I have spent a full week focused on reading, and haven’t allowed any programming distract me. I try to divide my time between my Korean study, Japanese readings in history, and more theoretical stuff mostly written in English. In this last category I’m currently stumbling through Wittgenstein and Derrida and Partha Chaterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Chaterjee is an easy read (although to be fair, it would be difficult to imagine how one could make the first of these two books an “easy read”) and although I’m only through the introduction, I already find some of his observations sharp and relevant.
What prompted me to post today is confusion I feel at his attack, by now quite familiar to me in my reading, on what he consistently refers to as “liberal-rationalists”. While I have a similar reaction to many other things I read in the same vein, Chaterjee’s succinct summary of his version of the argument makes it easy to reproduce for comment.
I am gradually beginning to understand the range of criticisms of “analytical” or “modernist” or “liberal-rationalist” and have begun to sympathize with some of their moves and choice of targets. However, I am still very uncomfortable with approaches which seem to result in blatantly circular reasoning or, to put it another way, seem to launch an attack on reason itself, by means of reasonable arguments, only then to go on and continue to use familiar methods of the “rational” mode both to argue their own positive case, and to condemn their opponents within their own camp of critical thinkers.
I will get to some specific examples from Chaterjee’s introduction shortly. I will first say that I’m familiar, or at least becoming familiar, with some of the potentialy responses to this. That is, there are ways in which rationality, and particularly its propensity for universality, progressivism, and a “logic of the present” are critiqued, rationality delimited, and then revived in a new delimited state. Much of this hinges on key debates on the nature and limits of language (which justifies my digression in the world of Wittgenstein and Derrida). However, I don’t believe this process, even if it is possible, escapes some of the consequences of relativism. I believe that what results is a necessary split amongst those who endorse this form of critique: They may choose to believe that the consequences of relativism are indeed great and hold that there is a moderate “third way” which neither suffers the totalizing ills of modern “liberal-rationalist” thinking nor the “Nietzschean” extremes of the other side. Another option is to profess that there are no disturbing consequences of relativism, or that there is no way to avoid such consequences (so we might as well deal with them), or that the normative judgments implicit with the identification of such consequences is merely a reflection of traces of “liberal-rationalist” thinking.
For those who are confused, read on for a less abstract example of a point in which I feel this issue arises.
Continue reading Liberal-rationalists