightenment, and we realize today that it could lead to the ruin of our civilization.
The global crisis with which we are confronted is a crisis of reason. The latter is trapped in the net of domination, which is exercised over others and nature, but is also rooted in the rejection of our vulnerability and in the repression of our carnal condition. This largely explains our obsession for control and our contempt for other living beings….
https://hal.science/hal-03240808/document
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