Reason, faith, and politics

pp. 121-146

in: Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue among civilizations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Abstract

As many times before in human history, reason and faith are at loggerheads today. What renders our contemporary situation distinctive, however, is the intensity of the confrontation and the radicality of opposing claims. Ever since the Enlightenment, modern philosophy—trusting in "unaided" reason alone—has launched an assault on traditional dogmas and all kinds of rationally unvalidated premises and beliefs. The situation is further aggravated by the steady advances of modern science and the premium placed in our time on scientific and technological expertise—a premium that militates against any reliance on untested assumptions (thereby equating faith with ignorance). Unsurprisingly, the modern assault on faith has engendered a vigorous counter-offensive against modern rationality, an offensive operating both inside and outside of academia. In academic and literary circles, this offensive tends to take the form of a radical fideism (sometimes curiously allied with philosophical agnosticism)—a posture bent on debunking philosophical reasoning as such in favor of an untrammeled spirituality or self-styled transcendentalism. In more concrete social contexts, anti-rationalism often surfaces as a wholesale attack on modern forms of public life, an attack drawing inspiration from premodern autocratic or "theocratic" conceptions of politics.