6 - Some Recent Reconsiderations of Rationality

Summary

…the opposition of self and other is mediated by the emergence of the other self and the common human language of “oneself.” This human language is the real and true non-dualist locus of culture, labor and politics, whether the other should be God, non-human nature, the world or other human selves, masculine or feminine, native or foreign.

—J. P. S Uberoi, The European Modernity: Science, Truth and Method (2002, 113)

The world as we understand it at present may be the same world as it always was but we no longer look to Physics to underpin the myth of Stability, and provide the same comforts as before. The claims of contemporary sciences, both natural and human, are a good deal more modest, seeking neither to deny nor to explain away the contingency of things.

—Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (2001, 209–10)

Perhaps the names of persons whose saying signifies a face – proper names, in the middle of all these common names and common places – can resist the dissolution of meaning and help us to speak. Perhaps they will enable us to divine, behind the downfall of discourse, the end of a certain intelligibility and the dawning of a new one. What is coming to a close may be a rationality tied exclusively to the being that is sustained by words, the Said of the Saying.

—Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names (1996, 4–5)

The Problem

The concept of rationality has been subjected to numerous critiques in the history of modernity, and all these critiques have been helpful in opening rationality to cross-cultural translations and examinations.