The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco Goya, 1797-1799
"Many of the follies of mankind resulted from the 'sleep of reason'. There are always people telling us what we want, how they will provide it, and what we should believe. Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything. We are typically ready to believe that our ways, our beliefs, our religion, our politics are better than theirs. In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other. It is because of ideas about what others are like, or who we are, or what our interests or rights require, that we go to war, or oppress others with good conscience, or even sometimes acquiesce in our oppression by others.
When these beliefs involve the sleep of reason, critical awakening is the antidote. Reflection enables us to step back, to see our perspective on a situation as perhaps distorted or blind, at the very least to see if there is argument for preferring our wats, or whether it is just subjective. Doing this properly is doing one more piece of conceptual engineering."
(Warburton (ed.), 2005: 16, from Blackburn: 2001)
