2: A Note On My Own Gellnerian Lens

From Rational Moderns to Cyberian Subjects: The Collapse of Enlightenment Culture and the Rise of Post-Rational Society

Here's a little half baked sermon: We are living through the collapse of a civilisation built on rationalism. What once claimed to be the universal engine of progress, clarity, and truth is now faltering, not only as an ideal but as a functioning social order. The modern project, grounded in Enlightenment reason and its institutional embodiments, liberal democracy, science, bureaucracy, education, no longer commands trust or coherence. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen observes in Overheating, the tempo of globalisation, technological change, and ecological instability has outpaced our capacity to process, regulate, or find meaning in the world. The very mechanisms designed to bring order - rational governance, technocratic institutions, scientific authority - have lost legitimacy in the face of overwhelming complexity and acceleration. Eriksen warns that our societies are “overheated”: stretched between global connectivity and local disintegration, drowning in information while starving for meaning. 

But this is not just a matter of stress or complexity. It is also the terminal stage of a culture founded on reason. The world imagined by Descartes, Kant, and Weber, one in which knowledge, truth, and system could ground a shared human project, has unravelled. Its failure is no longer academic. It is vividly playing out on the world stage: in the election of Trump, the consolidation of Xi’s digital authoritarianism, Modi’s ethno-nationalist transformation of India, and the rising tide of post-truth populism across the globe. These are not simply political turns; they are signs of a deeper cultural rupture and the breakdown of rationalism as the guiding grammar of civilisation.

Ernest Gellner's anthropology of reason revealed that rationality was never truly universal. It was a style of cognition produced by a specific social formation: industrial society, with its need for impersonality, precision, and continuous innovation. Rationalism, he argued, emerged from a particular cultural ecology: it was not the antidote to culture, but a culture in its own right. It demanded certain kinds of social organisation: literate, mobile, rule-governed, sceptical, and abstract. But now that society is fragmenting. The rationalising institutions of science, bureaucracy, legalism, liberalism are no longer trusted or effective. And their cultural foundation is dissolving under the pressures of digital acceleration, ecological emergency, and mass disaffection.

Rationalism has failed not just to provide meaning, but even to sustain its own operational integrity. It could not remain culturally hygienic, as Gellner warned, because it needed its own rituals, loyalties, and shared assumptions to sustain itself. But those have eroded. We now find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: rationalism remains technologically potent but culturally inert. The tasks of reasoning, of calculation, prediction and analysis are increasingly delegated to machines, to algorithms and artificial intelligences. We are becoming, as Eriksen might put it, cyberians: beings embedded in systems of digital cognition we no longer understand or control. The rationalisation of the world continues in those silos where it is required, such as science and technology, but it no longer requires rational humans to carry it out. 

In this post-industrial condition, we are witnessing the withdrawal of rationality from the domain of culture. It no longer grounds our ethics, our politics, or our sense of self. Instead, we are beginning live in a vacuum of meaning filled with algorithmic spectacle, emotional tribalism, and unprocessed existential dread. The dream of Enlightenment reason has ended not with triumph, but with obsolescence. Philosophy, from Descartes to Derrida, inadvertently and often enthusiastically, chronicled this decline: each stage of rationalist critique peeling away one more layer of justification, until nothing remained but irony, power, and either post-human triumph or despair depending on mood.

Gellner helps us see that this was always in the cards. Rationalism undermined the sacred but could not replace it. It displaced tradition but failed to build a sustainable alternative. Now, having eaten through the very cultures that nourished it, reason stands alone as something technically omnipresent but culturally exhausted. And as it recedes, we are left to confront a stark new condition: a world organised by machines, governed by authoritarian politics,  irrational passions, and haunted by the ruins of our disenchanted hopes. We are no longer rational moderns. We are post-rational subjects in a post-human order drifting between code and chaos. 

Ok. End of sermon. So now, I still largely see many things through the lens of  Ernest Gellner and I think in a way he foresaw this. Gellner is a social anthropologist and a philosopher, and he combines insights from both disciplines.He argues that it is fruitful to model the history of philosophy not as a timeless sequence of ideas, but a coded reflection of the cultural and material conditions that produce it. He treats philosophy not as the unfolding of absolute reason, but as a series of abstract cognitive responses to the demands of different stages of social organisation. For Gellner, ideas do not hover above history; they crystallise its underlying structures in conceptual form.

Philosophy as Mirror of Social Order: Gellner’s Socio-Economic Reading of Rationalism

In this schema, the philosophical systems of any age are intelligible best when read against their socio-economic backdrop. In the agrarian era, what Gellner calls agraria, the dominant social logic is one of hierarchy, stability, and ritual. It is a world of fixed roles, sacred orders, and cyclical time. Plato’s thought, with its emphasis on eternal forms, strict caste structure, and intellectual guardianship, maps perfectly onto this world. The realm of Ideas is the cognitive counterpart to the immobile world of castes, temples, and kings. Truth is stable and unchanging because society is meant to be the same. 

With the advent of industria, this structure is shattered. Industrial society demands mobility, precision, standardisation, and abstract skills. Its citizens must be trained not in ritual but in logic, not in obedience but in competence. Here we find the rise of a new philosophical idiom - rationalism and empiricism. Descartes, with his quest for certainty through methodical doubt, embodies the industrial need for a stable, reproducible foundation amid a dynamic and transforming world. Hume and Kant follow suit: they try to reconcile the human need for meaning with the impersonal demands of reason and system. Hume reduces knowledge to sense-data and habits, matching the rise of empirical science. Kant rebuilds the structure of the mind as a kind of epistemic factory, processing raw data through universal categories.

Philosophy becomes a mirror of the industrial world’s tensions: individual versus system, freedom versus structure, perception versus reason. Gellner argues that these philosophical debates also make sense of industria, a society that requires a cognitively disembedded individual, capable of applying rules across space and time, stripped of local loyalty or ritual comfort. Just as industry required the standardisation of parts, it also required the standardisation of minds. Philosophy (inadvertently) models this ideological infrastructure.Thus, for Gellner, philosophy models the intellectual form a society gives to its own self-understanding. Plato’s metaphysics cannot be transplanted into an industrial world, just as Descartes’s radical doubt would be unintelligible in a peasant village. The history of thought is, in this view, a map of socio-economic evolution abstracted into a model. It is not that philosophers predict the future but that they express, in purified cognitive form, the tensions and transformations already underway in their material world.

Gellner offers an interpretation of our modern philosophical condition as a tension between rationalist and romantic visions of human cognition and social life. Rather than engaging with philosophical doctrines purely on their own terms, Gellner treats them as civilisational manifestations, intellectual styles rooted in social structures and historical transformations. At the core of his account is what he identifies as the doctrine of the “Sovereignty of Reason” (SOR), a project most fully crystallised in the work of René Descartes, and subsequently challenged by romantic, historicist, and communalist currents of thought. 

Through this lens, Gellner stages a confrontation between two opposing ideals of reason and culture: the individualist, classicist, bourgeois rationalism of Descartes and his heirs, and the historicist, organic, emotional countercurrents represented by thinkers like  Hegel, Herder, Heidegger, Dewey and late Wittgenstein amongst others. In a crude way the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is captured by this.  Gellner sees Cartesian rationalism as the founding gesture of modernity, a radical disembedding of the self from inherited tradition, custom, and communal belief. The Cartesian method, famously anchored in the principle cogito ergo sum, is not merely an epistemological tactic but a cultural gesture. It is a turning inward, a stripping down of belief to its absolute minimum, in search of the indubitable. Descartes’s rationalism reflects what Gellner calls “bourgeois cognitive possessive individualism”: a commitment to order, clarity, stepwise progression, and the methodical reduction of all problems into discrete, manageable parts. 

The ideal philosopher becomes a cognitive accountant, proceeding “in orderly fashion from the simple to the complex,” ensuring that “all issues [are] divided into as many parts as possible” and “subject[ing] performance to accurate and searching accountancy using clear, intelligible criteria.” The Cartesian mind mistrusts haste, confusion, prejudice, and the murkiness of collective emotion. It strives for intellectual hygiene with a methodical, restrained, almost Pelagian belief in the capacity of individual effort to yield truth. This rationalist culture, Gellner argues, is profoundly classicist in temperament. It values systems, buildings, and legal orders that bear the mark of a single, deliberate author. It is opposed to the messy accretion of tradition or the slow sedimentation of custom. “History is pollution,” Gellner writes in paraphrase of this worldview; unconscious growth is anathema. The ideal structure is one whose every part can be accounted for and justified. 

In this sense, Cartesian rationalism mirrors the values of a certain kind of social class: the sober, disciplined bourgeoisie, with its preference for clear lines, cognitive cleanliness, and personal responsibility. Yet Gellner also recognises that this ideal generates deep tensions. The Cartesian gesture requires one to treat culture itself - custom, example, tradition - as a source of error. Truth lies in what can survive the fire of doubt; everything else must be discarded. Descartes’s inner compulsion to find the indubitable, the pure and distinct idea, becomes the only legitimate form of reason. All other forms - mystic, orgiastic, communal, emotional - are not merely suspect but defined as antithetical to reason. “Only this inner compulsion is reason,” Gellner notes, and “the other kinds it fights off - murky, turbulent, obscure, trance, mystic, orgiastic, emotional excess, undecorous indulgence.” Reason becomes a sword drawn against the whole messy realm of culture, history, and sentiment. This purification of reason provokes its own backlash. 

The Romantic Rebellion: Culture, Community, and the Limits of Reason

Against this, the romantic tradition, emerging in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism, stages a counterrevolution on behalf of the organic, the historical, the communal. It is not necessarily anti-reason, but it is anti-SOR. Figures like Rousseau and Herder argue that reason cannot be disembedded from the cultural lifeworld; that we are not abstract minds but social beings formed by language, tradition, and feeling. Gellner sees this as the beginning  of the 're-enchantment industry' in philosophy where philosophy seeks to find the handrails for life that the SOR  have removed. 

Gellner’s reading of this reaction is laced with irony. He cites Alfred de Musset: “It is human reason which has destroyed all illusions; but reason herself wears mourning for it, so as to induce us to console her.” Reason, in this vision, is no longer triumphant but bereaved. It has shattered meaning and left itself desolate. Similarly, Gellner invokes Immanuel Kant’s poignant observation: “Many develop a certain measure of misology, i.e. hatred of reason, because they find that they had won weariness for themselves rather than bliss, and so in the end they tend to envy, rather than despise, the commoner run of men, who grant but little influence to their reason…” Here, Kant, normally the emblem of rationalism, acknowledges the psychic costs of reason's dominance. Those who pursue truth through the isolation of mind may discover not enlightenment but exhaustion. David Hume’s remark that “Our reason must be considered as a kind of cause, of which truth is the natural effect” forms the epigraph to Gellner’s inquiry, yet it also marks its ambiguity. For if reason is a cause, then it is shaped by its conditions, social, cultural, psychological, and its effects may vary accordingly. 

Gellner’s deeper anthropological insight is that the Cartesian project conceals its own historicity. It claims to transcend culture while being a cultural product itself. Its image of the isolated, reasoning self is not universal, but historically and socially specific. The SOR is a style of thought made possible by a particular kind of society: one that valorises individual effort, linear progress, private property, and accountability. Gellner’s analysis is not merely descriptive, therefore, but also diagnostic. He aims to show that what we call “reason” is itself a culturally saturated ideal, one that reflects the needs and anxieties of a world undergoing rapid transformation. 

