against the very nature of self-interest

Behavior and arguments in interest conflicts are not notorious for their “rationality.” Nothing, unfortunately, has so constantly been refuted by reality as the credo of “enlightened self-interest,” in its literal version as well as in its more sophisticated Marxian variant. Some experience plus a little reflection teach, on the contrary, that it goes against the very nature of self-interest to be enlightened. To take as an example from everyday life the current interest conflict between tenant and landlord: enlightened interest would focus on a building fit for human habitation, but this interest is quite different from, and in most cases opposed to, the landlord’s self-interest in high profit and the tenant’s in low rent. The common answer of an arbiter, supposedly the spokesman of “enlightenment,” namely, that in the long run the interest of the building is the true interest of both landlord and tenant, leaves out of account the time factor, which is of paramount importance for all concerned. Self-interest is interested in the self, and the self dies or moves out or sells the house; because of its changing condition, that is, ultimately because of the human condition of mortality, the self qua self cannot reckon in terms of long-range interest, i.e. the interest of a world that survives its inhabitants. Deterioration of the building is a matter of years; a rent increase or a temporarily lower profit rate are for today or for tomorrow. And something similar, mutatis mutandis, is of course true for labor-management conflicts and the like. Self-interest, when asked to yield to “true” interest—that is, the interest of the world as distinguished from that of the self—will always reply, Near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin. That may not be particularly reasonable, but it is quite realistic; it is the not very noble but adequate response to the time discrepancy between men’s private lives and the altogether different life expectancy of the public world. To expect people, who have not the slightest notion of what the res publico, the public thing, is, to behave nonviolently and argue rationally in matters of interest is neither realistic nor reasonable.

Hannah Arendt, On Violence (III)

the vision of things as "disenchanted"

The Epicureans and Sceptics achieved a notion of self-definition by withdrawal from the world; their weapon was scepticism about cosmic order, or a plea for the irrelevance of the Gods. By contrast the modern shift to a self-defining subject was bound up with a sense of control over the world - at first intellectual and then technological. That is, the modern certainty that the world was not to be seen as a text or an embodiment of meaning was not founded on a sense of its baffling impenetrability. On the contrary, it grew with the mapping of the regularities in things, by transparent mathematical reasoning, and with the consequent increase of manipulative control. That is what ultimately established the picture of the world as the locus of neutral, contingent correlations. Ancient sceptics while denying our ability to know the nature of things, had claimed that men had enough immediately relevant grasp on their situation to go about the business of life. While sometimes taking up the same formulae, the seventeenth century changed their content radically. The immediately relevant knowledge which was not to be compared with knowledge of final causes came to enjoy a higher and higher prestige. It came to be understood as the paradigm of knowledge.

This control over things which has grown with modern science and technology is often thought of as the principal motivation behind the scientific revolution and the development of the modern outlook. Bacon's oft-quoted slogan, 'knowledge is power' can easily give us this impression, and this 'technological' view of the seventeenth-century revolution is one of the reasons why Bacon has often been given a greater role in it than he deserves, alongside Galileo and Descartes. But even in Bacon's case, when he insists on the nullity of a philosophy from which there cannot be 'adduced a single experiment which tends to relieve and benefit the condition of man', we can read his motivation in a different way. We rather see the control as valuable not so much in itself as in its confirmation of a certain view of things: a view of the world not as a locus of meanings, but rather of contingent, de facto correlations. Manipulability of the world confirms the new self-defining identity, as it were: the proper relation of man to a meaningful order is to put himself into tune with it; by contrast nothing sets the seal more clearly on the rejection of this vision than successfully treating the world as object of control. Manipulation both proves and as it were celebrates the vision of things as 'disenchanted' (entzaubert) to use Max Weber's famous phrase.

Technological progress has so transformed our lives and produced so many things we could barely do without, that we easily think of the 'pay-off' of the seventeenth-century revolution in terms of these benefits (if such they unambiguously are). But in the seventeenth century itself, this pay-off was very slim. For Bacon and the other men of his time, control was more important for what it proved. In the very passage quoted above where he speaks of relieving and benefitting the condition of man, Bacon says: 'For fruits and works are as it were sponsors and sureties for the truth of philosophies.' And later he makes an explicit comparison of the relative importance of the two considerations: 'works themselves are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts of life'. We have no reason to think of this as false scientific piety.

Bacon later defines this goal which 'is in itself more worthy than all the fruits of inventions' as 'the very contemplation of things as they are, without superstition or imposture, error or confusion'. My suggestion is that one of the powerful attractions of this austere vision, long before it 'paid off' in technology, lies in the fact that a disenchanted world is correlative to a self-defining subject, and that the winning through to a self-defining identity was accompanied by a sense of exhilaration and power, that the subject need no longer define his perfection or vice, his equilibrium or disharmony, in relation to an external order. With the forging of this modern subjectivity there comes a new notion of freedom, and a newly central role attributed to freedom, which seems to have proved itself definitive and irreversible.

