Imagine you are a philosophy professor in Europe in 1920. You
have just been through a gut wrenching war. In your livelihood as a professor you
emphasize the power of rational discussion, but you have also just witnessed a
war which almost obliterated the world. How do you reconcile your job as a
philosopher with the horror of the war?
You have three options.
1) You can say that philosophy failed in its task, that
reasoning is nothing but a veneer over the underlying irrational impulses of
humankind.
2) You can say that the war, for all its horror, was
rational and perfectly reasonable, that this is what reason in action looks
like.
3) You can say that it is not philosophy in general that
failed, but a particular kind of philosophy, the kind which is irresponsible
and horrible, and which you will fight to overcome.