The history of Western culture is the history of the rise of the authority of ‘Reason-with-a-big-R’. Since the Enlightenment, we have come to believe that modes of knowledge that are guided by rationality are intrinsically more valuable, more ‘true’ than others. This is reflected in the power of scientific discourses in modern society: today, science occupies the throne which religion occupied in earlier times, as the key source of knowledge and truth. We have gained a lot of things in this process, including the many benefits that medical discoveries using rationalist scientific methods have brought us. But it is also important to ask ourselves: what have we lost? What has been pushed out by this historical march of Reason, what are we not seeing when we assume that rational thought automatically brings ‘progress’, and what areas of our human experience have come to be devalued?

Nietzsche pictured the history of Western culture as a struggle between Apollo, the Greek god of orderly rationality and science, and Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy, poetry, love, and sex, ruled by irrational excess of feelings. Nietzsche drily observed that Apollo seemed to have won. As a result, modern life has become what the sociologist Max Weber called an ‘iron cage’: whether we want it or not, we live in a world where rational principles guide our everyday lives. We’re encouraged to be efficient in all areas of our everyday lives, ranging from continual evaluation practices of workers’ productivity to our relationship with our own bodies, which we constantly scrutinise, measure, and are expected to keep within scientifically responsible norms. The endless rounds of examinations and evaluations that we are subjected to from the cradle to the grave – and subject ourselves to (now with the aid of iphones and fitbits) – help make society as a whole more ‘productive’, but they also imprison us within complex webs of relations of power from which we can never completely break free.