LITERARY ORIGINS OF MODERN RATIONALITY (BASED ON THE MATERIAL FROM DON QUIXOTE)

Abstract

Purpose. Explore some of the paradoxes of the latest rationality (the disappearance of knowledge as the basis of action and action despite its problematic nature), show the manifestation of these paradoxes at the origins of modern rationality. The research methodology is defined by such historical and cultural works as the work of Michel Foucault “Words and Things”, which is understood by the author of this article as the historicization of rationality and the study of rationality in a wide cultural context, outside the «strict» science, but also in literature, painting etc. Scientific novelty. Shows a kind of alternation of literature and philosophy in the resolution of including epistemological problems. For example, before Kant raises the question of the world of phenomena and the world of things in themselves (and their relation), this will already be played quite talentedly in the fiction of the 17th century. Most of the conversations between Don Quixote and Sancho are about the relationship of a phenomenon to a thing in itself. Which, of course, does not mean that Kant’s research is redundant. Shows a kind of overlap between our time and the time of the emergence of modern rationality. So, one of the signs of our time is the creation of a scene as a kind of space for the production of pseudo-relations. There is even a special term «relational aesthetics». But it is the scene that is obsessed with 17th century Spanish literature. This is exactly what is shown in the material of Don Quixote. Or the “empty object»” (Dulcinea) as the basis for Don Quixote’s actions in comparison with the «sublime object» of Slavoj Zizek. Or “Pascal’s wager” and its modern interpretations. In a word, everything that does not rest on knowledge and includes a share of recklessness. Conclusions. Our rationality is not devoid of paradoxes, but it is the paradoxes that become the signs of our rationality at certain moments in history, when the emerging social reality has not yet been determined, and at the same time there is no adequate knowledge about it, that is, one way or another we have to resort to rather vague concepts.