Reason and Transition: On the Concept of transversal Reason

For most philosophers today reason is no longer an issue. On the contrary, "Farewell to Reason" seems to be a motto of the age. Reason - once the center and hallmark of philosophy - has become the victim of two strategies. On the one side there is the open postmodern attack on reason; on the other side we find a creeping rationalistic abolishment of reason.

Ever since the Dialectic of Enlightenment of the fourties and the postmodern and poststructuralist critique throughout the last few decades, reason has been openly accused of being dominating, oppressive, destructive, downright male, class-based, Eurocentric or merely irrelevant. Striving for the general and universal, reason cannot do justice to the singular, but is always oppressive; and since no version of reason is ever in fact comprehensive and universal, as all of them claim - and for reason's sake must claim - to be, the concept of reason seems to be unrealizable and flawed in itself. Why not just get rid of it?

A second, more subtle, way of doing away with reason comes from the partisans of ever more consummate rationality. They say: we don't need reason any more, all we need is rationality, and throughout modernity we have developed a comprehensive range of rationalities, able to cover all conceivable questions. Amidst these highly differentiated versions of rationality, no room and no issue remains for reason any more. - Analytic philosophers, for example, often practice this kind of abolishment of reason. If you dare to use the expression `reason' when talking to them, they leave you in no doubt that they haven't the faintest idea of what you might mean.