Quotes About Rationalism

We in our secular, rationalist world are utterly unprepared for such existential-spiritual spasms. For one thing, we do not study the history of religion in any serious way, even for explanations of religious phenomena. Instead, we look for sociological explanations, or economic explanations, or even political explanations, and we do so precisely because we find it almost impossible to posit spiritual appetites and spiritual passions as independent, primary forces in human history.

I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.

Nietzsche wanted to explode the framework of Occidental rationalism within which the competitors of Left and Right Hegelianism still moved. His antihumanism, continued by Heidegger and Bataille in two variations, is the real challenge for the discourse of modernity.

Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.

spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a whole

The truth is that my work — I was going to say my mission — is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

The author compares rationalism and much of organized religion do a dictator who paves over natural springs in order to dispense water in a more organized fashion. The pushback of the world hungry for wonder may be compared to the break out of those springs from their constraints. Not everything they produce is healthy, but the overreaction of eliminating them is worse.

This is where the Platonizing of our eschatology has led not only to bad atonement-theology but to the twin dangers of rationalism (imagining that being Christian is a matter of figuring out and then believing a true set of ideas) and romanticism (supposing that being a Christian is about people [122] having their hearts strangely warmed).

Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute.

Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism.

Racionalismo es el seudónimo oficial del Gnosticismo.

Rationalism is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the realm of reason, as if the reason coincides with the very principle of things.

Voltaire was soon turned, with Catherine's encouragement, into a patron saint for the secular Russian aristocracy. Voltairianism, vaguely signifying rationalism, scepticism and reformism, became her official ideology. Almost all of Voltaire was translated into Russian; no library was deemed complete if it did not contain a collection of Voltaire's works in the original French.

The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. (...) It shows, not that truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.