Rationalism amounts to a misuse of reason
Last week, I posted on my blog a link to a piece by Gene Callahan about the British philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott called Michael Oakeshott on Rationalism and Politics. According to Callahan, Oakeshott’s view was that “the rationalist, in awarding theory primacy over practice, has gotten things exactly backwards.”
This brought to mind something Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols: “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” What reminded me of this was the realization, while I was reading the piece on Oakeshott, that rationalism is the foundation of every so-called system. Or, to put it another way, every system is an exercise in rationalism.
This would be of purely academic interest but for the truth of Nietzsche’s second sentence: “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” What Nietzsche is suggesting — and I happen to think he is right — is that every system is necessarily inauthentic, a make-believe wholeness, what e.e.cummings was talking about when he said that “a world of made / is not a world of born.”
The philosophers would have us believe that the reasoning faculty is the essential note of humanness, what distinguishes us from the rest of the natural order. Only it ain’t necessarily so. Many years ago, I was house-sitting for a friend. One day, I found a kitten in the backyard. My friend was the director of a ballet company and the very large living room of his house was graced by a correspondingly large mirror at one end of the room, right next to where the door to the dining room was.
I was fascinated to watch as the kitten discovered the mirror and apparently saw in it another cat. She first pawed at the mirror, then walked through the door to the dining room to see if the other cat was there. Having apparently figured out that there was no other cat either there or in the mirror, she never looked in the mirror again.
This is evidence, I think, of a certain rudimentary inferential process. I watch birds every day out my kitchen window and I see evidence that they think before they act. So it may well be that the difference between us and animals is not that we can reason and they can’t, but that our reasoning faculty is simply more sophisticated than theirs.
Reason is one of the wonders of human life. But so is emotion. And so is imagination. We would all be better off if more people learned to use reason properly. Among other things, this would lead more people to understand that rationalism amounts to a misuse of reason. It is such because it attempts to use reason to explain the whole of something — call it life — that reason itself is only a part of, and probably not an especially large or particularly determining part.
This, it seems to me, has much in common with that fatuous exercise known as explicating poems. A poem is all of what it says in the precise way that it says it. To explicate a poem is simply to devise a parallel, inevitably inferior statement. That is because the constituent elements of a poem affect the reader simultaneously, while the explication must treat them linearly, one at a time.
The same is true of life and reason. Reason is linear. Life is three-dimensional.
Explications of poetry are harmless academic pastimes. But the isms that reason can give birth to are often pernicious, because they are almost invariably connected to the acquisition and exercise of power. All of the 20th century’s murderous totalitarianisms were grounded in rationalism.
It could hardly be otherwise. Rationalism subordinates reality to the categories of thought. Combine that with absolute power and you get not merely despotism, but tyranny. And this is because, as Nietzsche also noted, “the true party man learns no longer — he only experiences and judges.”
And he no longer has time to reason.
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)
- An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012
Print This Post
Frank makes some good points here, but reason isn’t the real culprit; it’s the agendas to which reason is seconded as an instrument. We can argue about what exactly we mean by reason, but we don’t mean my values or yours but something inherently shareable. I don’t subscribe to Nietzsche’s view but rather to David Hume’s: “Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of passion.” It serves our ends, for better or worse. But it isn’t an end in itself that “subordinates reality,” unless yoked improperly to particular ends.
I think we’re pretty much in agreement, Jeff, though perhaps I did not make myself as clear as I should have. I certainly don’t think reason is the culprit. As you say, it’s the agendas to which reason is seconded. I think we both agree that it is an abuse of reason to yoke it “improperly to particular ends.” Hume’s view (which I knew of but had not thought about) is quite intriguing.
Jeff’s response seems to be conflating “Reason” with “Rationalism.”
Even though I *love* Roger K. Miller’s observation that “isms” equal “wasms,” I must add that, IMO, isms ultimately morph into ain’tisms. Got gusto? Good one, Frank. (I don’t explicate poetry, I respond to it with a mix of reason and emotion; one can complement the other.)
—
http://booksinq.blogspot.com/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/Booksblog/