Western philosophy often treats reason—or rationality—as defining what is unique about humans.Footnote 1 This tendency has sparked a debate about the reliability of our ability to reason. Yet even when philosophers reject rationality, they use reason to do so, reinforcing the centrality of what they reject. This is why literature, a mode of representation rather than a form of argument, critiques rationality more successfully than philosophy can.
1.
Plato ranks reason as the ruling element of the soul. In the Phaedo, he claims the body deceives, and that we can only access truth when the soul unburdens itself from sensory distractions.Footnote 2 “Aspiring after true being” happens when the mind leaves the body, and “has as little as possible to do with [it], and has no bodily sense or feeling.”Footnote 3 In the Republic, the just life is one in which reason governs appetite and passion.Footnote 4 Plato centers rationality in our lives as both epistemically privileged and normatively supreme: it grants access to truth and defines what it means to flourish as a human being.
Aristotle, Plato’s student, further articulates rationality as unique to mankind, arguing in the Nicomachean Ethics that the function of the human being is rational activity: that is, living and acting in accordance with reason.Footnote 5 “For man,” he states, “the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest”. Happiness (eudemonia), in his view, is not a feeling but the ultimate goal for mankind: a sustained mode of excellent rational living.Footnote 6
Two thousand years later, French philosopher René Descartes locates rational reflection as the condition of certainty: rationality becomes the essential foundation for any knowledge.Footnote 7 In the Meditations, radical doubt strips away all the uncertainty until one truth remains: the thinking self. He identifies the essence (res cogitans) of the human being as a “thinking thing” who doubts, comprehends, imagines, and wills—to name only a few functions of reason.Footnote 8 With the cogito, Descartes binds our very existence to rationality; the place from which all knowledge must be grounded. The senses are unreliable unless validated by reason, and the “mind alone, and not mind and body in conjunction,” is necessary “to a knowledge of the truth.”Footnote 9
Although Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes recognize its finitude, their philosophies place rationality at the center of human nature: we are defined by the capacity to reason, and only through rationality can the highest or most certain truths can be known.Footnote 10
2.
In contrast, David Hume rejects reason as the primary source of our knowledge. He criticizes “abstruse philosophy” (a direct dig at Plato) detached from ordinary life and denies that causal inference can be rationally justified.Footnote 11 Our belief that the future will resemble the past does not arise from reasoning but from “custom”: a psychological habit formed from repeat experience.Footnote 12 Even once we come to experience and understand “the operations of cause and effect,” Hume claims, “our conclusions from that experience are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding.”Footnote 13 Reason is limited and subordinate to our experience informed by our senses.Footnote 14 In this way, Hume attempts to knock rationality off from its privileged epistemic position and restore philosophy to lived experience.Footnote 15
Kant moves in the opposite direction. He argues that morality depends on reason’s ability to legislate universally. The Categorical Imperative expresses this requirement: we must act only on maxims that could be rationally adopted by all.Footnote 16 Unlike Hume, Kant elevates reason above experience; a good will must not be determined by desire or impulses, but only by reason.Footnote 17 “The true vocation of reason,” he claims, “must be to produce a will that is good, not perhaps as a means to other purposes, but good in itself, for which reason was absolutely necessary.”Footnote 18 Still, he acknowledges reason’s limits: we cannot comprehend the metaphysical ground of freedom, though morality presupposes it (we must freely choose to use reason). In this sense, reason both establishes moral law and also recognizes the limits of its own reach.Footnote 19
Despite their differences, Hume and Kant share a structural feature: in both cases, reason remains the medium and measure of critique. Hume critiques privileged rationality through philosophical argument, whereas Kant reforms rationalism by granting reason authority to legislate morality and define its own bound. For these thinkers, even when reason is declared limited, it appears sovereign in setting those limits, and neither escapes the authority of rationality.
3.