The modern world, with its demand for mobility, clarity, and impersonality, favours the Cartesian model. But it cannot suppress entirely the romantic impulse, the desire for rootedness, for meaning grounded in shared traditions and collective identity. Thus modern philosophy swings between these poles: from the cognitive purity of Descartes to the organic nationalism of Herder, from Kant’s rigorous metaphysics to Hegel’s historical dialectic, from the analytic to the existential. Gellner exposes this tension. He frames modern philosophy as a civilisational battleground, structured by a basic polarity between the reason of the sovereign individual and the culture of the embedded community. 

What makes Gellner's approach so compelling is its refusal to grant either side a final victory. Instead, it illuminates the contradictory demands we place on reason itself: to be pure and yet humane, disembedded and yet meaningful, critical and yet comforting. In the end, reason may destroy illusions but, as de Musset saw, she does so while wearing mourning. Following Descartes, the history of reason moves into more turbulent waters with David Hume, who both inherits and quietly subverts the Cartesian legacy. Gellner treats Hume as a pivotal figure, an empiricist who carries out the Cartesian programme of epistemic purification, but without the metaphysical optimism or theological scaffolding. Where Descartes had believed in the power of clear and distinct ideas to certify both self and world, Hume dismantles that confidence by transforming the very substance of cognition. Ideas are no longer pristine intellectual constructs guaranteed by divine reason. Instead, they are reduced to perceptions, fragmentary, fleeting, and subjective impressions that arrive unbidden and inescapably to consciousness. As Gellner puts it, Hume “replaces concepts with perceptions as basic building blocks” of cognition, reasserting in extreme form the old Scholastic thesis that “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses”, but without the Aristotelian teleology or Thomist moral universe. 

The Disenchantment of Cognition: Gellner on Hume, Kant, and the Cultural Limits of Reason

This reversal is radical. Descartes had tried to purge the senses in favour of the indubitable intellect, believing that rational inspection alone could yield truth. Hume takes the opposite view: the only authority an idea can claim is genealogical, derived from its descent from some original impression. Gellner memorably formulates this as: “The validating lettre de noblesse of an idea is its documented descent from an ancestral impression.” Cognition thus becomes a kind of audit: “item by item scrutiny is imposed in the cognitive audit”. A genuine idea is one that can produce its credentials, traced back to the “strength of progenitor sensation.” No impression, no cognition. No ancestral sense data, no cognitive legitimacy. Descartes’s solitary reasoner, armed with the pure light of reason, is replaced by Hume’s psychologically passive receiver, visited by inevitable perceptual events. 

And yet, as Gellner observes, Hume remains a rationalist in a peculiar sense. He retains the Cartesian ambition to purify knowledge from the taint of tradition, even while he replaces its epistemic foundations. Humean empiricism becomes “doing the rationalist enterprise à la Descartes” but with different tools. Rather than beginning with an indubitable idea, one begins with inescapable sensation. Rather than assuming divine harmony between mind and world, one acknowledges only custom and expectation. Hume still seeks to isolate the individual mind from the cultural field and to construct a vision of the world through methodical inspection of elementary experiences. This remains a lonely enterprise. Gellner likens it to the predicament of Robinson Crusoe: the rational individual stranded on the shores of cognition, forced to rebuild a world out of minimal resources, without the social or metaphysical guarantees of older systems. 

But crucially, Gellner sees Hume’s world as historically different from Descartes’s. Descartes could assume that the rationalist project would inherit the warm coherence once provided by a unified Christian cosmos. He imagined the cognitive individual possessing both a stable self and a reliable world, underwritten by God’s benevolence and a culture of order. But by the time of Hume, that cohesion had eroded. The Cartesian repudiation of culture had succeeded so thoroughly that now there was nothing left to inherit. “The banks of custom of an ongoing culture, spurned because they were culture,” had collapsed, Gellner writes, leaving the rationalist individual isolated, without the stabilising narratives and shared frameworks that previously made cognition feel meaningful. Rationalism had won, but at the cost of the home it once presumed. This raises a deep paradox at the heart of modern epistemology. Rational cognition, as Gellner shows, eventually became itself a culture, a set of expectations, institutions, norms, and discourses embedded in the social world. Cartesian individualism, which had aimed to liberate reason from all such cultural embedding, turned out to require a cultural infrastructure to be sustained. 

Hume lives in this transformed world, where the Cartesian method is no longer an act of radical rebellion but a shared habitus. “The culture of rational cognition had been adopted to a large extent,” Gellner notes; “so it was now the lived culture.” But if reason requires a sustaining culture, then the whole Cartesian premise collapses: there is no culture-free cognition, and, crucially,there is no genuine vindication of any world. We must choose between cognitive certainty and cultural inhabitation, but never both. This insight opens up the possibility of a new formula, one that Gellner expresses with chilling concision: “no culture-free cognition AND no genuine vindication of any world.” This is not a comfortable place to stand. The human desire is not just for knowledge, but for a world in which one can feel “securely at home.” But this, Gellner insists, is now impossible. Rationalism, having displaced myth, religion, and tradition, leaves behind not a firmer world but a bleaker one. “A culture that provides immense knowledge but feeble illusions,” he writes, is the best we can hope for. The disenchantment is complete: “Feeling securely at home in the world is something that will not be granted to it”. 

Hume, unlike Descartes, recognises this disenchantment. Gellner credits him with a sharper awareness of the epistemic and existential cost of rational inquiry. “Hume had come to perceive the acute difficulty of vindicating, underwriting, guaranteeing the world attained by rational exploration”. Where Descartes believed in an interlocking world and self, underwritten by divine clarity, Hume saw only perceptions, habits, and expectations, useful, perhaps, but never certain. The rational self does not inherit the world; it assembles it provisionally, out of fragments. The epistemic solitude that Descartes had embraced as liberation becomes, in Hume, something like homelessness. Gellner’s point is not to praise Hume’s scepticism but to trace its origins in a broader civilisational shift: the triumph of rationalism undermines the very conditions that made reason livable. In seeking to liberate cognition from culture, the moderns succeeded only in replacing thick illusions with thin comforts. The rationalist may know much, but she no longer belongs. The transition from the chaotic perceptual data that floods our senses to the seemingly stable and manipulable world we inhabit is not only precarious but profoundly puzzling. For Hume, this transition is not guaranteed by logic, metaphysics, or divine authority. Instead, it is achieved by custom, habits of mind that are not culturally relative, but rather, as Gellner notes, “something pervading all minds.” These customs are not chosen or justified; they are what cognition is. There is no luminous certainty, no a priori guarantee that the external world exists or behaves regularly. The best we get is psychological compulsion: this is simply the kind of creature we are, and this is how we process experience. Descartes had offered a formula for how cognition should function - clear and distinct ideas, illuminated by the divine light of reason, would guarantee the correspondence between thought and world. But Hume demonstrates the hollowness of that promise. The manifest image, the orderly, manipulable world of experience, cannot be derived or guaranteed from the buzzing confusion of sensation. 

Gellner articulates the point with sharp clarity: Hume’s great lesson is that “there are no guarantees written into the data, just customs of the mind that we have to use.” The transition from impressions to the world we inhabit is not epistemologically secure, it is psychological, habitual, and inescapably human. This rupture carries consequences not only for the world but for the self. Descartes had famously begun with the self, cogito, ergo sum, as the indubitable foundation. But Hume tears even that away. The self, for Hume, “is, notoriously, a bundle, accumulated with a suggestion of passivity on its own part.” There is no entity behind the impressions, no metaphysical anchor. The self is not a substance but a function, a placeholder, a convenient fiction that gathers the shifting elements of perception. 

Kant agreed: the self is not an object represented in consciousness but an activity that synthesises experience into a coherent whole. The Enlightenment thinkers- Descartes, Hume, Kant - were united in their refusal to ground knowledge or identity in tradition, authority, or cultural inheritance. Even Descartes’s respect for the Church had less to do with its historical continuity than its clarity and univocal authority: it resembled his epistemic ideal more than it appealed to his cultural allegiance. This is the fundamental character of modern rationalism: it treats knowledge as a problem that must endorse no inherited world, no unexamined custom, no culturally received assumptions. Only claims that can be rationally justified and internally validated by the operations of reason are admissible. But as Hume and Kant both showed, that very purity strips away the external guarantees that once made knowledge feel secure. Descartes could still believe in a world of order and clarity, made by God and reflected in the structures of human reason. But by the time of Hume and Kant, that metaphysical safety net had vanished. They lived in a world that was actually ordered thanks to the success of science, commerce, and bureaucracy but they knew that no non-circular justification for this order was available. As Gellner remarks, “Hume and Kant lived where an orderly world was actually lived in but without secure justification.” 

Descartes was confident; Hume and Kant were uneasy. And rightly so. The cognitive foundations of modernity had become a tangle of internal mechanisms, no longer God-given light but psychological or transcendental structures. There was no longer a sacrament to bind us to the world, only habit and functional adequacy. “We are bound to our world,” Gellner writes, “only by a common law marriage, based on customary and well-established cohabitation, and not by some divinely underwritten sacrament”. There is no eternal vow, only long-term convenience. This cognitive cohabitation might work, but it lacks metaphysical romance. Kant accepts this. He offers no external validation, only a transcendental account of how the mind must structure experience. The order of the world is not discovered but imposed. It is the product of categories and forms of intuition: space, time, causality. For Kant, these are not derived from experience; they make experience possible. Hume had also located the source of order in the mind, but he offered no transcendental necessity, only psychological habit. Kant wants to prove that we cannot think otherwise; Hume merely observes that we do not. 

In Gellner’s view, the difference between them is not foundational but stylistic. They are “internal validators” with different accents. Hume is the psychologist, Kant the philosopher-mechanic. Hume’s mind is “putty or clay,” malleable and shaped by the force of impressions, which echo faintly in ideas. Kant’s is “all pulleys and levers, wheels and catches, a machine,” a precision device that imposes necessity on the flux of sensation. But for all their differences in metaphor and temperament, the philosophical stakes remain the same: the mind must supply what the world no longer gives. And this raises a further anthropological question, which Gellner hints at: was this mind, whether putty or machine, still recognisably the same human mind as had always existed? Or was it a new construct, a culturally specific apparatus that emerged under certain civilisational pressures? If so, then even the cognitive structures described by Kant or Hume might themselves be artifacts of culture, not eternal features of reason. It is, he suggests, a question for “social anthropologists,” whose task is to investigate how different forms of consciousness emerge from and sustain different modes of life. In that sense, even the Enlightenment mind, the mind of precision tools or of passive bundles, might itself be an artifact, the byproduct of a peculiar civilisation. The very project of rationalism, far from escaping culture, might turn out to be its most refined expression. Comparing minds across cultures reveals the inadequacy of the Enlightenment’s internalist accounts of cognition. While Hume and Kant each attempted to explain the emergence of order from within the mind, neither could account for the sheer compulsiveness, the binding force, of the conceptual schemes that make human worlds stable and communicable. 

The Ritual Roots of Reason: From Durkheim’s Categories to Weber’s Rational Spirit

Durkheim’s anthropological intervention, especially in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), dismantles both projects. Hume, for Durkheim, was radically wrong: associationism cannot explain why we are compelled to see the world in certain ways. Bundles of impressions, even if habitually connected, lack structure; they are accidental coagulations, not frameworks. The mind, under Hume’s account, is merely an echo chamber, reverberating faintly with past experiences, but incapable of constructing the stable world of obligations, meanings, or shared reality that we actually live in. As Gellner remarks, “Associationist psychology and anthropology hope to explain amazing well-organised structures via an appallingly undisciplined mechanism... It cannot be done”. 

Kant does better. He recognises that cognition operates under constraints, that space, time, causality are not derived from experience but constitute it. But his system, too, ultimately rests on an "if." If the world is orderly, then we must think in terms of these categories. But Kant cannot say why the world should appear orderly, or why we should be compelled to think it so. His package deal lacks a cause: “If we bought one item we had to buy them all, but there’s no reason for buying the deal except for wanting the deal.” This inability to account for conceptual irrationality or deviance, why some minds do not fit the structure, or how a culture could fail to conform to it, leaves Kant’s an elegant but ultimately circular system. And it cannot explain the massive variations in world-construction between societies. 

