Spooked

“Two points about rationalism stand out: It becomes our privileged way of accessing the world and making sense of the things around us, to the exclusion of other ways of appreciating meaning: moods, our use of tools and other instruments, and our communal traditions captured in language. But the chief defect of this narrowed, receptive mode of rationalism is that it disguises from us our own essential practice of creating meaning in the world through our involvement and engagement with it. As a further result of this, our inclination to rationalism has led us throughout history to build the world, so to speak, in accordance with dimmed-down ‘reason.’ But since reason doesn’t agree with our most fundamental essence as finite, engaged beings, the world we’ve built—starting with the ancient Greeks—is particularly hostile and unwelcoming: hence the destructive phenomena of nihilism as well as our own inherent anxiety about reason. Reason alienates us from our own essence as human beings, and it teases us into thinking, falsely, that the world is separate from our own acting and being within it.” – Alexander S. Duff, “Heidegger’s Ghosts”