Maverick Philosopher

On the Infirmity of Reason

Weak in leading us to truth, reason is also weak in the correction of bad behavior. Reason in us waxes strong, however, in finding excuses for our weakness. Cigarette smokers, for example, typically claim to be 'addicted' to nicotine. They misuse the word 'addiction' to cover their refusal to exercise their will power. Unexercised, it atrophies.  A will atrophied unto extinction then validates the claim of 'addiction.'

Weak in determining behavior, reason is strong in rationalizing its weakness.  Why is reason in us so miserably weak? Is this weakness a noetic consequence of the Fall? If it is, then the weakness is not essential to it, but accidental. The Fall, after all, was a contingent event: there was no necessity that it occur. Man might have remained in his prelapsarian state. In that state, man's reason was strong and healthy not like it is now suborned by its lust and greed and envy, and all the rest of the deadly adjuncts of the Initial Moral Collapse. 

Reason

Reason calls itself into question but often won't allow a challenge from anything other than reason. But if reason, despite its weakness, has the power to limit its reach and curb its pretensions, then it is strange indeed that it should not allow this power to other sources of insight such as faith, mystical intuition, and conscience.

A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and in Religion

This Sunday morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and carried about by the wind."  While I do not deny that doubt  can close us off from the help we need, I wonder whether doubt has a positive role to play in religion.

Doubt is the engine of inquiry, as I have said many times, but I think it also plays a salutary role in religion.  

The religious doubt the world and its values. What I mean by 'world' here is the fifth entry in my catalog of the twelve senses of 'world':

5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:

But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians  talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they  speak  of could not be reduced to the world of black holes  and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.

To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it.  They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.

Crucial to being religious is doubting the ultimacy and value of the world in this acceptation of the term.  The religious person is skeptical of secular teachings, secular 'authorities,' and secular suggestions. He is keenly aware of the infernal and ovine suggestibility of  humanity. That's my first point.

Second, the religious man doubts his own goodness and his ability to improve himself. He cultivates a deep skepticism about his own probity and moral worth, not out of a perverse need for self-denigration, but out of honest insight into self.  He follows the Socratic injunction to know oneself and he is not afraid to take a hard and unsparing look into his own (foul) heart, (disordered) soul, and (dark) mind.  He does not avert his eyes from the dreck and dross he inevitably discovers but catalogs it  clinically and objectively as best he can. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot come to know and bemoan its own weakness and its susceptibility to subornation by the lusts of the flesh.

And of course the religious  train their moral skepticism upon their dear fellow mortals as well.  

Fourth, the religionist doubts the philosophers. Well aware that philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, one of the finest flowers in man's quest for the Absolute, the savvy religionist knows that it is miserable in execution. The philosophers contradict one another on all points, always have, and presumably always will.  Their guidance must not be ignored, but cannot be blindly trusted.

Fifth, he doubts the teachings of other religions and the probity of their teachers.

Sixth, he doubts the probity of the teachers of his own religion.  Surely this  is an obvious point, even if it does not extend to the founder of the religion. Doubt here can lead to denial and denunciation, and rightly so.  (Does not Bergoglio the Benighted deserve denunciation?)

Finally, a point about reason in relation to doubt. There is is no critical  reasoning without doubt which is not only the engine of inquiry but also the blade of critique which severs the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, the justified from the unjustified, the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the improbable.  Critical reasoning and thus doubt have a legitimate role to play not only in theology  but also in scriptural exegesis.

Philosophy and religion are opposed  and in fruitful tension as are reason and faith, but each is involved with the other and needs the other for correction and balance, as Athens needs Jerusalem, and Jerusalem Athens.

Both Weak and Strong

Reason is weak in the discernment of reasons, strong in the crafting of rationalizations. But the strength of rationalizing reason  derives not from reason but from passion and her subornation of reason.