Durkheim offers what neither philosopher could: an external, social, and ritualistic account of how compulsive thought-forms arise. He rejects the introspective method of the rationalists and the laboratory empiricism of the psychologists. Minds are not forged in solitude or in the sterile environment of the lab; they are shaped in the furnace of collective life. The site of that forging is ritual. Through ritual, societies imprint shared categories onto their members. These categories are not mere beliefs but binding constraints - they feel necessary. “The morning after the rite,” writes Gellner paraphrasing Durkheim, “the savage wakes up with a bad hangover and a deeply internalised concept”. This is not metaphorical: rituals install the structures of mind, the ways we think, feel, and parse the world. And because rituals differ between societies, different societies produce different compulsive thought-forms. Anthropology, not philosophy, provides the answer. Indeed, the anthropology of sympathetic and homeopathic magic, as catalogued in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, is itself a parade case of the failure of Humean psychology. Frazer, steeped in empiricism, tried to explain magical thinking through Humean association: like is associated with like, and contiguity creates belief. But, as Durkheim sees, this just doesn’t work. If association is free, it is directionless. Nothing constrains it; anything can be associated with anything. “Associations are born free but are everywhere in chains.” Why the chains? What enforces them? Empiricism has no answer. Ritual does. Ritual disciplines the mind. It makes associations compulsive, not optional. It binds the flux of experience into structure. Kant noticed this compulsiveness but could not explain it. He took it as a given, as something built into reason. But Durkheim shows that it is installed by society. Ritual, repeated performance, ecstatic solidarity are the mechanisms by which the voice of society becomes the voice inside our heads. 

This also explains how societies, wildly different in their cosmologies and practices, nevertheless each enjoy remarkable internal conceptual coherence. The human mind is not universal in structure; it is universally structured by ritual. What appears rational is the residue of irrational processes of collective bonding. The consequences of this view are dramatic. We become human not by thinking clearly, but by participating in rituals that embed collective categories into us. These rituals may be symbolic, theatrical, orgiastic, or mundane but they are the engine of cognition, the ground of social life. “Creatures like us control our intolerable volatility via collective rituals that constrain them.” Through ritual, cohesion, communication, and cooperation become possible. The constraints of reason, the capacity to share a world, are not natural givens, they are cultural products. The Enlightenment sought to escape this fact. Descartes in particular tried to leave the social behind, to found knowledge on the private clarity of reason alone. But even he was trapped by the voice of the collective. “Descartes seems to have tried to escape the social only to have been tricked into using concepts that were the social working inside of him.” His clarity, his distinctness, his idea of the cogito, these were not innocent. They were rituals of a new kind, secular rites of the mind, internalised forms of social authority. Still, Descartes might object: his concepts were not just any concepts; they bore the marks of logic, necessity, clarity. Surely no ritual sustains that? 

This is where Durkheim needs Weber. For if Durkheim explains how concepts become compulsive within a society, Weber explains how types of rationality emerge historically, through the evolution of ritual into rule, charisma into bureaucracy, myth into method. The cogito, far from being the asocial kernel of thought, may instead be the historical outcome of a specific civilisational trajectory, a ritual of disciplined introspection, born not in the forest clearing but in the study, in a society already on its way to becoming bourgeois, bureaucratic, and rationalised. In that case, Descartes’ clarity is itself the residue of social rituals. He may have banished the Church and tradition from the epistemic stage, but their voice remained, transfigured, sublimated, internalised. Reason, it turns out, may be the most cunning ritual of all. Durkheim asked why all men are rational, and not merely passive receivers of arbitrary associations. His answer was ritual: collective practices that install inescapable conceptual compulsions, binding individuals into shared mental worlds. But his theory alone could not explain the variations in rationality across cultures. For that, we need Weber, who asked a different but complementary question: why are some men more rational than others? What historical, cultural, and institutional conditions produce not just order, but systematicity, precision, and an all-encompassing rational style of life? 

Suppose, with Weber, a community that has shifted from magical religion to a transcendent, jealous god, one that forbids all magical dealings and replaces them with moral and natural laws. This deity cannot be bribed; no amulets, no sacrifices, no favours. It is a god of rules, not patronage. Such a theology installs a moral order premised not on ritual ecstasy but ritual solemnity, which penetrates the entirety of life. All men become priests. Daily activities take on ritual gravity. The sacred is no longer limited to the temple, the oracle, the seasonal festival, it is diffused across every aspect of mundane existence. Such a religion, as Weber describes, is scriptural. Writing itself becomes sacred. Context-free statements emerge, statements that treat all men equally, abstractly, apart from concrete status or rank. The form of the statement, its universal reach, replaces the particularity of myth. Exemplary stories give way to legal prescriptions. The community now communicates its meanings and moral obligations not through tales, but through rules. And rules demand consistency. They invite systematisation. Disputes over interpretation become possible, even necessary. Theoretical justifications grow. Rival theories proliferate. Heresy appears. To be wrong is no longer just to be deviant or impure, it is to violate internal consistency. Faith becomes something one has rightly or wrongly. It is no longer sufficient to be loyal or pious; one must be doctrinally precise. This shift from narrative to theory, from story to scripture, coincides with a socio-political transformation. Commercial relations become widespread. The division of labour is extensive. Political order is stable. Contracts replace kinship loyalties; clan or chief no longer structure obligation. Rule of law, not personal patronage, organises society. Under these conditions, the rituals that maintain respect and cohesion shift too. Status-based respect must be periodically dramatised in emphatic, theatrical rituals. But contract-based respect is quiet, diffuse, even-tempered. It is not periodic but continuous. Trust and cooperation become habits, not performances. The entire social atmosphere changes: solemnity becomes sobriety, spectacle becomes routine. Durkheim’s compulsive categories change their form in this new context. They no longer impose a specific concept, this tree is sacred, that word is taboo, but rather instil reverence for a formal order. “Sacredness adheres to a formal order, not to selected items in the world”. 

What is sacred now is not the content of belief, but the method of belief: consistency, system, seriousness. The sacred becomes symmetrical, unselective, evenly distributed. No longer restricted to high days and holy places, it is now everywhere and always. The ecstatic becomes the sober. And the absence of visible symbols becomes the mark of the highest faith. What used to be a specific rite now becomes a disposition, an ethos. A reverent attitude to all action. A structured seriousness. A devotion without theatre. This transformation explains why rational planning becomes possible. Curiosity is no longer sated by oracles or revelations; it is extended by doubt, driven by discipline. Miracles are not expected. Knowledge is earned, slowly, rigorously. Theory addiction emerges. Thought becomes compulsive, not optional. Faith must be coherent, not comforting. Anxiety replaces magic. The individual cannot manipulate the divine, cannot trade or plea. They can only look for signs. And the best sign is the sober and successful performance of one’s calling. Hence, individuals throw themselves into their work, not for money, or prestige, or pleasure, but to allay fear. Inner torment replaces external bribery. The need for reassurance becomes internalised. 

This is the birth of a new kind of rationality. Its root is not reason but unreason. Not calculation, but terror. People do not act rationally because they are enlightened, but because they are haunted. “They aren’t in it for the money, the success, the riches and power, they’re there to allay inner fear.” This fear cannot be soothed by rituals of forgiveness or acts of loyalty. Only consistent, rule-bound behaviour offers the hope of salvation. Even then, predestination means nothing is guaranteed. But the compulsions of work, duty, consistency, these now become spiritual in nature. This, paradoxically, breaks the collective action problem. In most societies, being the first to follow the rules doesn’t pay, it makes you vulnerable. But in this new spiritual economy, the compulsions are internal. No one needs to monitor you. The fear is in you. The voice of society has become your conscience. This allows for unprecedented levels of cooperation, rule-abiding, and productivity. It lays the foundations of what Weber called the “rational capitalist spirit.” It is not pleasure, nor utility, that drives it but a terrified, theory-laden search for reassurance in the face of a silent God. 

Durkheim’s notion of the sacred has here undergone a total inversion. Where once the sacred was occasional, ecstatic, symbolically rich and spatially defined, it is now universal, sober, abstract, and constant. The whole of life becomes religious but in a new form. Not via symbols but via formal constraints. Ritual solemnity no longer clings to particular practices, but permeates all practice. The sacred becomes procedural. Society is no longer stratified by sacred hierarchies, but unified by abstract norms. Trust becomes cognitive, not affective. Rational planning becomes possible because faith now demands theory, consistency, and duty. One must forsake the world in order to gain it. And thus, irrational torment produces the most rational society in history. 

Sacred Compulsions and Universal Reason: Weber’s Diagnosis and Gellner’s Defense of Rationality

Is this Weberian theory true? No one knows. But if it is, then it answers a deep philosophical worry posed by Descartes and latent in all attempts to ground knowledge in first principles: where do our compulsions come from, and why do we trust them? Descartes thought he had escaped culture by submitting all claims to the court of reason, stripping away everything but what could be known with absolute clarity and distinctness. But Weberian sociology tells another story, one in which Descartes, far from escaping culture, codified a particularly intense and historically contingent one. He systematised a compulsion already socially installed. “He feels compelled to submit ideas to symmetrical treatment.” The Cartesian imperative, to treat all concepts in formally equivalent ways, to distrust partiality and demand clarity, is not a universal birthright of the human soul. It is, in this reading, a product of a particular form of ritual life: one in which inner sobriety replaces outer ecstasy, and symmetry becomes sacred. “Cartesianism now becomes Webero-Durkheimian: nothing other than formal, symmetrical compulsion is authoritative. That is what Pascal could not forgive him”. Pascal, with his intuition of divine mystery, recoiled from Descartes’ cold geometries. 

But Descartes wasn’t denying the sacred; he was transferring it. The sacred had moved from the heavens to the structure of argument. The commandment was no longer “Believe,” but “Be consistent.” In this view, Descartes did not invent rationality, he gave ritual sanction to a new kind of unreason. “Sobriety is the excitement of the puritan”. The intoxication now came from formal coherence, the ecstasy from abstraction. Durkheim had placed Reason on top of Unreason, showing that all categories, even the most rational, are formed through shared compulsions. But Weber reversed this again: in the heart of modern Reason, he found Unreason. “Durkheim located Reason under savage Unreason: Weber identified Unreason under modern Reason”. Thus, the compulsive categories of modern Cartesian man, which seem detached from any ritual or communal practice, are in fact deeply embedded in a diffuse but potent form of ritual solemnity. They are not tied to a temple or priesthood, but they are no less sacred. The universal, context-free nature of scientific and philosophical propositions, their impersonality, their symmetry, their claim to be valid for all, is not the mark of their purity from culture, but of a particular kind of cultural success: the transformation of religious terror into theoretical addiction. The inner torment that once led the Calvinist to search for signs of election now leads the scientist to seek coherence, the philosopher to fear contradiction. Descartes didn't escape culture, he crystallised it. He formalised the compulsions of a new civilisation. If reason is rooted in social custom, is it an illusion? Is it merely a dummy erected by a historically specific order? If so, should we abandon its claims to universality? 

