A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we accept rest… We must free ourselves from the sacrilization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something as essential in human life and human relations as thought.

- Michel Foucault

Reason & Eric Bellinger - Doin Too Much ft. Isaiah Jaay

Reason and Eric Bellinger have released a new rap and R&B fusion featuring Isaiah Jaay. This track showcases the talents of all the artists involved. Reason’s rapping is impressive, while Jaay and Bellinger deliver strong vocal performances. The fusion of styles is well-executed, making it likely to be enjoyed outdoors as the spring months approach. There is anticipation for more collaborations…

Reason & Eric Bellinger - Doin Too Much ft. Isaiah Jaay

If you’re innocent,

It’d probably be a good idea to show me why you’re innocent

Because I could use all the help I can in fighting for you

—-but that’s the way it is with panic. It takes you by the throat and doesn’t much listen to reason.
—Justina Ireland/Dread Nation

I just did it because it was what had to be done then and there

We measure and evaluate and judge. We distinguish and classify and categorize. We hypothesize and test and infer. By doing these things repeatedly, we construct a perfectly objective world that we can perfectly understand and perfectly control.

We use our understanding and our control to make ourselves happy. We see lack in our lives, and we focus on it like a problem to be solved. We reason that by increasing whatever is lacking, we will improve our well-being, and when nothing is lacking we will finally be happy. Then all of our desires will be satisfied, our aversions vanquished, and our beliefs confirmed.

It is this state of objective perfection that we seek. We want to be the perfect human animal, the one that has optimized its environment through control and thrives endlessly as a result. But in focusing completely on this singular goal, we miss something important. We forget to ask who it is that will thrive.

Read more…

The body overtook the brain

And all of a sudden it felt like thinking didn’t matter anymore

Like reasons didn’t matter

That felt great

It was so brief

Whew

Godly

#Fundamentalism

Ipazia […] Con il suo sacrificio cominciò quel lungo periodo oscuro in cui il fondamentalismo religioso tentò di soffocare la ragione.

Margherita Hack

Hypatia […] Her sacrifice marked the beginning of a long, dark period in which religious fundamentalism attempted to stifle reason.

Margherita Hack

#Fundamentalism

Kant did not overestimate human reason as much as he defined a standard that human reason rarely reaches.

The criticism that Kant overestimated human reason is actually very close to the position of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer argued that reason is far less powerful than Kant believed. In his view, human behavior is driven mainly by deeper forces which are desire, temperament, and the will to live. Reason usually appears afterward to justify what those forces already pushed us to do. From that perspective, Kant’s rational moral agent looks almost like an idealized abstraction rather than a realistic psychological description.

And history supports this skepticism. People have justified extremely destructive actions while claiming perfect rational consistency. Ideologies, political movements, and religious doctrines often pass their own internal tests of “logic” while ignoring broader consequences or contradictions.

But dismissing Kant entirely would miss something important. His model still gives a tool for criticizing those rationalizations. If someone proposes a rule that only works when applied to their own group but fails when universalized, Kant’s test exposes the inconsistency. The fact that humans often ignore the test does not make the logical tool useless. It only shows that human beings frequently fail to meet the standard.

Perhaps Kant’s idealized view of the human capacity for reason stems from a lack of direct observation of human behavior. Kant’s quiet routine in Königsberg, where he spent nearly his entire life is historically accurate. He lived a highly structured, relatively isolated intellectual life. Some critics argue that this distance from political and social chaos allowed him to imagine a much more orderly picture of rational agency than real societies display.

Kant described a logical ideal of rational justification, not a psychological portrait of how humans actually reason. The criticism becomes valid only if the theory is mistaken for a description of real human thinking.

Does Reason Create Motivation For Human Actions?

In the original philosophy of Immanuel Kant, “conscious will” and “rational will” are not identical terms, but they overlap in an important way. Kant was not interested in consciousness as simple awareness. A person can be conscious while acting entirely from impulse or habit. What he focused on was the capacity to act according to a principle recognized by reason. When philosophers summarize this loosely, they sometimes call it “conscious will,” but the precise term is a will guided by practical reason.

So the key distinction is that a person can act because of a desire (hunger, fear, ambition). That action can be conscious, you know you are doing it, but it is still driven by inclination. In Kant’s framework that is not a rational act in the strict sense. A rational act occurs when a person recognizes a rule and acts because the rule itself is valid, not because it produces a reward. This is why Kant insisted that genuine moral action cannot depend on expected outcomes like happiness, approval, or success. The moment an outcome becomes the reason for acting, the motivation returns to inclination.

Kant argued that rational actions are not justified by external purposes like reward or advantage. Their justification lies in the principle itself. For example, if someone refuses to lie because lying would violate a rule they believe must apply universally, the action does not serve a practical reward. It might even produce disadvantages. Yet the person still considers it rational because it follows a principle they judge to be logically consistent and universally applicable. To be moral, the action must not performed for a personal outcome.

The reader of Kant can conclude that rational will ends up choosing things that look pointless. That interpretation partly reflects the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, who criticized Kant. Schopenhauer believed that reason does not actually create motivation. He thought the deeper driving force in humans is will or desire, and reason mainly explains or organizes those drives afterward. From that perspective, a purely rational act without desire looks strange or even empty, because the engine of action normally comes from inclination. The claim is simply that rational action is not justified by personal gain. Its justification lies in consistency with a principle. For Kant, when reason acts, the reward is not the outcome but the coherence of the rule itself.