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.

My point is not to flip this cultural hierarchy between Reason and emotions around, and to claim that the latter are in reality ‘superior’ to the former. Instead, I want to ask: what are the political consequences of the assumption that Reason is superior to other modes of knowledge? What are the power effects of this hierarchy of reason and emotions? Historically, Western culture has portrayed the capacity for rational thought as a particularly male attribute, whereas women are usually depicted as ‘naturally’ more emotional creatures. There have been many variations of this type of argument. In the 19^th century, evolutionary theorists claimed that women have an inferior capacity for rational thought compared to men, because their evolution has stopped at an earlier stage than that of male bodies and brains. In the 20^th century, following the discovery of sex hormones, scientists have argued that these imbalances make women more emotional and therefore less rational than men. Donald Trump was merely echoing this old argument when he rebuffed criticism from Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on the grounds that she had ‘blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever’ during his election campaign.

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"The idea that reason is no more than a neutral path to truth has been a pillar of male domination over women"
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