Gellner refuses this relativist slide. For him, rationality is a historically contingent development, but one whose internal structure allows it to transcend its origins. “Cosmic exile is an illusion,” he writes, but exile from pre-scientific culture is not. We are not aliens in an absurd universe, but we have left behind the worlds of myth, magic, and kin-based truth. We are exiles from them. Reason, for Gellner, is real. It is universalistic, generic, and potentially present in everyone, though often inhibited by custom, authority, or ritual. What distinguishes it is its symmetry: it applies the same standards to all claims, subjects all evidence to the same logic, and acknowledges no privileged knower, no hidden oracle, no sacred text exempt from scrutiny. There are no privileged locations. No person, no institution, no tradition possesses incarnate knowledge. There are no “others” who speak for the divine, no initiated who know what the profane cannot. “All cognitive claims are equal and judged by the same criteria,” Gellner insists, “which in principle can be applied by everyone.” 

This is not merely a political egalitarianism, but a cognitive one. Rationality demands that every claim be tested, every theory scrutinised, every source questioned. And this demand, once internalised, spreads outward: from symmetry among people to symmetry among concepts, and finally to symmetry among phenomena. The world becomes a single system, governed by the same laws everywhere. What applies to one part must apply to all. There is no place where different rules hold. This is the true revolution of rationality: not its emergence from pure reason, but from compulsions that demand impersonal consistency. Rationality is a system of rules, formal properties, and rituals of justification that emerged from fear and discipline and gradually came to monopolise the space of legitimate thought. And once established, it tolerates no rivals. It is not one language game among others as the late Wittgenstein might argue, rather, it is a system that abolishes language games. It doesn’t appeal to custom, it doesn’t bend to community, and it doesn’t make exceptions. It is, in Gellner’s view, a cold, jealous god: one that offers no comfort, but unrelenting order. And in that, perhaps, it is more religious than any religion. 

Reason’s Five Rivals: Tradition, Authority, Experience, Emotion, and Trial-and-Error

Reason, as Gellner frames it, opposes five rivals: tradition, authority, experience, emotion, and piecemeal trial-and-error. It is not content to share space with them. It seeks to replace them, to submit all truth claims to a single criterion. But this monotheism of method, this insistence that there must be one and only one test for truth, raises its own uncomfortable question: where does this single criterion come from? Can we assume it, simply because it feels inevitable? 

Wittgenstein didn’t think so. He imagined the world not as a coherent system, but as a patchwork of incommensurable practices, language games with no final rule, no meta-language to adjudicate between them. There is no “single touchstone,” no unifying principle that can legitimate them all. A baker doesn’t need a philosopher to know how to bake; a priest doesn’t need a physicist to know how to pray. Wittgenstein’s late philosophy denies any super-framework, denies even the possibility of one. Rationalism, then, appears not as the culmination of reason, but as one peculiar language game among others, albeit one that has become imperial. Hume too considered such a fragmented world. But unlike Wittgenstein, he recoiled from it. His scepticism was always tethered to an underlying optimism about the uniformity of human nature and the generalisability of empirical method. But even so, Hume never offered a justification for the single criterion. He assumed it, even as he undermined it. This tension remains alive in all post-Enlightenment thought: we act as though the world is structured by one coherent method of inquiry, but we rarely justify the assumption. “It is in this sense,” Gellner writes, “that Rationalism looks as if it might be the offspring of monotheism: a single and exclusive deity led us to the notion of a unique and homogeneous fount of truth. 

Jealous Jehovah taught mankind the Principle of Excluded Middle. Once deeply internalised, the idea becomes detached from its theological root”. The idea that all truths must be either true or false, that there are no mysteries, no ambivalence, no plural truths, stems not from reason itself but from a particular theological worldview: one God, one Truth, one Law. Rationalism is monotheism in secular dress. And like its theological ancestor, it is jealous. 

Tradition

Its first target is tradition. Rationalism replaces organically grown, multi-layered, culturally embedded structures with single-plan designs. Instead of a slow accretion of local knowledge, it seeks total clarity and abstract justification. Common law, with its layered precedents and case-specific adaptability, is Romantic and traditional; Roman law, codified and systematic, is rational. So too in architecture: Gothic cathedrals reflect time, place, improvisation; Haussmann’s Paris is rationality imposed from above. Rationality prefers grids. 

Authority

Its second target is authority. If you follow a command because someone told you to, this contradicts reason’s core premise: that truth must be seen, not obeyed. Authority often justifies itself as the conduit of unique revelation - God, the State, the Nation, the Prophet. But even tradition is more honest: it doesn't claim to be unique, just old. Authority claims to be both - and its demand to not be questioned is what reason rejects most violently. But here authority begins to collapse under its own weight. As Gellner puts it, authority is self-defeating: “If there’s a reason for following authority, it’s the reason, not the authority, that matters.” And if there isn’t, then it’s coercion. 

Still, those who speak for authority often resist this logic with passionate bitterness. Cardinal Newman mourned that many harboured “a real antipathy against revealed truth, which it is distressing to think of.” But this is circular: if truth is revealed, it can’t be argued. If it can be argued, it’s not revealed. The same logic torments Barth: “The Judge is the Saviour,” he writes, trying to reconcile justice and mercy. But authority’s ultimate claim is to be beyond argument and in that lies its unreason. Sometimes, this unreason cloaks itself in science. Psychoanalysis once claimed special knowledge of the unconscious, inaccessible to ordinary methods of verification. The more unfalsifiable, the more authoritative. The triangle of rationalism, centralised religious authority, and freelance superstition is unstable. “In the seventeenth century,” Gellner notes, “contrary to the Weberian theory on which we have in the main relied, the wilder forms of superstition were often aligned with the new rationalism. Alliances will no doubt continue to oscillate”. Today, political populism flirts with science-sounding nonsense, post-truth conspiracy, and techno-gnosis alike, proof that authority, rationalism, and superstition may be rivals, but they are also uneasy bedfellows. 

Experience

Reason also opposes experience, or at least the fetish of personal experience. For rationalism, what matters is not whether you saw it, but whether anyone could. This makes it incompatible with the sacred event, the revelation, the miracle. Once again, the sacred cannot be shared, and that which cannot be shared cannot be scrutinised. Trumpism exemplifies this collapse: the appeal to sacred sources disguised as reason. The “I feel it in my gut” becomes political epistemology. Experience becomes untouchable. Rationalism responds: no gut feelings, no visions, no witnesses, just hypotheses and evidence. Therapies, political or psychological, are expelled by rationalism.

The philosophers see this tension most clearly. What method should the mind use to seek truth? Clarity and deduction (Descartes)? Or experience and inductive learning (Hume)? The rationalist insists that clarity wins, that the mind can, with enough effort, abstract itself from error. But even this clarity, as we've seen, may be haunted by inherited ritual: sobriety-as-ecstasy, symmetry-as-faith, coherence-as-salvation. Reason, then, does not merely oppose tradition, authority, experience, emotion, and trial-and-error. It replaces them with something structurally theological: a total system, a jealous standard, a single principle of evaluation. But unlike its predecessors, it does not confess its sacredness. It claims only neutrality, impersonality, universal applicability. And in doing so, it hides its origins. 

Chomsky’s conception of a pre-wired mind - Cartesian in the sense that it exists independently of experience - may explain the source of our mental structures, but it says little about the validity of what those structures produce. Just because we are predisposed to make certain kinds of inferences or generate specific grammatical forms doesn’t mean those inferences or sentences are true. Chomsky’s model helps account for the architecture of cognition, but not its justification. What if our minds are wired to affirm certain ideas, not because they’re true, but because we can't help it? Even if a conclusion is psychologically inescapable for me, that does not make it valid. Cognitive inevitability is not epistemic legitimacy. This confuses, as many frameworks do, the source of an idea with the justification of that idea. Behaviorists make the same error from the other side. They reduce the mind to stimulus-response chains, a pattern of reactions wholly explainable in terms of experience. But empiricism here becomes self-defeating, it begins with experience and ends by theorising, a priori, about how all mental life must emerge from it. Thus, it becomes a metaphysical dogma: the mind must be shaped from the outside. The behaviorist denies pre-wiring to defend the sovereignty of experience, while Chomsky affirms pre-wiring but with no capacity to justify its outcomes. Both fail to distinguish between how we come to believe something and why we ought to. 

So we are left with the fundamental question: what validates a cognitive claim? Do facts validate reasoning, or does the cogency of the reasoning itself do the validating? In either case, the answer lies not in the source, not in experience, tradition, emotion, or divine decree, but in a structure of argument that no person or authority can finally possess. No individual, no sacred text, no institution can claim the role of terminal authority. As Popper insists, science is not a source of final truth but only a mechanism for eliminating falsity. We edge closer to truth not by discovering it directly, but by discarding error. This asymmetry leaves us in a world without oracles. "Corrupt judges are useless", and experience, Wilde quipped, is just “the name people give to their mistakes.” 

But can experience be purified, abstracted enough, to perform this eliminative function? Or is it too contaminated by our desires, our priors, our symbols? What appears to be "evidence" is never raw, it is always interpreted. The judge, to borrow Gellner’s phrase again, cannot be clean. In such a system, Reason has to act without guarantee: it investigates, eliminates, revises, but never settles. This is clearest in the uneasy relation between Reason and Emotion. Romanticism treated this division with suspicion, seeking to reintegrate feeling into truth-seeking and moral life. Emotion seemed appropriate to life’s deeper decisions. “Reason is appropriate in finance,” Gellner writes, “but less so in the choice of marriage partner”. Yet this neat dichotomy collapses. People rationalise their feelings and emotionalise their reasoning. Descartes tried to keep them separate seeing thinking as a cool substance and feeling as disruptive whilst Spinoza attempted a synthesis, crafting a rational ethics that would bring the soul into alignment with the order of the universe. But this sage-like life of fulfilment-through-reason remains more fantasy than method. Hume and Kant, though often seen as opposing figures, both exposed the limits of this rational project, albeit differently. For Hume, feelings were not irrational but non-rational, they were “existences” in us, autonomous, not subject to logical derivation. We can observe our preferences, but we cannot reason our way to them. Calm passions might appear rational, but they are simply less noisy feelings. Reason can’t tell us what we prefer, it only tells us how to pursue it. 

Thus, for Hume, morality begins with sentience: with the felt experience of pain and pleasure, not with deduction. Utilitarianism grew from this soil: it locates value in feelings, not ideas, and seeks to optimise them. Rationality plays an instrumental role of selecting means, not ends. Kant, in contrast, viewed sensations as contingent and unstable, incapable of grounding moral law. Feelings come and go; they are accidental, even shameful. “You might as well identify with your National Insurance Number”, Gellner quips, mocking the arbitrariness Kant saw in basing identity on emotion. For Kant, morality comes from reason because only reason is impersonal and universal. The self isn’t a bundle of passions; it is a form, structured by laws it gives itself. Kantian identity is fastidious and aloof, a product of purification, not personality. Like a customs union without a home, the Kantian soul is nowhere in particular. We are visitors to nature, not participants in it. In both Kant and Durkheim, the legitimacy of knowledge and the formation of a valid self are entwined. But if reason detaches us from culture, example, and organic belonging, what does it provide in return? The rational world is one of suspended certainty, endless revision, unstable roles. In a society governed by reason, there are no inherited statuses, no obvious scripts. Each individual must navigate without a map, their identity unanchored, their moral standing unconfirmed. 

Emotion

The world is cognitively fluid, impersonal, and cold. The reason-emotion debate took on new life after Darwin, when nature herself became a source of authority and a more forgiving one than Kant’s disembodied Reason. The lower faculties of instinct, drive, libido acquired new prestige. Nietzsche and Freud emerged not as post-Romantics, but as Darwinised moralists, turning from reason toward energy, will, and repression. They abandoned the idiom of cool reflection and law-bound autonomy in favour of buried forces, dynamic tensions, and dark economies of the self. Freud, with his instinctual drives, and Nietzsche, as his more powerful philosophical precursor, both suggest that the architecture of the mind is not a rational system, but a battlefield. In this world, the rational ego becomes a manager of chaos, not a sovereign legislator. The dream of moral self-grounding through Reason recedes. We become interpreters, not authors, of ourselves. And if this is the case, if truth, value, and selfhood are not derivable from one single rational method, then rationalism itself begins to look less like the culmination of intellectual history, and more like one myth among others: a final relic of monotheism, haunted by its dead god. 

