The virtue of the New Enlightenment reason

Abstract

The two World Wars of the last century questioned the previously unqualified faith in the power of human reason and provoked devastating criticism of the European Enlightenment project, which was seen as the main source of such faith in reason, science, and the human ability to make responsible and rational decisions and actions. The criticism of faith in reason was partly justified, especially in the part where it was directed against unjustified scientism and the tendency to elitism and repressive instrumental rationality often associated with it. However, the criticism of reason in itself is something unnatural when it comes to Homo sapiens. The article argues for the need to revise ideas about the human mind and its main tasks – in particular, the hypothesis is put forward about the need to change the epistemological approach to reason to an ontological one, and the instrumental view of reason to a moral understanding of the purpose of reason. Attempts to rethink the metaphor of the Enlightenment in the new ontology of light are revealed – in particular, in the works of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. It is argued that the crisis of normativity, which has widely unfolded in the 20th century not only in science, but also in the sphere of morality and culture in general, cannot be overcome by rejecting normativity or by recognizing a weak relativistic version of normativity. The thesis is proven that, if the crisis of the classical Enlightenment is the result of the loss of social normativity, then the New Enlightenment should be based on a new normativity, and above all – a new integrity of reason as its moral integrity. It is substantiated that the new common world should not be a common world of survival and fear, but a responsible common world of virtuous reason. Within the framework of transcendentally and intersubjectively defined norms inherent to humanity and developed by Mankind in its concrete history, which has already actually taken place, representatives of a responsible common world can create new forms of normativity – on the basis of multiple social practices of the embodiment of virtuous reason.