The Near Occasion of Doubt

Acutely aware of our moral weakness, the wise among us do not continually test our virtue: we  avoid the near occasion of vice. Tests will come without our seeking them. But the wise among us  are also keenly aware of our intellectual weakness.  Reason in us we know to be infirm, prone to error, and easily swayed by our passions and especially the suggestions of others. It does not follow what we should refrain from testing our beliefs or entertaining doubts about them.   Doubt is the engine of inquiry. What follows is only that the testing and the entertainment should be kept within limits.

So while we ought to avoid the near occasion of vice, we ought merely to beware of the near occasion of doubt.

Reason Weak and Strong

Reason proves weak in the search for truth, but strong in the rationalizing of behavior.

Could it be Reasonable to Affirm the Infirmity of Reason?

Any reasons one adduces in support of the thesis of  the infirmity of reason will share in the weakness of the faculty whose weakness is being affirmed.  Is this a problem for the proponent of the thesis? Does he contradict himself? Not obviously: he might simply accept the conclusion that the reasoning in support of the thesis is inconclusive.

Suppose I argue that, with respect to all substantive philosophical theses, there there are good arguments  pro and good arguments contra, and that these arguments 'cancel out.'  Now my thesis is substantive, and so my thesis applies to itself, whence it follows that my meta-thesis has both good arguments for it and good arguments against it, and that they cancel out.

Where is the problem? I am simply applying my meta-philosophical skepticism to itself, as I must if I am to be logically consistent.  Now I could make an exception for my meta-thesis, but that, I think, would be intolerably ad hoc.

I am not dogmatically affirming the infirmity of reason; I am merely stating that there are reasons to accept it, reasons that are not conclusive.

Deeper into this topic:

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre: The Infirmity of Reason

No Total Clarity in Philosophy

To demand total clarity in philosophy is like demanding that one's visual field be all focus and no fringe.  It is a demand  that cannot be satisfied.  But the situation in philosophy is worse than the metaphor suggests. The visual fringe can be brought into focus if one is willing to allow the focus to become fringe. The transdiscursive, however, to which philosophy is beholden and to which she points, can never be brought into discursive focus. The transdiscursive, ineliminably obscure, must forever remain fringe. 

The unity of the proposition, for example, without which no proposition can attract a truth value, and without which no proposition can be more than a truth-value-less aggregate of its sub-propositional parts, lies beyond the grasp of the discursive intellect.

Might we reasonably expect total clarity in the next world? The next world might be samsara 2.0, clearer, brighter, more intelligible, but still subject to the duality: clarity-obscurity. Ascend from the Cave, and you will still experience light and darkness, but more light and less darkness than down below. And beyond that there perhaps lies samsara 3.0, and so on.  Ever subtler realms of chiaroscuro. The nirvanic terminal state would then be the extinction of all dualities, and the unspeakable unity of clarity and obscurity, intelligibility and ab-surdity.  Could that be the ultimate Goal? Could the ens reallissimum himself take as his final goal, nibbanic extinction? 

Could the ens perfectissimum et necessarium say to himself: Take it to the limit Old Man and become finally in truth what you were supposed to be all along, Absolute and Unconditioned?

The above is a species of nonsense from the point of view of the discursive intellect.  Important nonsense or nugatory nonsense?  If you plump for the latter, are you not assuming that the discursive intellect is unconditioned?

Companion post: The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Slavery, Abortion, and 'Skin in the Game'

Slavery is is widely and rightly regarded as among the worst of moral evils. Abortion is not. On the contrary: the latter is now celebrated in some circles. Why the difference? Why the difference when both are grave moral evils? 'Skin in the game' plays an explanatory role. Not the whole role, perhaps, but a major one.

No one owns slaves or has an economic interest in them. There's no  skin in the game. But everyone is naturally concupiscent. There's plenty of skin in that game both literally and figuratively.  Add to the natural the social: Western societies do little or nothing  to restrict, and quite a lot to facilitate, the pursuit of sexual gratification for its own sake.  Now add to the social the technological: safe and reliable birth control and safe and reliable abortion. The resulting trifecta of mutually reinforcing factors has brought us to the current decadent and hedonistic pass.