Trial and Error

Reason stands opposed not only to tradition, authority, experience, and emotion, but also to the humble, adaptive processes of piecemeal trial and error. In this confrontation, Reason is system and method - deliberate, coherent, seeking unity - while trial-and-error is spontaneous, partial, reactive, shaped by circumstance and contingency. The latter evolves, the former designs. Where Reason aspires to structure and generality, trial-and-error learns from mishap, improvises, and forgets. American pragmatism attempted to valorise the piecemeal approach without regressing into tradition. It looked like empiricism, but with an American twist, flexible, forward-looking, self-correcting. “It commends opportunism with an American face”, Gellner notes, capturing both its democratic optimism and its shallow utilitarianism. There is no final method, only what works now. Inquiry becomes a permanent experiment, answers provisional. Truth is what survives, not what corresponds. 

Yet this pragmatism, however adaptive, still smuggles in Reason: it watches, selects, reflects, keeps a ledger of its failures. Even in its messiest form, it cannot help but observe itself. Gellner offers a sketch of Reason not as a person or an ideology, but as a kind of impersonal moral figure. She is generic in her procedures, systematic, and self-disciplined. Her demands are painful and seldom rewarded. She does not speak of values, as Hume reminded us, remaining silent where others proclaim. Her validity comes not from a set of prior truths, but from the style of her operations. She is self-justifying, but not arbitrary - what she does could be otherwise, but isn’t, because only this path preserves consistency, transparency, and impartiality. She is symmetrical in her dealings. She offers the same judgment to all who pose the same question, no matter who they are. She recognises no priesthood, no caste, no entitlement by status or lineage. She does not confer truth by decree, but by procedure. Her even-handedness is not tolerance but discipline. Her independence from personal interest, social embeddedness, or historical contingency marks her as transcendent, but not in the religious sense. Rather, she is untethered. She does not belong to any organism, biological or social, within which she might happen to operate. Her functioning is not reducible to her context. 

Because of this, Reason threatens every personal hierarchy. If all must argue and none may pronounce, then no one may rule by fiat. The moment reason enters, the spell of sacred persons breaks. And yet, this same universality can seem cold, inhuman, detached. Reason does not confer belonging. It levels. It excludes particularity. It offers no home, only rules. No heritage, only equality. The noble ideal of symmetrical availability can seem, in practice, like exile. We are recognised only when we are no one in particular. Reason, in this sense, resembles the state in its modern form being abstract, impersonal and normative. It doesn’t love you. It doesn’t need to. 

Cunning Enemies: Hegel, Marx

The enemies of Reason are not always dogmatic priests, irrational mobs, or occult mystics. Sometimes they are quiet, ordinary, mundane. The very tools and systems Reason creates to clarify the world - concepts, disciplines, ideologies - eventually begin to obscure or even exclude it. From Descartes’s luminous clarity to Weber’s rational bureaucracy to Kant’s moral law, Reason was once cast as the calm arbiter of truth, detached from emotion, tradition, and authority. But there were always wilder shores beyond this cool lucidity. 

Hegel responded to Kant’s tidy world by dragging Reason into the hurly-burly of history. For Hegel, Reason isn’t a static mirror for truth but a historical force, a protagonist in the drama of time. It grows, develops, suffers, contradicts itself, becomes alienated and reconciled. Order, for Hegel, is the self made rational; disorder is the alien intrusion that threatens our self-possession. The mind-body problem is rewritten as the dialectic: how the rational self interacts with the sensuous natural self across the ages. In this movement, rationality itself becomes the secret of history. The world becomes a theodicy of impersonal Reason, guiding human life through culture, error, conflict, and reconciliation toward the eventual fulfilment of Spirit. “The real is the rational,” Hegel declares in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837). This historical cunning mimics Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the private aims of individuals unknowingly fulfil a greater, rational design. Even culture, once a source of distortion for Descartes, is here transformed into an instrument of Spirit, the medium through which error is transmuted into wisdom. In Hegel’s schema, every setback is a prelude to synthesis, every contradiction the seed of a higher unity. The implications are grand: meaning is real, history has a telos, and rationality redeems it. 

Marx and Engels refused to grant Spirit such primacy. In The German Ideology, they posed the decisive counter-question: is history driven by metaphysical Reason, or by material needs and human activity? Their answer was blunt - materialism. Human life is shaped by work, by production, by the satisfaction of needs. Ideas are not autonomous spirits floating above history but the ideological foam produced by its economic surf. But in asserting this, Marx also narrowed the horizon. He assumed, somewhat hastily, that economics dominates all. Coercion, however, is not always reducible to economic relations. The state, ideology, war, and law all exert autonomous force. Marx, despite railing against idealism, developed his own kind: one in which the proletariat carries the eschatological burden once shouldered by Reason itself. This synthesis - bourgeois rationality blended with Hegelian teleology - was both compelling and flawed. It lacked the luminous clarity and impartial discipline of earlier Reason. Its rationality was historically contingent, infused with mysticism, and at times opaque. It absolutised a particular process within history and elevated it to the status of a universal principle. In doing so, it became a deviant form of Reason, no longer procedural and impartial, but historical, goal-oriented, and self-justifying. 

Still, this Cunning of Reason must be understood in relation to what Gellner calls “straight” Reason, a version that is tidy, even-handed, transcendent, and not embedded in the very history it seeks to explain. Kant, by contrast, offered no such theodicy. His dualism between Reason and Nature echoed Descartes’ cosmic exile. Reason can know only what is tidy, formalisable, categorizable. Thus, Nature, to be known by Reason, must be tidied and arranged into a system, bureaucratically organised, “no facts escape a shared order”. But in doing this, Reason builds a world that has no place for itself. In this world-machine, everything is mechanism: input, output, law-bound motion. There is no room for autonomous beings who freely conceive and obey laws and no room for morality, for identity, for the person. “It has room for mechanisms which obey natural laws: it has no room at all for beings which autonomously conceive laws, natural and moral, and which freely and rationally choose to conform to the latter”. Reason, in Kant’s vision, is extra-territorial: it belongs neither to Nature nor to experience. It bears our identity and gives us our values, yet it lives in exile from the world it helps to construct. We cannot know it directly, only infer its presence through the fruits of its labour. 

The paradox is sharp and painful: “Reason is self-devouring, because it engenders a world in which there is no room for itself”. The mundane enemy of Reason is thus not fanaticism, but the very system that results when Reason’s methods are too faithfully applied. In tidying the world, Reason expels itself. This, finally, is the tragedy: Reason, untethered from tradition, unanchored by authority, unmotivated by feeling, unable to dwell in experience, and hostile to piecemeal improvisation, constructs for itself a kingdom of logic where it can no longer live. A cosmic exile of its own making. Hegel tried to close the gap that Descartes and Kant left yawning, between Reason and Nature, by claiming that Reason itself grows into Nature, that the divide is historical, not ontological. Spirit becomes flesh, gradually, dialectically. But Schopenhauer abandoned even the attempt. His rejection was starker and deeper. 

Naturalism: Nietzsche, Freud

In The World as Will and Idea, he declared all willing to be bad. Will, for him, was not moral agency or rational striving, it was the brute metaphysical substrate of life itself. Action was an expression of this blind force, and therefore inherently corrupt. Morality meant inaction. The good life became a life of passive contemplation: aesthetic, detached, almost inert. Here, Schopenhauer fused Buddhist renunciation with Platonic valuation of contemplation over action, filtered through the lens of 19th-century aestheticism. Salvation was no longer ethical striving or rational clarity, it was more like admiring a beautiful object. “As spectator, the collection-owner fuses with the sage”. This wasn’t simply epistemic retreat, it was moral inner emigration. Pessimism replaced progress. The good became not improvement of the world but flight from pain. Knowledge was no longer an ambition, it became irrelevant in the face of a metaphysics that made striving pointless. For Schopenhauer, Nature is causal, biological, proto-Darwinian, driven by a metaphysical Will: brutal, voracious, insatiable. It wants, consumes, exhausts, then begins again. A Will that never rests, never ceases, that knows no peace or pleasure. “There is only the mathematical, extensionless boundary between as yet unsatisfied, hungry, unfulfilled, tormented craving, and weary, depressed, satiated exhaustion. He altogether seems to ignore temporally extended pleasures, such as lying in a hot bath”. In place of Hegel’s cunning machinery, Schopenhauer offered the raw mechanics of lust. But if Will is forever thwarted, it must eventually turn on itself. 

Nietzsche agreed, but inverted the judgment. If this is what Nature is, why call it bad? Why denounce it? In whose name? Nietzsche's brilliance lay in showing that even the ascetic moralist, even Schopenhauer himself, is merely Will in disguise, Will playing tricks on itself. Ascetic morality is not the defeat of lust, but its mutation. The priest is a seducer of the soul, and guilt is just another pleasure, more cunning than carnality. This vision blew apart the old Platonic hierarchy of higher and lower, reason and appetite. All of it is Will, Nietzsche insisted. The priest and the pornographer serve the same master. “It rang true and had great psychological depth”. Nietzsche stood Schopenhauer on his head, just as Marx stood Hegel on his. But even as he celebrated the Will, he could not avoid a covert valuation. He preferred lions to foxes, strength to cunning, boldness to trickery. But on what grounds? If everything is just Nature, if Will is all, there is no vantage point left from which to declare one mode of Will superior to another. Why is devious cunning less admirable than open violence? Nietzsche’s answer was aesthetic: cunning is ugly, it leads to decadence and decline. But this is a cheat. Aesthetic fastidiousness carries no more justification than the moral strictures it seeks to replace. It is simply another taste, one no more grounded in reason than the rest. Freud took this whole edifice and naturalised it in medical, bourgeoise, scientific terms. He took the Will and its system of unconscious drives and gave it rituals, techniques, practitioners. 

Freud lacked the philosophical coherence of Kant or the Dionysian grandeur and philosophical depth of Nietzsche. Yet he disseminated these ideas with astonishing effectiveness. Sexuality became the vehicle, the hidden engine of identity. But he didn’t see how deeply these ideas undermined rational values. Why repress or redirect the drives? In the name of what? Reason? But Reason, too, was now just another cunning disguise of the Will. If identity lies not in Reason, not in alignment with historical destiny, not in aesthetic contemplation or Stoic/Buddhist self-control, nor even in antinomian indulgence, then it lies somewhere else, somewhere indeterminate, private and unfixable. No Cartesian certainty, no Kantian consistency, no utilitarian calculation can deliver personal truth. Even Spinozan, Stoic or Buddhist serenity through rational self-acceptance is ruled out. 

The Unconscious devalues autonomy altogether. Inner convictions may be nothing but cunning instincts. The self becomes unknowable, not because it is too complex, but because the means we use to know it - reason, evidence, morality - are now suspect. They too may be forms of deception. In Freud’s therapeutic procedure, there is no public tribunal, no rational appeal. There is only the judgment of the Practitioner. And this, paradoxically, mirrors the ancient mystery cults. “In the therapeutic procedure, the sustained inversion of all the canons of Protestant-Cartesian rationality, - orderliness, restraint-marks and highlights the special condition, just as heightened formality and/or sartorial abandon had done in the more collective rituals of earlier mysteries”. Rationality is no longer the guide, but the barrier. Therapy is not a science, but a rite. And so the long arc that began with lucid, systematic Reason - symmetrical, impartial, independent - curves back upon itself in ritual, in psychology, in myth. 

