"Phædrus spent his entire life pursuing a ghost. That was true. The ghost he
pursued was the ghost that underlies all of technology, all of modern science,
all of Western thought. It was the ghost of rationality itself."
"The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic
thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the
rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will
simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic
government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that
government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the
succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little
understanding."
"Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better
world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the
Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and
shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of
people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of
reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins
to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless
and spiritually empty."
"To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very
effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions. It's
such a powerful, all-dominating agent of civilized man it's all but shut out
everything else and now dominates man himself. That's the source of the
complaint."
"What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the belief that the crisis
is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the
situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself
is the source of the problem. ..So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the
solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality but that you expand
the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution."
"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes
considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it
really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art.
Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some
people still condemn it because it doesn't make 'sense.' But what's really
wrong is not the art but the 'sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp
it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's
more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the
roots."
"A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a
study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the
art of rationality itself."
"Now I want to show that that classic pattern of rationality can be
tremendously improved, expanded and made far more effective throughthe formal
recognition of Quality in its operation."
"It's long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of
facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who make so much of
these facts after they are "observed." I think that it will be found that a
formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn't
destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings
it far closer to actual scientific practice."
"When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it
shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's Quality, not any subjects
or objects, that tells you where you ought to go."
"He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even
broader than that...a new spiritual rationality...in which the ugliness and the
loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would
become illogical. Reason was no longer to be "value free." Reason was to be
subordinate, logically, to Quality."
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