Even genealogies on rationality cannot break free. In The Order of Things, Foucault traces how different historical configurations determine what counts as knowledge and what appears intelligible. He seeks to unsettle rational authority by revealing its contingency, yet he cannot sidestep the medium it means to expose. Rationality, for Foucault, is not timeless or universal but historically constituted. The “Western ratio” arises from specific epistemic shifts—most notably with Descartes—where knowledge becomes ordered.Footnote 20 Scientific rationalization is not the discovery of truth but the product of a particular mode of thought that shapes our relationship to and perception of the world.Footnote 21 Rationality becomes institutionalized. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that knowledge and rational discourse are inseparable from disciplinary mechanisms. Even when presented as neutral or universal, reason implicitly maintains power structures.Footnote 22
Although Foucault disavows normativity, genealogy already implies critique. The very demonstration of contingency depends on normative reasoning. In revealing rationality as historically bounded, Foucault exercises a form of rational authority: he orders archives, reconstructs epistemological ages, and renders intelligible transformations of thought. He conducts his analysis of rational authority in the language it seeks to destabilize.Footnote 23
Foucault gestures toward another mode of critique: literature. Literary “experience,” for him, suspends theoretical frameworks and conceptions of the self to expose the limits of language and thought without re-grounding in justification.Footnote 24 If genealogy reveals the contingency of rationality, literary form stages the experience of that contingency. And so, Foucault’s project confronts a structural difficulty: philosophy can diagnose the limits of reason, but so long as it proceeds by argument, it cannot fully displace rational authority.
4.
Avoiding this trap, Friedrich Nietzsche critiques rationality not merely in content but in form, exemplifying a broader shift in postrationalist philosophy.Footnote 25 Nietzsche argues that philosophers elevate “truth” as a defense against uncertainty, imposing order as a salve to the instability of lived experience. Against this inheritance—from Plato to Kant—Nietzsche calls for a “new species of philosopher,” one willing to embrace the “dangerous Perhaps”: life without metaphysical or moral certainty.Footnote 26 He answers his own philosophical call through a performative style that critiques rationality without reinserting the truth-ideals he rejects.Footnote 27
Nietzsche challenges the view that truth is superior to “appearance.”Footnote 28 Appearance does not denote illusion but names perspective. Interpretation, for him, constitutes the only reality available to us, there being no access to the world without it. Art, therefore, exemplifies reality itself, an expression of life grounded in perspective. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche enacts this conviction. Favoring parable and dialogue, the narrator declares: “Not only the rationality of millenniums—also their madness, breaketh out in us. Dangerous is it to be an heir.”Footnote 29 Rather than argue against rationalism through analysis, Nietzsche unsettles the reader through form, precisely in the way he thinks we should feel shirking off our philosophical legacy. Aphorisms and irony replace deductive closure, and argumentative reassurance is absent.Footnote 30
Recognizing that style is not ornamental, Nietzsche’s writing does not simply convey a thesis about rationality; it stages a confrontation with inherited modes of thought. In so doing, his work compels readers to engage affectively and interpretatively—an understanding separate from rational analysis. Form becomes a medium that displaces rational supremacy.
5.
Philosophy must justify its claims, but literature just is. This allows literature to represent the pitfalls of rationality without reentering the justificatory economy that sustains rational authority. For instance, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are literary warnings against the supremacy of reason.Footnote 31 Instead of applying rational explanations, these works navigate through ambiguity, memory, and embodiment.Footnote 32
In Faust, Goethe dramatizes the exhaustion of intellectual mastery. Faust has devoted himself to philosophy, science, and theology, only to discover that such knowledge has not yielded wisdom or meaning:
FAUST: All that philosophy can teach,
The craft of lawyer and of leech,
I’ve mastered, ah! and sweated through
Theology’s dreary deserts, too,
Yet here, poor fool! for all my lore,
I stand no wiser than before.Footnote 33
His rational mastery reveals itself to be hollow: it cannot provide transcendence. The turn to the divine—and later to the overtly sensual—reveals his refusal to accept human finitude. Goethe’s theatrical take on Faust embodies the dangers of over-rationalization, preventing rational authority from appearing self-sufficient and disembodied.Footnote 34 Faust’s destruction is an existential, staged collapse—not a logical contraption.