The old enemies of Reason were fanatics and tyrants. But its new enemies are gentler and more intimate: curators, collectors, therapists, and sages. They do not burn books; they explain them away. They do not assault Reason; they dissolve it from within, through empathy, through irony, through suspicion. And so Reason, having purged the world of mystery, finds herself excluded from the world she made. In the name of freedom, feeling, therapy and identity, Reason is retired - not slain, but gently, politely set aside. Freud’s revolution represents not simply a content-shift in self-image, from rational agent or moral subject to a nexus of instinctual drives, but also a methodological inversion of Enlightenment norms. The self is no longer accessed through introspective rational clarity, nor through Spinozist acquiescence to necessity, but through confessional speech filtered by a licensed practitioner. “In the therapeutic procedure,” as Gellner notes, “the sustained inversion of all the canons of Protestant-Cartesian rationality, orderliness, restraint, marks and highlights the special condition, just as heightened formality and/or sartorial abandon had done in the more collective rituals of earlier mysteries.” What has emerged is a new pastoralism, a secular therapeutic culture grounded in appeals to authority that are no longer theological or epistemic, but affective and institutional. The Freudian unconscious is a kind of universal cognitive original sin, an always-present, hidden force that disrupts rational self-certainty. The key is not whether the self can know itself, but whether it can trust its inner convictions, convictions now always already suspect as disguised expressions of deeper, unconscious compulsions. 

The implication is devastating: “Nothing can tell her whether an inner conviction isn’t cunning Will. Only a Practitioner can tell her and there is no appeal against the verdict.” The role of reason, under this schema, is not to adjudicate but to submit and to surrender to the interpretive monopoly of the therapeutic guild. Freud thereby stands at the culmination of the naturalisation of man. As Gellner puts it: “Freud does indeed stand … at the culmination of the progression which established the naturalisation of man, the definitive inclusion of man in Nature, and the refusal to grant him extra-territorial status.” A moralistic world is retained which is saturated with therapeutic meaning, coded in layers, and promising salvation through revelation, but the guarantor of legitimacy has shifted from God or Reason to Nature. “A cosy, morally saturated, cognitively hierarchical, salvation-promising world is constructed; but its cognitively privileged realm, this time, seems to be provided by nature.” Freud’s irrationalism has a dual structure: content and method. In terms of content, the moral agent is displaced by a being of instinctual needs, whose fulfilment lies not in rational duty or utilitarian calculus, but in emotionally intense, libidinally charged relations. In terms of method, Freudian free association dismantles rational convictions through the active suspension of belief, creating a chaotic textuality decipherable only by the initiated interpreter. As in Marx, sovereignty is restored not in heaven but in the world: for Marx, in the class structure of history; for Freud, in the Unconscious. But where Marx retained a progressive teleology, Freud retreats into diagnostic pastoralism. No politics of emancipation emerges, only therapeutic mastery. That therapeutic mastery also comes with a political valence. 

While the liberal intelligentsia adopted Freud in the name of permissive moral liberalism, loosely arguing that if repression is bad, then all repression should be removed, this vulgar Freudianism missed the mark. Freud never argued that instinctual drives could or should be entirely liberated. The deeper truth of Freudianism, as Nietzsche grasped before him, is that these drives are cunning, protean, and self-deceiving. They don’t simply need unleashing, they require interpretation. But the fact that interpretation requires institutional gatekeeping (and yields no external test for validity) makes the whole enterprise deeply anti-Cartesian, anti-Enlightenment, and in its own way, authoritarian. This pastoral, therapeutic irrationalism has slowly come to replace the older rationalist vision. Its core authority is no longer found in Reason or divine order but in instinct, feeling, and intimate interpersonal relations. 

This tradition, deeply shaped by Freudian thought, is irrational not just in what it teaches (its content), but also in how it operates (its method). The Freudian shift transforms the self-image: we are no longer rational calculators or lovers of noble, abstract ideals. We are bundles of instinctual needs, governed by unconscious drives and haunted by repressions. Satisfaction now lies not in virtue, reason, or equality, but in the successful management, or strategic sublimation, of our lusts and attachments within tightly-knit affective groups. All the old masks are stripped away. Cunning ascetic codes, priestly disciplines, Enlightenment ideals are now all reimagined as instruments of repression, mystifications of our base impulses. Rationality becomes yet another disguise of the libido, one more elaborate system of denial. Cold Reason can no longer save us because, in this view, there is no rational self to be saved. As Gellner puts it: “Lusts and relations are everything”. 

And yet the irony is profound. This surrender to the primacy of instinct does not deliver peace or pleasure. It simply renders politics, justice, and even freedom incapable of satisfying us. Egalitarian participation cannot quench these deep, ceaseless appetites. Nor can the liberal promise of wealth and gratification. Desire leaks through every structure. Rationalist political ideologies, both left and right, are quietly, fatally undermined. And so, a certain vision of the Right begins to reassert itself, not the classical liberal or free-market Right, but something far older and more visceral: Romantic, illiberal, hierarchical, authoritarian, emotive, violent, and ritualistic. This Right meets the new Freudian picture of the self more honestly than the rationalist left ever could. It draws not on the clinical tameness of Freud, but bends Nietzsche's naturalistic moralpsychology into a wild, Dionysian metaphysics of power and domination. Freud may have naturalised the unconscious, but this distorted Nietzscheanism glorified it. This idiom is poetic, not medical. The appeal is not to the therapist, but to the warrior-priest. Liberal intellectuals, however, often take up Freud with a superficial moral permissiveness. If repression causes neurosis, then liberation must be the cure: remove all repressions. That becomes the crude syllogism. 

But Freud never argued this. He saw repression as necessary, even inevitable. Civilisation, for him, was precisely the work of repression. The problem wasn’t the presence of restraint, it was the hypocrisy and invisibility of it. Freud’s project was not emancipation, but unmasking. And the unmasking is methodologically radical. Freudian method suspends all previous beliefs and replaces them with free association, a stream of unfiltered, uncontrolled utterance, deliberately designed to devalue and delegitimate all prior convictions. The process is not logical, not empirical, not falsifiable. It is hermeneutic and confessional. Just as Marx replaced transcendental Reason with the historical unfolding of class interest, so Freud replaced reason with the unfolding of the unconscious. Sovereignty is no longer exiled, but returns lodged now in the hidden depths of the psyche. Gellner notes that “[t]he Unconscious is like universal cognitive original sin.” We are not just irrational; we are structured by our irrationality, and its source is metaphysical, not simply psychological. 

For humans now fully naturalised there is no transcendence, no rational soul beyond the world. We are fully inside it, and its laws are not noble, but cunning, carnal, deceitful. Nature, having absorbed man, now devours Reason. Darwin had already begun this process. His unification of the biological world abolished the old ontological divides. Nature became seamless. And yet, Reason always imagined itself as standing apart as an exception. Nature, however, allows no exceptions. Reason becomes, therefore, a fraud, a part of Nature masquerading as its judge. The naturalisation of Reason turns out to be the annihilation of its claims. Some theorists still attempt to salvage Reason through pre-established harmony or through pragmatism. Hegel offered one route: a dialectic in which Reason and Nature were stages in a developmental whole. 

Pragmatism and Incommensurability: The suicide of Reason: Quine, Popper, Feyerabend, Khun

But others, like Quine, pursued a more pragmatic reconciliation. For pragmatists, there is no cosmic exile. Reason is simply a function of evolved cognition. We need not distrust our cultural inheritance. In From a Logical Point of View (1953) and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), Quine offers a very American kind of optimism. There is no tragedy in our absorption into Nature. Knowledge and Nature were made for each other. Important truths are simply there, waiting to be discovered “in this happy period”. This is the contrast: Freudian naturalisation vs. Quinean naturalisation. Freud is a siege mentality rationalist. He suspects Reason. He treats it as a neurotic symptom. 

Quine is a providentialist. He believes Reason is at home in Nature. “Reason is the pawn of Nature, but Nature is so arranged that our Reason tells us the truth about Nature”. Both positions are naturalist, but they offer different answers to the same question: is there a cosmic guarantee for our commitment to Reason? The siege mentality answer is No - Reason is an illusion or a self-deception. The providentialist answer is Yes - Nature has arranged itself so that Reason can perceive its order. The trouble is that if Nature is all, then legitimacy must be ceded to it. And if Nature is fundamentally irrational, driven by lust, power, chance, and compulsion, then irrationalism is more at home in it than Reason. This is the dangerous pivot. The old Enlightenment dualism of Nature and Reason, body and mind, fact and value crumbles. What remains is either a flattened pragmatism (in Quine) or a naturalistic irrationalism (in Freud and Nietzsche). In both cases, Reason loses its throne. It becomes local, historical, contingent. In one, it becomes humble and domestic; in the other, it becomes neurotic and doomed. But in either case, the Enlightenment dream is over. The appeals to authority now come not from Reason, nor even from God, but from Nature, recast as the source of all drives, all meanings, all norms. And Nature does not argue. It whispers, hungers, deceives. 

The suicide of reason proceeds not only through absorption into nature, but through a more direct and devastating route: the impotence of reason to fulfil its own promises. This form of irrationalism arises not from metaphysical commitments to instinct or naturalism, but from within the performance of reason itself, its inability to deliver what it claims. This is the impotence argument: that the tools of reason, logic, mathematics, inference, verification, are insufficient or self-defeating. They collapse from within, and in doing so, drag down with them the structures of science, philosophy, and objective knowledge. There are many versions of this argument. Some point to the fragmentary nature of data. We simply do not possess enough secure information to warrant confident inferences. Others point to the formal limitations of mathematics and logic themselves, where incompleteness theorems and undecidability have rendered the foundational aspirations of logicist and formalist projects permanently inadequate. Gödel, Turing, and others showed that the dream of a fully self-justifying rational system was impossible. In the philosophy of science, this crisis becomes even more explicit. 

Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) tries to retain a Cartesian rationalism through the principle of falsifiability. Scientific theories cannot be confirmed, only refuted. But even this negative method turns out to be undermined. The problem lies in the role of empirical data. Data are never neutral; they are theory-laden, situated, contestable. What counts as a falsifier is often vague or disputed. And this leads Popper, unwittingly, into irrationalist territory. As Gellner notes, “whilst he succeeds in securing this for a ‘pure’ science, purified in accordance with his recipe, he does at the same time actually highlight the irrationality of our faith in the very extensive and important practical application of science, normally treated as an integral part of science”. That is, Popper secures the purity of science only by separating it from the real-world institutions and expectations of science and consigning those to irrational belief. The very idea of a "fact" begins to fracture. Facts are not innocent. They are always “theory-saturated.” No single fact can definitively falsify a theory, because the fact itself is understood within a theoretical frame. Thus, even Popper’s vision begins to dissolve. Lakatos tries to rescue some rational structure by proposing “research programmes”, bundles of theories, heuristics, and protective belts, but even he must admit this is a rough and flexible model, not a rigid methodology. 

As Gellner remarks, “It is difficult … to see it as anything other than near-abandonment of the attempt at providing science with a rational base”. Feyerabend takes this further. In Against Method (1975), he famously declares that “anything goes.” Science, for him, is not governed by a universal method but by an anarchic proliferation of ideas, tools, and tactics. Rationality, as a single standard, collapses. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn does not just describe the progress of science as cumulative. He reframes it entirely. Science, he argues, proceeds through paradigm shifts, periods of normal science governed by a shared conceptual framework, punctuated by crises that lead to revolutionary changes in that framework. Paradigms are not cumulative; they are incommensurable. The shift from one to another is not guided by shared rational standards, because the standards themselves change. Scientific truth, then, becomes historically situated, embedded in linguistic and institutional paradigms that cannot be judged from outside. Kuhn insists that later paradigms are “better” than earlier ones, but his theory offers no basis for this judgment. Improvement becomes a gesture of faith, not a rational conclusion. This is not a local or technical problem. It cuts across all domains of human inquiry. Collingwood, in An Autobiography (1939), makes a similar claim in a different idiom. Cultures, he argues, are self-sustaining and incommensurable. Each is embedded in its own presuppositions. One cannot step outside culture to assess it objectively, because the act of questioning is itself culturally determined. 

