Conclusion
Just as with God and the monarchy, reason has also been overthrown. All the brilliant philosophic and scientific advances of the past few centuries have brought us, step by logical step, to the strangeness of the post-modern world. It took only a few years after Nietzsche for us to arrive at Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) insight that reality is relative, at Werner Heisenberg’s (1901-1976) insight that it is indeterminable (the Uncertainty Principle), at Karl Popper’s (1902-1994) insight that ultimately truth can never be proven, at Kurt Gödel’s (1906-1978) Incompleteness Theorems that demonstrate that axiomatic mathematical systems cannot be simultaneously complete and consistent, at the bleak emptiness of Samuel Beckett’s (1906-1989) “Waiting for Godot” and at the mind baffling insights of Quantum Physics.
With every step, ironically and paradoxically, we have used our rational minds to dismantle not only reality, but rationality itself. Reason has been turned on itself to expose its own limits. After almost 400 years, we have come to the end of the Age of Enlightenment, full circle from Descartes’ quest for certainty to the reluctant acceptance of uncertainty. And I believe it is this strange and confusing period we currently live in, no longer strongly tethered to either reason or truth, that has also brought us inexorably to a Kellyanne Conway, who could look straight into the cameras and assert that there are “alternative facts”.
