Critique of Reason
My philosophical heritage is rationalistic and scientific. I place a great value on reason and empiricism as means of inquiry to investigate truth. I also acknowledge the great price that humankind has paid due to irrational and superstitious beliefs. At the same time, I think the role of reason in self-understanding and knowledge of the soul is greatly limited and even has the potential to be destructive.
Reason is an excellent tool for understanding the physical world. Reason and empiricism have proven their success multiple times over he course of history, and we have all benefited greatly from the discoveries of science and medicine in particular.
But for understanding the psyche, for understanding our internal world of meaning, reason is inadequate.
Every reason-led person I have ever met distinguished between right and wrong, and cared about the events in the world far from themselves. But reason alone can never tell us right from wrong. Our desire to see right realized in the world, our dislike of wrong, our care for the world outside of its affect on our ourselves, these are all at their base inexplicable and irreducible.
Our experience goes far deeper than our impressions of the physical world. Of course there are the emotions, but there are many other things besides, perhaps less well named because these are much less distinct. There are our moods, our connections, our apprehension, our passion, our understanding. There are our aspiriations, our pride, our humility, our hope, our wonder. Can we really enumerate the dimensions of human experience? What is the experience of reading a Shakespearian tragedy? What is the experience of hearing a Mozart sonata? Can these things be measured, compared and objectively valued?
Looking at our experience through the perspective of reason flattens it, distorts it. The bean-counter of reason cannot embrace the full complexity of human experience, which is not simply positive and negative. The dimensions of the soul are many, and the best life is not necessarily the one that has the least suffering; suffering, too, has its valued place in the soul.
There is an impulse toward wholeness and integration in the soul. The soul has its own kind of understanding, neither part of reason nor wholly outside reason, an intuitive designer that brings together the myriad elements of experience to make a unified picture of the world and one's place in it. This process of world-understanding or meaning making is continuous, it is mysterious, and it is beyond the grasp of reason and beyond the measurement of science.
When reason is forcefully appled to this meaning-making mechanism, the result is violence to the soul. Reason cuts like a knife, separating what in the soul is married. It reduces the soul to a slave, whose worth is no more than what can be objectively measured by the systems of economy or biology.
It is ironic that the great light of reason, liberator of humankind, is also capable of creating a kind of blindness, one that robs us of our deepest insight into ourselves.
Reason is an excellent tool for understanding the physical world. Reason and empiricism have proven their success multiple times over he course of history, and we have all benefited greatly from the discoveries of science and medicine in particular.
But for understanding the psyche, for understanding our internal world of meaning, reason is inadequate.
Every reason-led person I have ever met distinguished between right and wrong, and cared about the events in the world far from themselves. But reason alone can never tell us right from wrong. Our desire to see right realized in the world, our dislike of wrong, our care for the world outside of its affect on our ourselves, these are all at their base inexplicable and irreducible.
Our experience goes far deeper than our impressions of the physical world. Of course there are the emotions, but there are many other things besides, perhaps less well named because these are much less distinct. There are our moods, our connections, our apprehension, our passion, our understanding. There are our aspiriations, our pride, our humility, our hope, our wonder. Can we really enumerate the dimensions of human experience? What is the experience of reading a Shakespearian tragedy? What is the experience of hearing a Mozart sonata? Can these things be measured, compared and objectively valued?
Looking at our experience through the perspective of reason flattens it, distorts it. The bean-counter of reason cannot embrace the full complexity of human experience, which is not simply positive and negative. The dimensions of the soul are many, and the best life is not necessarily the one that has the least suffering; suffering, too, has its valued place in the soul.
There is an impulse toward wholeness and integration in the soul. The soul has its own kind of understanding, neither part of reason nor wholly outside reason, an intuitive designer that brings together the myriad elements of experience to make a unified picture of the world and one's place in it. This process of world-understanding or meaning making is continuous, it is mysterious, and it is beyond the grasp of reason and beyond the measurement of science.
When reason is forcefully appled to this meaning-making mechanism, the result is violence to the soul. Reason cuts like a knife, separating what in the soul is married. It reduces the soul to a slave, whose worth is no more than what can be objectively measured by the systems of economy or biology.
It is ironic that the great light of reason, liberator of humankind, is also capable of creating a kind of blindness, one that robs us of our deepest insight into ourselves.
Comments
(I finally figured out how to leave comments...obviously.)
Q: In your new book, "The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God and World Affairs," you admit to having underestimated the role that religion would come to play in foreign affairs.
A:People were unprepared for it. I was unprepared for it. What I grew up with was the "rational actor" model of foreign policy — the idea that you're dealing with someone who is going through a rational process and not a spiritual process.
It seems that understanding the world in a non-rational or spiritual way is good for the individual and for national foreign policy.