This is a parallel form of irrationalism: not that reason is absorbed into instinct or biology, but that it is trapped in linguistic, historical, or cultural worlds that render all standards local and provisional. Whether through Freud's suspicion of Reason, Kuhn’s shifting paradigms, or Popper’s internal collapse, the result is the same: the Enlightenment model of autonomous, self-justifying reason dissolves. We are left with competing authorities - nature, instinct, culture, paradigm - none of which can be validated from a neutral standpoint. The suicide of reason is not a single event, but a gradual self-disassembly. Reason turns on itself, reveals its internal contradictions, and exits the stage. What remains are the fragments: therapeutic instincts, naturalised selves, shifting scientific regimes, and cultural enclaves. Each has its own logic. None can claim universal authority. And so the modern world, deprived of Reason’s sovereignty, must improvise its legitimacy elsewhere through charisma, aesthetics, affect, or power. 

Language: Wittgenstein and Chomsky

Another blow to the sovereignty of reason comes not from biology, psychology, or the history of science, but from language itself. The Wittgensteinian revolution, particularly in its late phase, undermines the liberal dream of transparent communication and rational discourse by reasserting the primacy of communal forms of life. In Philosophical Investigations, language is no longer a logical scaffolding onto which the world is mapped (as it was in the Tractatus) but a set of overlapping, ritualised practices embedded in specific cultural contexts. The world we live in is not one of Gesellschaft, an abstract society of rational contracts and rule-governed communication, but rather of Gemeinschaft, of closed, status-bound communities where meaning is inherited, not reasoned. “As an account of the languages of primitive man, prior to literacy, or the emergence of an elaborate division of labour, or of doctrinal theology and conceptual centralisation,” writes Gellner, “this is not at all bad, though this is not how it was presented; so, without intending it, Wittgenstein had turned himself into quite a good theoretical anthropologist”. That is, the later Wittgenstein inadvertently becomes a chronicler of closed, traditional societies, whose rules cannot be rationally justified but only followed. Forms of life, for Wittgenstein, are given. They can be described, perhaps compared, but not justified. The very notion of rational justification presupposes a standpoint outside the form of life, which is precisely what cannot be obtained. The idea that one could appeal to neutral criteria of truth or correctness collapses. Language games are sovereign; their internal rules are absolute for those who play them. Competing systems of meaning are, in the strictest sense, incommensurable. There is no meta-language that can mediate between them. Thus, the Wittgensteinian move is not merely descriptive; it is epistemologically devastating. It dissolves the liberal hope for consensus through reasoned discourse. We inhabit communities of sense, not neutral arenas of truth. 

This tradition runs parallel and in tension with Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics. Whereas Wittgenstein points to the external social embeddedness of meaning, Chomsky highlights the internal, mental architecture that makes language possible at all. His work reveals that languages, despite surface differences, share deep structural properties, and that these rules are largely unconscious. “Languages are disciplined and rule-bound,” Gellner summarises, “and rules are unknown to users. Language has reasons the mind doesn’t know.” Like Durkheim’s observation that the categories of society are imposed upon individuals without their consent or awareness, Chomsky’s linguistics identifies a compulsiveness at the heart of cognition. We obey the imperatives of grammar without knowing we are doing so. Syntax is not learned inductively; it is triggered by exposure. It emerges from a pre-programmed structure of the mind. And this, in turn, suggests a kind of irrationalism: if the rules that govern language, and hence thought, are opaque to us, then the transparency of reason is a myth. We do not speak language; language speaks us. Gellner captures this with reference to Georg Lichtenberg’s formulation: not “I think,” but “it thinks.” 

The Cartesian ego is displaced. There is no sovereign self scrutinising its thoughts; there is only a system processing symbols through rules it cannot inspect. Language is “not just a ritual, but a ritual which makes a modular use of limited equipment, so as to produce an infinity of articulable and intelligible assertions”. But the capacity for infinite articulation is precisely what undermines the rationalist ideal. If thought is structured by unknowable and perhaps irrational constraints, then reason itself is no longer self-legitimating. Cartesian clarity vanishes into the black box of mental architecture. Chomsky’s pre-wiring puts limits on our thoughts not only in terms of structure but also in terms of intelligibility. The deep irrationalist implication here is that we are in the grip of a machinery we neither control nor fully comprehend. What appears to be rational discourse may only be the surface play of deeper, unconscious constraints. We can generate endlessly new thoughts, but we cannot step outside the system that generates them. Confronted with the Chomskyan revolution, the Cartesian ideal of thought asserting the luminous clarity of ideas deduced from first principles evaporates. In its place is a mind driven by unknown rules, a language running through us, a thought that no longer belongs to the thinker. 

This convergence of Wittgenstein and Chomsky completes the portrait of modern irrationalism. Whether in the historical succession of paradigms, the unconscious drives of Freud, the limitations of scientific method, or the structural compulsions of language, the Enlightenment model of reason is eroded from every angle. What began as a critique of metaphysics becomes a decentering of the subject itself. We are no longer rational agents evaluating the world from a secure position. We are inhabitants of language games, products of instinct, nodes in puppets of causality, networks of paradigms. There is no neutral ground, no Archimedean point, no cosmic guarantee underwriting our faith in reason. Whether absorbed into nature or fragmented by its own tools, reason no longer rules. And so we return, ironically, to the realm of myth, ritual, and community but now disenchanted, reflexive, and haunted by the dream of a rational order that never was. 

Reason Abandoned

Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs (1927) stands as a poignant indictment of modern intellectuals who abandoned the timeless pursuit of truth in favour of transient, local commitments. He laments the “collective treason” of the clerisy, those once detached thinkers who, instead of remaining universal, transcending ethnicity and class, succumbed to the pull of factional identities and partisan passions. Originally, clerics were imagined as free spirits, dedicated solely to eternal verities, unencumbered by mundane attachments. But with the rise of nationalism, class struggle, and ideological fervour in the 19th and 20th centuries, this ideal dissolved. Marxists, pragmatists, Nietzscheans, and existentialists alike substituted identity and commitment for proof, for verifiable truth, because proof no longer seemed attainable. Instead of objective grounds for belief, what held sway were the urgencies of identity, belonging, and passion. Yet Benda’s own defence of reason is undercut by his failure to grasp why irrationalism flourished. The intellectuals he castigates were not cynics or charlatans but often anguished rationalists who confronted the collapse of classical certainties honestly and earnestly. As Gellner reflects, “They were sensitive to the rational argument that no other truth is ever genuine, and mundane bondage is the only kind of truth available to us. It is the only kind which gives us real satisfaction, which corresponds to nature”. This acknowledgment, that truth is always embedded in, and limited by, the conditions of lived reality and social identity, is a key insight that Benda misses. The turn to irrationalism is not mere folly or betrayal but a tragic consequence of the suicide of reason itself, a phenomenon “announced and preached by people who were, by temperament, honest thinkers”. Nietzsche, often invoked as a precursor or architect of modern irrationalism, pursued his critique of reason with a rigour and sincerity that cannot be dismissed as mere reaction or bad faith. Benda’s defence of reason rests not on an intrinsic or philosophical justification but on its practical advantages, its utility as a tool for social progress, peace, or stability. 

This pragmatic stance, while understandable, offers no rational grounding for reason’s claim to supremacy. It is a defensive posture rather than a positive epistemology, one that begs the question: why privilege reason at all if it cannot guarantee truth beyond contingent interests? In this sense, Benda’s book betrays itself, articulating a pro-reason stance that ultimately fails to confront the deeper dilemmas modern thought faces. Thus, the landscape of modern intellectual life is marked by a tragic paradox. On the one hand, reason remains the ideal, the beacon of enlightenment and universalism. On the other, the very conditions of modern existence, historical, social, psychological, render reason impotent or compromised. The intellectual’s predicament is no longer one of ignorance or superstition, but of confrontation with the limits of rationality itself. 

The legacy of thinkers like Freud, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, and Chomsky has been to show that reason is embedded in frameworks and unconscious structures beyond transparent control, that scientific method is provisional and paradigm-bound, and that language itself is a social ritual rather than a pure medium of truth. Reason’s suicide is thus not a simple fall from grace but a profound crisis at the heart of modernity, where the aspiration to universal truth collapses into the fragmentation of identity and the tyranny of situatedness. In this light, the “betrayal” of the clercs is less a moral failure and more an existential condition. They are heirs to a rational tradition whose premises no longer hold unchallenged. Their shift to local commitments, partisan causes, and passionate identifications is a response to the emptiness left by the death of universal reason. They trade proof for identity because proof is no longer available; they anchor themselves in communal realities because the rational foundations of truth have dissolved. This is not mere abandonment but adaptation, even if it appears as a descent into irrationalism. 

The crisis is not only epistemological but also ethical and political: how to live and act meaningfully when reason no longer commands allegiance? The answer remains contested, but what is clear is that the suicide of reason is not the triumph of irrationality, but its anguished companion, the shadow cast by reason’s own limitations and failures. The landscape of irrationalism reveals itself as a complex constellation of challenges to the classical ideal of universal, sovereign reason. Popper and Feyerabend highlight the problem that competing theories remain empirically underdetermined, making no rational method available to decisively adjudicate between them. The regress argument shows that foundational premises themselves escape rational justification, leaving reason caught in an infinite loop. Collingwood and Kuhn emphasise that paradigms, self-contained and incommensurable, cannot be governed by any single, overarching rational principle. 

The insights of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud expose the dark recesses of the mind, where unconscious forces undermine rational clarity and trustworthiness in conduct. Hume’s sceptical demonstration that no rational validation exists for aims or values leaves passions as arbitrary, opaque, and potentially devious drivers of human behaviour. Wittgenstein dismantles the notion of a universal framework of conduct, revealing a plurality of “forms of life” where universal rationality dissolves. Chomsky and the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis show how language and thought are structured by rules beyond conscious knowledge or control, further fracturing the claim to transparent rationality. The Quine/Duhem problem complicates the empirical test of theories by interconnecting hypotheses so tightly that a failure can never clearly identify which part is to blame, adding further uncertainty. The holistic and romantic vision of society articulated by thinkers like Oakeshott insists on immersion in particular social contexts, rejecting any universal, trans-social standpoint. 

Rapid societal change only compounds this difficulty, making it impossible to isolate units for rational evaluation or to “learn from experience” in any straightforward way. Finally, notions of value incommensurability challenges the possibility of rational policy altogether, since competing values may resist any common metric or conversion. Taken together, these points form a checklist of the myriad ways in which reason’s claim to sovereignty has been undermined or complicated. They sketch a world where universal reason gives way to pluralism, contingency, unconscious drives, and situatedness. The classical Enlightenment dream of a single, rational standpoint from which to govern knowledge, values, and social order is replaced by a dispersed, fragmented, and often opaque reality. This renders the project of pure rationality not merely incomplete but structurally compromised, demanding new ways to understand human thought, culture, and politics beyond the ambitions of traditional rationalism. 