It is easy to think clearly and disinterestedly about slavery and its immorality since we have no stake in it. There are no passions or interests to suborn the intellect. Denunciation of slavery and its real or imagined consequences such as 'institutional' or 'systemic' racism also allows one a cost-free way of displaying one's supposedly high moral status. One doesn't have to give up anything or do anything. One signals one's virtue by one's bien-pensant attitude. At most one will be called upon to mouth some politically correct pieties.  One's 'thinking' merges easily with thoughtless groupthink.

To think clearly about the immorality of abortion on demand at any stage of fetal development for any reason, however, requires one courageously to cut against the grain of groupthink and to resist one's natural desire for unlimited sex without consequences.

For one whose mind  is in the grip of the Zeitgeist and his loins in the grip of concupiscence, rational argument arrives too late. 

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre: The Infirmity of Reason

Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices. Let us not take this word in a bad sense. It does not necessarily mean false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, opinions adopted before any examination. Now these sorts of opinions are man’s greatest need, the true elements of his happiness, and the Palladium of empires. Without them there can be neither worship, nor morality, nor government . . . .

Joseph de Maistre, Against Rousseau: On the State of Nature and the Sovereignty of the People

De Maistre's statement above is extreme but it contains a kernel of insight. Let me see if I can isolate the kernel.

Thinking beyond the empirical is endless and leads to no fixed result. The conclusions of the philosophers are inconclusive. The strife of systems rages unabated across the centuries. Nothing is ever settled to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  In a Kierkegaardian figure, philosophizing without dogma is like sewing without a knot at the end of one's thread. Thoughts are never stayed. Considerations and counter-considerations multiply and ramify, leading to protracted disputes. The protraction is unto infinity. Dispute impedes decision and action, including decisions and actions at the level of thought.

Not only is thinking inconclusive, it entangles itself in contradictions when left to run without sensory or dogmatic input. Think of Nagarjuna's tetralemmae, Sextus Empiricus' mutually canceling arguments, Kant's antinomies, etc. Or just plunge into the arcana discussed in the technical philosophy journals on any topic.  Forget the strife of systems; philosophers cannot come to agreement on even the most carefully and precisely defined questions.  Can anyone honestly think that real progress is being made on the narrowly defined questions over which philosophers, including this one, obsess? What goes for precisely defined technical questions whose human importance is low or non-existent, goes all the more for the broad questions of great human relevance.

"Human reason reduced to its own resources," if not perfectly worthless, is not capable of establishing any of the substantive and humanly important propositions about God, the soul, the nature of justice, and so on, that we need to know to flourish, and establish them in a manner that secures agreement among well-intentioned and intelligent truth-seekers.  We need the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, and we need agreement on it, but we can secure neither by our own efforts, whether individual or collective. Or at least that is a very good induction  from past philosophical experience.

Human reason needs input from a source outside it. (One cannot argue without premises, and not all premises can be argued for.) With respect to the Big Questions, sensory input is obviously of no use. Nor is mathematics, set theory and other formal disciplines. Foundational questions cannot be decided by the will of the people. Do you really want to put the principle of presumption of innocence up for democratic grabs?  Consensus does not constitute truth, and in any case uncoerced consensus is not to be had.

One might turn to divine revelation.  That would solve the problem if it were available. But revelation cannot be accepted at face value because there are competing revelations that cannot all be true. One is forced to distinguish putative and genuine revelation and to worry about the criteria of genuine revelation.  Even if God gave us all the answers in a book, he didn't tell us which book it is.

