Technological rationalism, as we experience it in the 21st century, did not sprout suddenly like wild vegetation. It is the fruit of an old tree, rationalism, whose roots took hold during the Enlightenment and matured over the centuries that followed. Yet this fruit, through hypertrophy and mutation, has transformed into something deeply different: a system of thought that no longer seeks truth but utility, that does not examine being but how to control it.
This shift became evident in the 19th century with the emergence of Auguste Comte's positivism, which established the dominance of the positive sciences and rejected all forms of metaphysics. Here, the seed of hyper-rationalism was planted, an excessive faith in the power of human logic that dismisses anything that cannot be quantified, proven, or computationally represented. Wittgenstein, at the beginning of his philosophical journey, famously wrote: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7). Although he later revised this view, the aphorism captures the limits of language and logic when faced with the ineffable.
Hyper-rationalism displaced mystery, the ineffable, and the unspoken dimensions of experience. Upon this foundation, technological rationalism was erected, its most practical, computational, and cold form.
The historical example of the Manhattan Project, the programme that produced the atomic bomb, is revealing. Technology reached its peak, physics mastered matter, yet the question of whether we should was eclipsed by the question of whether we could. J. Robert Oppenheimer, witnessing the test in New Mexico, recalled the words of Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
This form of rationalism presents itself as light, but it is laboratory light, not dawn. It illuminates only what it is told to illuminate, leaving in darkness anything that does not serve efficiency, speed, or control. It does not understand meaning; it knows only performance. The question "why do we exist" holds no significance for such a system; only "how can we be more efficient" does.
Max Weber, already in the early 20th century, warned of the iron cage (stahlhartes Gehäuse) of rationality, the process by which the world becomes an increasingly impersonal and disenchanted system of control, where the human being is reduced to a bureaucratic number within a mechanism. Weber did not condemn rationality but saw its unilateral dominance as leading to inner impoverishment.
In a similar spirit, Martin Heidegger emphasised that technology is not merely tools. It is a way of being. When Being is forgotten, and everything is approached as standing-reserve (Bestand), reality becomes a warehouse of objects, and humanity loses access to the deeper meaning of existence. His essay The Question Concerning Technology (1954) argues that the essence of technology is not technical but ontological.
Conversely, Simone Weil argued that truth is not attained by will or force, but by attention, the pure, silent presence before the real. In a world exhausted by speed and functionality, the mind that pauses and kneels humbly before Being becomes radically subversive.
The human being immersed in this technological framework becomes a tool of their own tools. Emotion, faith, art, poetic thought, all are weakened in the name of the objective. But this objectivity is superficial, a thin veneer masking a deep existential discomfort. We do not know why we live, but we strive to forget it by producing ever more intelligent machines. We believe that the answer to our existential void lies in technological perfection, that truth will emerge from data.
But truth does not dwell in spreadsheets. It lives in silence, in love, in failure, in death, all that technology attempts to ignore or eliminate. The false light of technological rationalism is not false because it fails to illuminate, but because it blinds. It makes us forget that we were not born to optimise the world but to understand it, and perhaps, simply, to experience it.
Perhaps, then, the most radical act today is not innovation but pause. Not production but observation. To look into the darkness and recognise that within it lies something more human than what the artificial light of rationalism promises. Not because darkness is better than light per se, but because the instrumental logic that kills meaning has yet to colonise it. The true light, the uncreated one, does not compete with darkness. It embraces and gently illuminates it from within.
Here, darkness is not evil, not denial. It is the place where mystery, the uncanny, the unutterable remain alive. Measurement, optimisation, and analysis do not work there. There survives prayer, poetry, silent knowledge that needs no proof. To face the darkness, then, is not to worship it. It is to accept it as part of being, a necessary dimension of the human.
And only there can we rediscover what it means to be human. Not through circuits and code, but through the dim flame of existence that asks no explanation, only witness.
Bibliography:
Descartes, R. (1641). Meditationes de prima philosophia
Comte, A. (1854). Système de politique positive
Wittgenstein, L. (1921). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Weber, M. (1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Heidegger, M. (1954). The Question Concerning Technology
Weil, S. (1952). Waiting for God
Rhodes, R. (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Bhagavad Gita (trans. Eknath Easwaran, 1985)
[This article was written as an interdisciplinary and existential approach to the phenomenon of technological rationalism in the modern West.]