Reason, as a mode of legitimation, extends beyond mere intellectual assent; it shapes an entire way of life, a disciplined and orderly approach to both thought and conduct. This lifestyle is marked by precision and calmness, a steady and measured tone that refuses to be swept up in emotional excess or hysteria. It separates issues clearly, addressing them one by one without conflating matters or descending into muddle. Equality before reason means treating like cases alike, governed by stable and impartial criteria that exclude caprice and arbitrariness. The rational individual augments their capital, both cognitive and financial, not for immediate gratification, pleasure, or status, but as a matter of prudence and investment. This person acts on good reasons alone, recognising that genuine reason obviates the need for appeals to authority or ecstatic revelations. Restraint and self-governance define their comportment. Such reasons are systemised, embedded in simple but robust criteria for success in any given domain. The desacralisation of life and thought replaces superstition and arbitrary custom with habitual orderliness and an orderly division of labour. Rationality entails a sober, accountancy-like approach to measuring success and failure, where efficiency is the cardinal virtue. Social interactions are contractual, founded on mutual recognition of reasoned terms rather than tradition or status. 

Sociology of Reason

This vision insists on the necessity of dialogue between sociology and philosophy: where Weber provides a sociological account of a rationality-pervaded society, Descartes begins the philosophical groundwork for rational cognition. The economic dimension of rationality unfolds in two registers: production and consumption. Capitalism, as the archetype of rational production, crystallises aims with remarkable clarity, perpetual maximisation of accumulation through ruthless efficiency, including the mobilisation of human labour within expansive infrastructures. This system displaces tradition, custom, status, and simple technology, relying instead on the complex but calculable logic of market relations. Yet capitalism shares with political rationality the challenge of navigating modern complexity, where diverse, often incommensurable considerations defy simple quantitative assessment. 

Affluent societies have managed, in some cases, to temper capitalism’s ruthlessness by protecting workers against traditional exploitation and the harsher edges of modern industrial discipline. Notably, societies influenced by Confucian rather than Calvinistic values, such as Japan, suggest alternative models for the future, emphasising hierarchical, feudal-industrial attitudes that temper market logic with social restraint. Cognition, particularly science, parallels economic ruthlessness in its ceaseless exploration of the world, unconstrained by social or moral limitations. It generates powerful technologies that amplify productivity both materially and intellectually, fuelling the ongoing expansion of capitalist production and scientific knowledge alike. 

But the rational economy of production is counterbalanced by the economy of consumption, which has undergone profound transformation from early to late modernity. Early modernity was marked by frugality and restraint; late modernity, however, depends on mass production paired with mass consumption. Keynesian economics champions consumption as an engine of growth, but this raises the question: is mass consumption rational? Pre-agrarian humans may have been rational in their economic behaviour, restrained in their needs and demands as Marshall Sahlins famously argued in Stone Age Economics (1974). Agrarian life, by contrast, was trapped within Malthusian limits where shadows of starvation shaped human existence. Modernity breaks free from such constraints, creating affluence beyond immediate needs and demands, yet this surplus tends to serve status enhancement rather than basic survival. 

Affluent humanity, living in a world saturated with the fruits of rational production, is paradoxically prone to embrace facile metaphysics of user-friendly universes promising easy cognitive access and quick understanding. As this society revels in the benefits of rational technology and efficiency, it simultaneously indulges in the wildest excesses of unreason within its culture. Rational production coexists uneasily with irrational consumption and cultural life, where the thirst for meaning and identity often escapes the sober constraints of reasoned calculation. Cognition retains the sovereignty of evidence as a crucial survivor from Cartesian ideals of clear and luminous ideas. While nature and society remain distinct realms, and despite the dominance of various irrationalist trends in theories about science, the actual practice of science continues to rely on evidence-based reasoning. This distinction marks a tension between theory and practice: irrationalism may flourish philosophically, but scientific endeavour itself often resists it. Culture, however, has never been fully dominated by rationalism. 

Max Weber noted this tension vividly: the country where rational production first emerged was also deeply committed to a messy, untidy Common Law tradition and resistant to the tidy codifications of Roman Law. Culture is absorbed rather than pursued with a clear aim or specification. People learn social norms less through explicit rules than by avoiding gaffes, vague, intuitive missteps that we feel rather than precisely define. Strangers risk faux pas, and reason serves as a subtle form of social control, with gatekeepers enforcing norms. Even language reflects this: the irregularity of verbs and grammatical idiosyncrasies act as barriers to outsiders, preserving group boundaries. Culture, then, is akin to buttermilk, a symbolic residue left over once serious cognitive work like science is done. In power and politics, procedural rationalisation pervades, especially in bureaucratic institutions where language serves utilitarian ends. Yet when it comes to major uncertainties, such as Brexit or other crises, politics often shifts toward charismatic forms of leadership that reject logic and rational debate. Charisma is dramatic, unreasoning, authoritarian, and spurns the need for logical justification. Nonetheless, charisma and bureaucracy can coexist at the top levels of governance, as exemplified by Napoleon, who combined the charisma of command with the creation of orderly legal codes and efficient administrative systems. 

Politics remains less amenable to rationalisation than economics. Charisma often draws on communal arguments, emphasising life as participation in a shared culture rather than a series of market transactions. Oakeshott captures this with his contrast of community versus enterprise, emphasising that political life is about belonging and shared values, not bargaining and calculation. The “Dark Gods” argument suggests that real passion and political energy cannot be contained by finely tuned calculations or procedural rationality. This fusion of Dark Gods and communalism can escalate into dangerous ideologies when genetic or racial assumptions are introduced, as in fascism and Herderian romantic nationalism. These movements appeal to irrational attachments to blood, soil, and myth rather than reasoned discourse. 

Varieties of rational experience emerge from two primary limitations: first, reason cannot prove the soundness of its own procedures; second, it cannot impose those procedures uniformly beyond cognition. Though there is no absolute proof that rational procedures work, the astonishing growth of technology and scientific knowledge shows that they do function effectively in practice. However, ethics and broader aspects of life remain largely outside the purview of rationalist underpinnings. It remained entirely conceivable to Gellner back in the 1990's that rationality would one day retreat to a limited “ghetto,” confined to productive and cognitive domains, while other spheres of life continue to be governed by different, perhaps irrational, principles. I think this is what is happening right now. 

The label ‘Prometheus Perplexed’ captures the fundamental loss of autonomy that Descartes once aspired to secure through rationalism and self-creation. Rationalism, dubbed “the philosophy of the new broom,” aimed to sweep away superstition and tradition with clear, distinct ideas and autonomous self-legislation, but it ultimately failed to deliver on that promise. We cannot conjure ourselves ex nihilo; the dream of pure self-creation remains unattainable. Instead, we are a “race of failed Prometheans,” condemned to live within the limits rationalism sets even as it shapes our destiny. This new culture is marked by the separation of referential cognition from all other activities, a systematic submission of cognitive claims to an extra-social, centralised court of appeal, be it the demand for clear and distinct ideas or the primacy of experience, and the establishment of a single currency of reference that ultimately fractures the very limits of knowledge. 

Viewed sociologically, the philosophy of rationality reveals a unique and unprecedented form of Custom and Example, an internally consistent system that governs thought like a social practice. We become Descartes/Crusoe figures, isolated in an intellectual wilderness where history unfolds in three stages: first, the age of ritual, dominated by tradition and embedded practice; second, the age of spurious proof, where proof is sought but never fully trustworthy; and third, the age of absence of proof, where philosophy charts the terrain of scepticism and the limits of certainty. The crucial link is between autonomy and transcendence where independent knowledge is the condition for the autonomy of the individual knower, and that autonomy in turn underwrites the objectivity and transcendence of knowledge itself. Rationalism and empiricism are thus complementary components of a transcendent rationalism. To break free from traditionalist thinking, empiricism must serve as the final court of appeal, repudiating pre-scientific beliefs that evade critical scrutiny as a corporate body. The counterargument, that all observations are inevitably culture-soaked and subject to interpretive bias, is simply false. The denial of objective facts on grounds of social interest or historic positioning, as Sartre famously did in denying the existence of the Gulags, fails under scrutiny. The Gulags, Pol Pot’s genocide, and Hitler’s atrocities all happened independently of whether observers’ beliefs or social needs acknowledged them. The empirical data base overrides psychic or social needs in establishing reality. 

Conclusions

Rationalism, then, functions like the public relations department of a highly turbulent and internally divided organisation. It issues Cartesian, Humean, and Kantian codes of conduct and knowledge, projecting an image of clear reason and structured knowledge. Yet behind this polished exterior lies the intimate, often chaotic psychic life of the organisation, irrationalities, passions, and power struggles that rationalism’s public face attempts to conceal or smooth over. Rationalism’s grand narrative thus serves both as a beacon and a veil, promising autonomy and clarity while masking the enduring complexity and opacity of human knowing and being. The parricide argument captures a deep irony: reason, in its relentless drive to scrutinise and dismantle all claims to knowledge, ends up destroying its own foundations, its progenitor, the very conditions that made reason possible. In trying to justify itself through pure rational proof, reason undermines the assumptions and intuitions it originally relied on, pulling the rug from beneath its own feet. This self-destructive tendency reveals reason’s fragility, highlighting that its claims to universal authority rest on premises it cannot secure without contradiction. Closely linked is the impotence argument: reason cannot be definitively proved to be effective or reliable. No ultimate rational justification can establish the soundness of reason itself, because every attempt to do so either assumes what it seeks to prove or loops back in an infinite regress. 

This impotence leaves reason suspended, powerful in practice, indispensable to modern life, yet philosophically and culturally vulnerable. Its authority is never absolute but contingent, always open to doubt and revision. Finally, the suicide argument brings this all to a climax: reason is mad, insofar as it kills itself by the very act of self-reflection and critique. It dismantles the certainties that give it life, revealing itself as a system that cannot ground itself without contradiction or despair. This maddening self-negation does not imply reason’s uselessness but rather exposes its tragic condition, its brilliance entwined with its own undoing. Together, these arguments form a stark reckoning with reason’s limits, capturing the paradox that rationality, while central to modern knowledge and culture, is also intrinsically vulnerable, self-subverting, and inescapably entangled with the irrational forces it sought to overcome.

It is through Gellner’s lens - caught between the unrealised hopes of rationalism and the encroaching tide of irrationalism - that I have come to understand the deep tensions shaping the philosophy of education today. Education was once central to the rationalist project of industria, imagined as the means by which reasoning, autonomous individuals would be cultivated for participation in a coherent, truth-seeking society whilst simultaneously developing handrails for life to offset the alienating disenchantment of the Weberian world. But now that those conditions are disintegrating under the pressure of digital acceleration, ecological crisis, epistemic fragmentation, and political authoritarianism, the rationalist foundation of modern education has largely collapsed.

What troubles me most is the extent to which many dominant philosophical traditions within educational thought have aligned themselves with this collapse, often unknowingly. From post-structuralist scepticism, Heideggerian anti-modernism, linguistic, cultural and idenentarian relativism and post-truth pragmatism, these schools of thought, however sophisticated, do not stand outside the irrational drift of our cyberian condition. Rather, they mirror it. They echo the fragmentation, therapisation, and irrationalism that define a world in which knowledge has been outsourced to AI, meaning has been derealised by digital media, and human discourse floats without shared ground. Ironically, these philosophies offer a kind of conceptual sociology of our current condition but only at the cost of renouncing any commitment to reason, coherence, or collective progress.

There is little self-awareness in the philosophy of education about this. The very traditions that helped unravel the rationalist framework are now routinely presented as emancipatory, critical, or progressive. But there is no honest reckoning with the possibility that they are just reflecting a disoriented, post-rational age rather than fashioning tools for navigating it. Gellner’s warning, I think, was not simply about the decline of reason, but about the danger of intellectuals mistaking that decline for insight. Unless we confront the role these traditions have played in dissolving the rational-cultural infrastructure that education once relied on, philosophy of education risks becoming a ghost of itself where critique lacks direction, theory lacks ground, and reflection ignores consequence.