"Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable"
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Yockey frames “rationalism” less as a method than as a mood: “the feeling” that reality must be fully domesticated by Reason. That choice matters. By casting rationalism as an overconfident temperament rather than a disciplined practice, he smuggles in a critique of modernity without having to argue the merits of any particular rational claim. The sentence is built like a trap: if you trust reason, you’re not reasoning, you’re emoting.
The target is a post-Enlightenment worldview that prizes what can be “visible and calculable,” with “consequently rejects” doing the heavy moral work. It suggests not just limitation but hostility: rationalism as a machine that discards the sacred, the mythic, the aesthetic, the national soul. The subtext is a plea to rehabilitate the non-quantifiable as a legitimate authority - intuition, tradition, destiny - while framing rational inquiry as spiritually impoverished and culturally corrosive.
Context sharpens the intent. Yockey was a mid-century reactionary writer whose broader project opposed liberal democracy and the rational-bureaucratic order it claimed to represent. In that ecosystem, “Reason” isn’t neutral; it’s coded as technocracy, secularism, and the flattening of hierarchy. The line reads like an intellectual alibi for politics that want to bypass evidence: if reality’s deepest truths are, by definition, beyond calculation, then demanding proof becomes a kind of philistinism.
It’s effective rhetoric because it exploits a real vulnerability: what can be measured isn’t all that matters. But it also weaponizes that insight, turning a fair critique of reductionism into a license to elevate the unverifiable.
The target is a post-Enlightenment worldview that prizes what can be “visible and calculable,” with “consequently rejects” doing the heavy moral work. It suggests not just limitation but hostility: rationalism as a machine that discards the sacred, the mythic, the aesthetic, the national soul. The subtext is a plea to rehabilitate the non-quantifiable as a legitimate authority - intuition, tradition, destiny - while framing rational inquiry as spiritually impoverished and culturally corrosive.
Context sharpens the intent. Yockey was a mid-century reactionary writer whose broader project opposed liberal democracy and the rational-bureaucratic order it claimed to represent. In that ecosystem, “Reason” isn’t neutral; it’s coded as technocracy, secularism, and the flattening of hierarchy. The line reads like an intellectual alibi for politics that want to bypass evidence: if reality’s deepest truths are, by definition, beyond calculation, then demanding proof becomes a kind of philistinism.
It’s effective rhetoric because it exploits a real vulnerability: what can be measured isn’t all that matters. But it also weaponizes that insight, turning a fair critique of reductionism into a license to elevate the unverifiable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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