Anti Rationalism Quotes

“This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“The ‘Sturm und Drang’ was even more complicated in its sociological structure than the West European forms of preromanticism, and not merely because the German middle class and the German intelligentsia had never identified themselves closely enough with the enlightenment to keep their eyes sharply fixed on the aims of the movement and not to deviate from it, but also because their struggle against the rationalism of the absolutist regime was at the same time a struggle against the progressive tendencies of the age. They never became aware of the fact that the rationalism of the princes represented a less serious danger for the future than the anti-rationalism of their own compeers. From being the enemies of despotism they, therefore, became the instruments of reaction and merely promoted the interests of the privileged classes with their attacks on bureaucratic centralization. To be sure, their struggle was not directed against the social levelling tendencies of the system, with which aristocratic and upper middle-class interests were in conflict, but against its generalizing influence and violation of all intellectual distinction and variety. They championed the rights of life, of individual being, natural growth and organic development, against the rigid formalism of the rationalized administration, and meant not only the denial of the bureaucratic state with its mechanical generalization and regimentation, but also the repudiation of the planning and regulating reformism of the enlightenment. And although the idea of the spontaneous, irrational life was still of an indefinite and fluctuating nature and certainly hostile to the enlightenment, but not yet markedly conservative in its purpose, nevertheless, it already contained the essence of the whole philosophy of conservatism. It did not need much now to ascribe a mystical superrationality to this principle of ‘life’, in contrast to which the rationalism of enlightened thought seemed unnatural, inflexible and doctrinaire, and to represent the rise of political and social institutions from historical ‘life’ as a ‘natural’, that is to say, superhuman and superrational growth, in order to protect these institutions against all arbitrary attacks and to secure the continuance of the prevailing system.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“Faith in miracles took the place of science, just as faith in social transformations moved the leaders of the new society. That is why those leaders eagerly welcomed every prophecy of Lysenko's. Like addicts who realize the harm of their addiction yet still pursue the narcotic, these leaders recognized the deception yet wanted to be deceived. When the promised miracles failed, the Lysenkoists did not turn back to science; instead, they drew up even more unreal plans, issued even more glowing reports, and so it went in a dizzying spiral.”
― Valery N. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science

“In Hume, Rationalism and scepticism existed peacefully side by side. Scepticism was for the study only, and was to be forgotten in the business of practical life. Moreover, practical life was to be governed, as far as possible, by those very methods of science which his scepticism impugned. Such a compromise was only possible for a man who was in equal parts a philosopher and a man of the world; there is also a flavour of aristocratic Toryism in the reservation of an esoteric unbelief for the initiated. The world at large refused to accept Hume’s doctrines in their entirety. His followers rejected his scepticism, while his German opponents emphasized it as the inevitable outcome of a merely scientific and rational outlook. Thus as the result of his teaching British philosophy became superficial, while German philosophy became anti-rational—in each case from fear of an unbearable Agnosticism. European thought has never recovered its previous whole-heartedness; among all the successors of Hume, sanity has meant superficiality, and profundity has meant some degree of madness. In the most recent discussions of the philosophy appropriate to quantum physics, the old debates raised by Hume are still proceeding.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Will to Doubt