Charles Taylor, Hegel, 7-9

Man is nothing but a subject full of natural error that cannot be eradicated except through grace. Nothing shows him the truth, everything deceives him. The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and, just as they trick the soul, they are tricked by [the soul] in their turn: it takes its revenge. The senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions. They both compete in lies and deception.

Pascal, Pensées (1987:42)

fallen desperately in love with an inch

It is no wonder that names have been considered uncanny manifestations of supernatural power, and that men have identified their names with their souls or used them to invoke spiritual forces. Indeed, the power of words has gone to man's head in more than one way. To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand. More important still, words have enabled man to define himself—to label a certain part of his experience "I."
  This is, perhaps, the meaning of the ancient belief that the name is the soul. For to define is to isolate, to separate some complex of forms from the stream of life and say, "This is I." When man can name and define himself, he feels that he has an identity. Thus he begins to feel, like the word, separate and static, as over against the real, fluid world of nature.
  Feeling separate, the sense of conflict between man, on the one hand, and nature, on the other, begins. Language and thought grapple with the conflict, and the magic which can summon a man by naming him is applied to the universe. Its powers are named, personalized, and invoked in mythology and religion. Natural processes are made intelligible, because all regular processes—such as the rotation of the stars and seasons—can be fitted to words and ascribed to the activity of the gods or God, the eternal Word. At a later time science employs the same process, studying every kind of regularity in the universe, naming, classifying, and making use of them in ways still more miraculous.
  But because it is the use and nature of words and thoughts to be fixed, definite, isolated, it is extremely hard to describe the most important characteristic of life—its movement and fluidity. Just as money does not represent the perishability and edibility of food, so words and thoughts do no represent the vitality of life. The relation between thought and movement is something like the difference between a real man running and a motion-picture film which shows the running as a series of "stills."
  ... It is most convenient for scientific calculation to think of a movement as a series of very small jerks or stills. But confusion arises when the world described and measured by such conventions is identified with the world of experience. A series of stills does not, unless rapidly moved before our eyes, convey the essential vitality and beauty of movement. The definition, the description, leaves out the most important thing.
  Useful as these conventions are for purposes of calculation, language, and logic, absurdities arise when we think that the kind of language we can use or the kind of logic with which we reason can really define or explain the "physical" world. Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be "intelligible" in this sense is to want it to be something other than life. It is to prefer a motion-picture film to a real, running man. To feel that life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951: 46-48)

the throne of the mind

What determines the question a scientist pursues? One side in the so-called science wars holds that the investigation of nature is a purely objective pursuit, walled off from the influence of the surrounding society and culture by built-in safeguards, such as the demand that scientific results be replicable and the requirement that scientific theories accord with nature. The gravitational force of a Marxist, in other words, is identical to the gravitational force of a fascist. Or, more starkly, if you're looking for proof that science is not a social construct, as so-called science critics contend, just step out the window and see whether the theory of gravity is a mere figment of a scientist's imagination.
  That the findings of science are firmly grounded in empiricism is clear. But the questions of science are another matter. For the questions one might ask of nature are, for all intents and purposes, without end. Although the methods of science today may be largely objective, the choice of what question to ask is not. This is not a shortcoming, much less a fault, of science. It is, rather, a reflection of the necessary fact that science is, at bottom, a human endeavor. Running through both psychiatry and neuroscience is a theme that seemed deeply disturbing to me almost from the moment I began reading in the field ... when my conviction that the inner working of the mind was the only mystery worth pursuing made me vow to become a psychiatrist. What disturbed me was the idea that free will died with Freud—or even earlier, with the materialism of the triumphant scientific revolution. Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture. Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that the will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of the brain does not exist.

Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain (2003: 7-8)

don't you know?

"You'll be very tired when you go home, if he shows you all his bibelots and gives you a lecture on each," said the Countess Gemini.
  "I'm not afraid of that; but if I'm tired I shall at least have learned something."
  "Very little, I suspect. But my sister's dreadfully afraid of learning anything," said Mr. Osmond.
  "Oh, I confess to that; I don't want to know anything more—I know too much already. The more you know the more unhappy you are."
  "You should not undervalue knowledge before Pansy who has not finished her education," Madame Merle interposed with a smile.
  "Pansy will never know any harm," said the child's father. "Pansy's a little convent-flower."
  "Oh, the convents, the convents!" cried the Countess with a flutter of her ruffles. "Speak to me of the convents! You may learn anything there; I'm a convent-flower myself. I don't pretend to be good, but the nuns do. Don't you see what I mean?" she went on, appealing to Isabel.
  Isabel was not sure she saw, and she answered that she was very bad at following arguments. The Countess then declared that she herself detested arguments, but that this was her brother's taste—he would always discuss. "For me," she said, "one should like a thing or one shouldn't; one can't like everything, of course. But one shouldn't attempt to reason it out—you never know where it may lead you. There are some very good feelings that may have bad reasons, don't you know? And then there are very bad feelings, sometimes, that have good reasons. Don't you see what I mean? I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like."
  "Ah, that's the great thing," said Isabel, smiling and suspecting that her acquaintance with this lightly flitting personage would not lead to intellectual repose.

