The Responsibility of Reason
Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age
By (author) Ralph Hancock
Publication date:
16 March 2011Length of book:
346 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442207370
Can we run our lives and govern our societies by reason? The question provoked Socrates to redirect philosophic inquiry in a political direction, and it has remained fundamental to Western thought. Martin Heidegger explored this problem in his profound critique of the Western metaphysical tradition, and Leo Strauss responded to Heidegger with an attempt to recover the classical idea of the rule of reason.
In The Responsibility of Reason, Ralph C. Hancock undertakes no less than to answer the Heideggerian challenge. Offering trenchant and original interpretations of Aristotle, Heidegger, Strauss, and Alexis de Tocqueville, he argues that Tocqueville saw the essential more clearly than apparently deeper philosophers. Hancock addresses political theorists on the question of the grounding of liberalism, and, at the same time, philosophers on the most basic questions of the meaning and limits of reason. Moreover, he shows how these questions are for us inseparable.
In The Responsibility of Reason, Ralph C. Hancock undertakes no less than to answer the Heideggerian challenge. Offering trenchant and original interpretations of Aristotle, Heidegger, Strauss, and Alexis de Tocqueville, he argues that Tocqueville saw the essential more clearly than apparently deeper philosophers. Hancock addresses political theorists on the question of the grounding of liberalism, and, at the same time, philosophers on the most basic questions of the meaning and limits of reason. Moreover, he shows how these questions are for us inseparable.
In a synthesis of separate studies of Alexis de Tocqueville, Martin Luther and John Calvin, Martin Heidegger, and Leo Strauss, Hancock (Brigham Young Univ.) critiques "the spiritual-intellectual framework of modern democracy." His thesis is that modern democracy rests on the unsustainable modern "illusion of the simple superiority of 'theory' to 'practice'" and that "the circulation of meaning between these poles must be accepted and assumed into the very self-understanding of reason." Though critiques of democratic theory abound, Hancock holds that in the postmodern age, the analysis and resolution by Tocqueville is superior to that of Heidegger, Strauss, and contemporary philosophers such as John Rawls and Charles Taylor. The "responsibility of reason" must be a political responsibility, deeply informed by inherited values and practices that sustain individual and social flourishing while offering a critical standpoint from which to question them. Humility in the face of what cannot be known is part of this responsibility....Recommended.