ABSTRACT
The crisis of modern reason, says Adrian Pabst (2015), leaves human beings directionless in an uncertain world. By reason he means instrumental reason. It is this kind of reason that leaves human beings exposed to the excesses of secular naturalism and capitalist political economy. This exposure is symptomatic of a larger crisis that has overtaken the emancipatory promise held out by the Enlightenment. Armed with reason, and having the courage to know for themselves (Kant 1970, 54), ordinary men and women worked themselves free of oppressive hierarchy, most commonly and popularly associated with religion, only to find themselves enslaved by their newly won freedom. Here, Pabst follows Charles Taylor, and others who have criticised the malaise of modernity, in seeing the self-mastery promised by modern reason as a chimerical illusion from which we now require liberation (Taylor 1992). Indeed human flourishing is stunted by a conception of reason that is at best blind and at the worst hostile to the meliorating influence of faith.