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1976: 256-257)

measuring it with its own extravagence

In the midst of the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on the one hand is the man of reason, who delegates madness to the doctor, thereby authorising no relation other than through the abstract universality of illness; and on the other is the man of madness, who only communicates with the other through the intermediary of a reason that is no less abstract, which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the demand for conformity. There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.
  ... The Greeks had a relation to a thing they called hubris. The relation was not solely one of condemnation: the existence of Thrasymachus [“Listen—I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger”] or that of Callicles, is proof enough of that, even if their discourse comes down to us already enveloped in the reassuring dialectics of Socrates. But the Greek Logos had no opposite.
 European man, since the depths of the Middle Ages, has had a relation to a thing that is confusedly termed Madness, Dementia, or Unreason. It is perhaps to that obscure presence that Western Reason owes something of its depth, as with the threat of hubris [to] the sophrosyne of Socratic speechmakers. In any case, the Reason—Unreason relation constitutes for Western culture one of the dimensions of its originality: it accompanied it long before Hieronymous Bosch, and will follow it long after Nietzsche and Artaud.
 But what then is this confrontation below the language of reason? Where might this interrogation lead, following not reason ... but seeking to retrace in time this constant verticality [ie. of madness], which, the length of Western culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it with its own extravagance? Towards what region might it take us, which was neither the history of knowledge nor history plain and simple, which was commanded neither by the teleology of truth nor the rational concatenation of causes, which only have value or meaning beyond the division? A region, no doubt, where it would be a question more of the limits than of the identity of a culture.

Michel Foucault, History of Madness (2006: xxviii-xxix)

a basic pessimism about the majority of human beings

Christianity took from its great competitor a doctrine that may bring you to despair when you study the history of trinitarian and christological thought. The dogmatic development of Christianity cannot be understood without it.
  Logos means "word". But it also refers to the meaning of a word, the reasonable structure which is indicated by a word. Therefore, Logos can also mean the universal law of reality. This is what Heraclitus meant by it ... The Logos for him was the law which determines the movements of all reality.
  For the Stoics the Logos was the divine power which is present in everything that is. There are three aspects to it, all of which become extremely important in the later development. The first is the law of nature. The Logos is the principle according to which all natural things move. It is the divine seed, the creative power, which makes anything what it is. And it is the creative power of movement of all things. Secondly, Logos means the moral law. With Immanuel Kant we could call this the "practical reason", the law which is innate in every human being when he accepts himself as a personality, with the dignity and greatness of a person. When we see the term "natural law" in classical books, we should not think of physical laws, but of moral laws. For example, when we speak of the "rights of man" as embodied in the American Constitution, we are speaking of natural law.
  Thirdly, Logos also means man's ability to recognize reality; we could call it "theoretical reason". It is man's ability to reason. Because man has the Logos in himself, he can discover it in nature and history. From this it follows for Stoicism that the man who is determined by the natural law, the Logos, is the logikos, the wise man. But the Stoics were not optimists. They did not believe that everybody was a wise man. Perhaps there were only a few who ever reached this ideal. All the others were either fools or stood somewhere between the wise and the foolish. So Stoicism held a basic pessimism about the majority of human beings.
  Originally the Stoics were Greeks; later they were Romans. Some of the most famous Stoics were Roman emperors ... They applied the concept of the Logos to the political situation for which they were responsible. The meaning of the natural law was that every man participates in reason by virtue of the fact that he is a human being. From this basis they derived laws far superior to many that we find in the Christian Middle Ages. They gave universal citizenship to every human being because everyone potentially participates in reason. Of course, they did not believe that people were actually reasonable, but they presupposed that through education they could become so. Granting Roman citizenship to all citizens of the conquered nations was a tremendous equalizing step. Women, slaves, and children, who were regarded as inferior beings under the old Roman law, became equalized by the laws of the Roman emperors. This was not done by Christianity but by the Stoics, who derived this idea from their belief in the universal Logos in which everyone participates. (Of course, Christianity holds the same idea on a different basis: all human beings are the children of God the Father.) Thus the Stoics conceived of the idea of a state embracing the whole world, based on the common rationality of everybody. This was something which Christianity could take up and develop. The difference was that the Stoics did not have the concept of sin. They had the concept of foolishness, but not sin. Therefore, salvation in Stoicism is a salvation through reaching wisdom. In Christianity salvation is brought about by divine grace. These two approaches are in conflict with each other to the present day.

Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (1968: 7-8)