Shelley’s Frankenstein portrays a similar pattern within an emerging world of scientific discourse. Victor Frankenstein seeks to “learn the hidden laws of nature” and to exercise control over life itself.Footnote 35 Yet, his scientific ambition stays divorced from community and ethical responsibility. The creature Frankenstein creates is a manifestation of his rational overreach. Shelley does not deny the value of inquiry but condemns unrestrained scientific ambition driven by a fantasy of total mastery.Footnote 36 Like Goethe, she does so narratively. The reader inhabits Frankenstein’s perspective: we become witness to his ambition and its consequences. Shelley demonstrates the limits of reason not through philosophical refutation but through the unfolding of experience.
Literature escapes the shackles of reason. Philosophy challenges rationality through argument, but argument presupposes standards of justification and coherence. Staying within these bounds only reaffirms reason’s authority as the medium of justification. Literature, on the other hand, does not claim epistemic supremacy or theses in need of defense. In Faust and Frankenstein, we experience rationality’s limits rather than being instructed about them. Because literature does not compete within an economy of reasons, it can expose the limits of rationality without reinstating its authority through argument.Footnote 37
Moreover, the philosophical genre is self-serving as philosophers go to rationality to find meaning or sense through their medium. They often treat rational analysis as the privileged route to sense-making in which rationality preserves its authority by declaring its own limits. When reason presents itself as modest and self-correcting, it only strengthens its dominance. By contrast, through literature, we can feel and inhabit from within the portrayal without securing knowledge of characters or events.Footnote 38
6.
When Nietzsche turns to literary form to resist rationalism, Stanley Cavell turns to literary criticism. Cavell’s critique of rationality, therefore, becomes a critique of genre: philosophy seeks assurance, whereas literature exposes the limits of that demand. This reframes Plato.
In “The Avoidance of Love,” Cavell argues that modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, redefines knowledge as certainty: to know the world is to render it fully present to consciousness.Footnote 39 Once knowledge is equated with epistemic assurance, skepticism becomes inevitable.Footnote 40 That is, the more philosophy demands certainty, the more the world seems to recede. Cavell does not attempt to refute skepticism but rejects the demand that produces it. Our relation to the world, he argues, must ground in acknowledgment: a responsiveness that accepts uncertainty rather than overcoming it. Literature stages this vulnerability, placing us within scenes of relation.Footnote 41 In this sense, literature does not solve skepticism; it shows us how to live with it.Footnote 42
If literature exposes the limits of rationality more effectively than philosophy, Plato appears like a counterexample: the philosopher who elevates reason writes in a literary genre.Footnote 43 In the dialogues, Plato does not present reason from an impersonal viewpoint; argument unfolds where the reader and the characters coexist, where inquiry is a shared endeavor. Rational authority comes not as detached certainty but enacted within conversation, vulnerable to misunderstanding and incompletion.
And so, a paradox exists. Plato’s conclusions tether humanity to reason, but his own medium prevents reason from appearing self-grounding.Footnote 44 Later philosophy keeps the argument and abandons the dramatic form. What survives is rational authority without the genre that once exposed its limits. The question, then, is not whether reason can criticize itself, but whether the genres through which it speaks allow its limits to become visible. Cavell’s acknowledgment helps clarify what Plato’s dialogue performs: our relation to the world is not grounded in epistemic certainty. When we grant reason a monopoly over intelligibility, we define selfhood exclusively through analytical argument, and our understanding of ourselves withers.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Prof. Jeffrey Wilson for advising this work.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: C.W.; Writing - original draft: C.W.; Writing - review & editing: C.W.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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