The Quest for Vision in a Confused World
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At the end of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment promised the triumph of reason. Superstition, religious dogmas and absolute rulers would no longer obscure or corrupt reality, and truth would bring freedom to all. But three centuries later, truth seems further away than ever. We aren’t free, but increasingly entangled in opaque technological structures. Unknown forms of intelligence threaten to turn arms in the hands of new corrupt leaders. False prophets present themselves in our frantic quest for meaning. Have the promises of the Enlightenment turned against us? Did we ourselves bring to power the excesses of the rational? Where do we find vision in this confused world? This eighth part in the Cultura Animi series contains essays of Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch, Benjamín Labatut and László Földényi.
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Index
The Quest for Vision: Past and Present
IntroductionLooking back on the ideas of Thomas Mann, Robert Musil en Edmund Husserl, Rob Riemen introduces the theme of this publication: the quest for truth and wisdom in a world that’s falling increasingly under the spell of lies, moral emptiness and fascism.
We still haven’t found that guideline, the vision needed to conquer the crisis of our civilization and regain a world in which every human being can live in freedom and in dignity.
Speculations on the Return of the Irrational
At Paul Lynch’s front door, there’s a print of Francisco Goya’s famous etching: a man lays on his desk with his head in his hands, while dark owls and bats soar behind him. The caption: ‘The sleep of reason begets monsters’ – only as long as we hold on to our sense of reason, we’re protected from the gloom of the irrational. Or should we interpret Goya’s caption differently? In a stunningly literary essay, Lynch warns us of a blind faith in objective reason. We can only defend ourselves against the excesses of the irrational, the Booker Prize winner argues, when embracing it as part of who we are.
Reason in arrogant rule falls asleep to the reality of what human beings truly are – all too human. And it is this kind of thinking that provokes the monsters from the deep.
Locusts in the Labyrinth
In nature, many animals benefit from moving in groups. Ants, birds or bats are more productive and better protected when part of a swarm. But sometimes, this collective rationality turns against itself. When locusts, due to environmental changes, instinctively start to move in a flock, this flock eventually turns into an all-consuming plague that first destroys its environment and then itself. What does man have in common with these locusts? In an urgent and insightful text full of striking images, Benjamín Labatut reflects on the role of logic and chaos, reason and imagination, individual and collective in a world on fire.
The irrational is something that bubbles from the deep within us in times of crisis. So perhaps all the folly we can see around us, all the seeming madness and disorder, is a response, an animal-like reaction to the world we have created.
Imprisoned in Cold Myth
Translation Ottilie Mulzet
The notion that after ‘the death of God’ we left all myths behind is erroneous, writes László Földényi. When man gave up its faith in a transcendent lawgiver, a void arose that itself changed into a belief. And in the absence of absolute truth or morality, every lie could grow into a reality, as long as enough people surrendered to it. In an essay that is as erudite as it is frightening, Földényi locates the roots of twentieth-century fascism at the emergence of a mass society, and asks the urgent question: where do we stand now?
One of the chief criteria of the modern mass spirit is to never leave even a single moment free and unutilized, as it is during these ‘empty’ moments that these metaphysical senses may easily appear, these senses that put the mass spirit and mass society into question.