But then we are back to the dialectic of endless consideration and counter-consideration.  We have to think about which Scripture to credit and what any bit of it means. Sola scriptura leaves us in the lurch, and what, pray tell, is its Biblical basis? Theology must be brought in, but what is that if not applied philosophy, philosophy applied to the putative data of revelation. And so we are brought back to philosophy and the disagreement endemic thereto. To take but one example, the Christian and Muslim differ bitterly, and unto bloodshed, about the nature of God: radically One, or triune?  And in each major and minor religion there are sectarian splits, and meta-splits on how to heal the various splits and whether it is even necessary to do so.  You may be latitudinarian and inclusive,  but not unto inclusion of those who are neither.

One can always wax dogmatic, but that is no satisfactory solution for a thoughtful person. Dogmas are decisions at the level of thought. The dogmatic pronunciamento cuts off thought, which is endlessly self-perpetuating, and there is something satisfying about bringing endless talk to a halt.  Basta! Enough!   We value decisiveness in people, despite the arbitrarity and willfulness of decision. Therein lies the appeal of the dictator who puts an end to parliamentary mewling and hand-wringing. We note in passing the bivalence of these words: 'strong-willed' has a positive, 'willful' a pejorative, connotation.  Our very language reflects our predicament.

Action uninformed by thought is willful and one-sided.  It is blind. Thought without action is effete and epicene. So we are in a fine pickle indeed, one of the many 'pickles' that make up our miserable but also exhilarating predicament. (And our condition is indeed a predicament: something is deeply wrong and we need to find a way out without the assurance that there is a way out.)

The problem, or part of it, is that considerations of the intellect alone cannot determine action. Will and de-cision come into it. At some point thinking needs abruptly to be cut off by free, hence undetermined, decision.  Can the cut-off be achieved by a will that is not merely willful? Or is a free decision necessarily arbitrary in a bad sense?

Both thought and action breed disagreement, often bitter and protracted, and sometimes bloody. In the precincts of theoria there is the strife of systems. In the precincts of praxis, the strife of blood and iron. The conflicts in either sphere feed the conflicts in the other. Conflicts among minds and ideas stoke conflicts among bodies and interests, and conversely. Intra-spheric conflict drives inter-spheric conflict.

So the problem cannot be solved within either sphere. The spheres need to be bridged or mediated. Dogmas are one kind of mediating principle.

Dogmas are decisions at the level of thought. One takes action, or a group takes action, at the level of thought by enforcing a view that must be accepted with no further questions. Dogmas are attempts to stop thought and knot the thread on pain of something dire such as perdition or excommunication or the gulag. But these congealed thoughts are still thoughts and so will be questioned, doubted, and denied.  Even if it is granted that the thread must be knotted somewhere, why here?

Dogmas are delivered by indoctrination, by inculcating them.  The word is exactly right, its etymology suggesting a stamping in, as with the heel (calx, calcis). Inculcation is most effective with the young and defenseless, those still in de Maistre's cradle:  "His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct."

But whose dogmas should line the cradle and be stamped into the young?  No doubt there are good dogmas and good prejudices, but could a dogmatic method sort the good from the bad?  One needs a critical method.

Human actions are embodied thoughts, thoughts made flesh. But if the thoughts are false or pernicious, then the actions will not be good.

What then should we say about the de Maistre quotation above?  I believe I have laid bare the kernel of insight it contains: human reason is weak and needs guidance from without whether or not any such guidance is available. Reason is a very poor guide to life. Appeals to 'reason' are useless when not absurd. Whose 'reason'?  How applied? And what exactly is this vaunted faculty anyway?  And what is its reach? How reasonable was Kant's mapping of its limits in his Critique of Pure Reason? The "Come now, and let us reason together . . ." of Isaiah 1:18 has little application among men, whatever application it has between a man and God.

But what I have written above tenders no aid and comfort to the reactionary extremism of de Maistre. He sees what is wrong with the appeal to reason, but not what is wrong with its opposite, appeal to tradition and unexamined prejudices.  The predicament we are in cannot be solved, if it can be solved, by veering off to either extreme.

I am tempted to say what Heidegger said in his Spiegel interview in 1966, the years before his death: Nur ein Gott kann uns retten.