It is hard to explain how we came to believe that reason was equal to rationalization and control. Rationalization means nothing but self-deceit, a construction made to protect our ego. It is a Nietzschean-Freudian thesis. Control means that reason is equivalent to science, science to technology, and technology to absolute planification and order. Reason meant a fable, a poor construction to avoid the deep contradictions of human existence. Reason came to be synonymous with pacification, neutralization, order, and hierarchy. According to Nietzsche this was Plato’s invention, a domestication of the tragic existence lived by ancient Greeks. At least in The Birth of Tragedy.
But it is easy to show that the opposite view is more consistent. The tragic world does not admit conflict. There is only fate and grandeur or feebleness to accept it. Conflict is only a subjective epiphenomenon. Praxis is not at stake. There is no seek of truth. On the contrary, for Plato there is conflict because there is truth. In other words, there is conflict because I can deceit myself, because there is error and because there is evil. Without the possibility of truth and error, and good and bad, there is no real conflict, only a fake dramatization of existence.
Plato goes even further. Not only does he claim truth to be at stake in our discourses. He also claims that truth is never simple, that it has a paradoxical core. Boris Groys claims brilliantly in The communist postscript that all the major exercises in rationalism involve some form of paradox. Indeed, this is the case in the noble “dialectical” tradition, including at least Plato, Nicholas of Kues, Agustin, Descartes, German classical philosophers like Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, and Marx. Philosophy, metaphysics and rationalism as systems of simplification of life, control of nature and society, and concealment of the dramas of life simply does not hold. Simplification and repression have always been on the side of governs and their ideologues. Even scientists were more simple-minded than most great theologians. The so-called “deconstruction of the history of metaphysics” tends to be more a projection into history of contemporary problems.