individualism & rationalism* as social & theoretical-philosophical anti-structuralism** respectively
individualism:
Individual freedom is seen as freedom from social structures… & freedom to use money to do whatever one wishes – and this monetary liberalism at the same time erodes, disintegrates, dissolves and liquefies social structures.
rationalism/rational tradition:
on the linguistic level: Under rational methodology, ones tries to reduce statements to such that can be defined and used independently of any [theoretical] context that might be too broad to be tangible, definable & explicable, and to such statements that consist of components whose meanings/functions are independent of any intangible, unconscious, impractically complex contexts. Put more simply, words and statements are isolated out of the complex structures they are/were parts of.
on the level of object/reference domain: When considering an object or a question, one can often find that this object is actually embedded in a more complex structure that is beyond practical rational analysis, and that the object’s properties and identity are dependent on a larger structure. The rational method tries, when tenable, to put aside such more complex structure in order to isolate and focus on an object that is a tangible, bounded, comprehensible piece of the universe. And rational objects of analysis thus tend to be physical and of theoretical dimension (- i.e. of [minimum] number of relata of the object’s predicate -) low enough to be reducible or definable using the available/accessible [mainstream] theories & theory levels.
on the level of belief/truth: At the same time rational theorizing tries to be free from dogma and bias by trying to be free from ideology, i.e. ideological idea structures. And this manifests in tending to minimize the positive content of theory structure, being opposed to theory structures that contain positive beliefs/determinations/propositions, instead aiming to build a purely technical/mathematical structure of neutral sets of possible choices. And this keeps the theory structure from growing in minds***, and thus minimizes the dimension and complexity of the theory structure, i.e. minimizes the extent of structure.
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Now, the idea of freedom from social structures is of course false – a naive rationalist denial of unnoticed, unconscious structures that humans are embedded in – structures of class, hierarchies, traditions, genders, etc. And this situation of naive ignorance of causally active social structures is open for exploitation by reactionary paternalism.
And analogously, the assumptions underlying rational methodology are also naive and exploitable.
*I’m not yet sure whether to say ‘rationality’ or ‘rationalism’ or something else here – and this isn’t simply a matter of looking up which term is the one closer to what I mean, it’s a matter of a longer process that involves exploring the logical and historical relationships between these terms and contemporary ideologies/traditions and developing a terminology that can most effectively be used to let a reader see the connections and distinctions I am trying to make or explicate. Suffice to say here that I mean ‘rationalism’ in a very broad, undefined, exploratory, speculative sense and not exactly in the sense of any particular existing historical definition of ‘rationalism’. Some other of many terminological candidates for what I’m thinking of are ‘rational tradition’ and ‘rational methodology’ and ‘rational-analytical methodology’.
**I use ‘structuralism’ here in a broader sense than the common usage of the term, especially than the sociological usage: By ‘structuralism’ I roughly mean: a meta-theory/philosophy that says that structures and relations actually exist and need to be taken into account for correct analysis of any single part of the world.
***I expect to write much more on this in other notes concerning the connection between rational-analytical method and nihilism.