There’s a tension here between reason as a regulative ideal (something to be pursued, refined, or rethought) and reason as an ideological weapon, a means of drawing lines between the “rational” and the “irrational” in ways that sustain power. Habermas leans on a procedural ideal of rationality, but his framework risks flattening out how different forms of reason emerge in specific historical, social, and material contexts.

The idea that we might hit a mirage rather than the target suggests something akin to a paralogism of reason—where what appears as rational discourse might actually be a distortion or even a simulation of reason, one that functions to obscure its own exclusions and blind spots. This echoes critiques of the Enlightenment (Adorno & Horkheimer, for instance) but also opens space for reformatting rationality, rather than rejecting it outright.

So, the move is not to indict reason per se but to interrogate the ways in which reason is structured, situated, and made into a tool of either openness or foreclosure. Reformulating rationality in a way that accounts for its relational, empirical, and communicative dimensions might require abandoning the notion that reason is a singular, universal faculty and instead seeing it as something more like an ecological process—one that depends on context, conditions, and intersubjectivity.

But the core dilemma remains: Can reason be saved from itself, or does its very structure lend itself to these ideological distortions? Does the distinction between rationality and ideology hold up under scrutiny, or do all rationalities inevitably encode forms of power?

GPT