Everything about Reason totally explained
Reason is a way of
thinking characterized by
logic,
analysis, and
synthesis. It is often contrasted with
emotionalism, which is thinking driven by
desire,
hate,
passion or
prejudice. Reason attempts to discover what is
true or what is
best. Reason often follows a chain of
cause and effect, and the word "reason" can be a synynom for "cause". Reason has been a major subject of interest since the beginning of
philosophy.
Discussion about reason especially concerns:
- its origin
- its relationship to other related concepts such as language, logic, and consciousness
- its ability to help people decide what is true
The question of whether or not
animals can reason has been a subject of lively debate.
The
concept of reason is closely related to the concept of
language, as reflected in the meanings of the Greek word "
logos", the root of
logic, which translated into
Latin became "ratio" and then in
French "raison", from which the English word "reason" was derived.
Also see
practical reason and
speculative reason.
Reason and logic
Reason is a type of
thought.
Logic is the attempt to make explicit the rules by which reason operates. The oldest surviving writing to explicitly and at length consider the rules by which reason operates are the works of the
Greek philosopher Aristotle, especially
Prior Analysis and
Posterior Analysis. Although the Ancient Greeks had no separate word for logic as distinct from language and reason, Aristotle's
neologism "
syllogism" (syllogismos) identified logic clearly for the first time as a distinct field of study. When Aristotle referred to "the logical" (logos), he was referring more broadly to rational thought.
Reason and logic can be thought of as distinct, although logic is one important aspect of reason. Author
Douglas Hofstadter, in
Gödel, Escher, Bach, characterizes the distinction in this way. Logic is what is done "inside the system" by formal steps such as deduction. Reason is what is done "outside the system" by such informal methods as skipping steps, working backward, drawing diagrams, looking at examples, or seeing what happens if you change the rules of the system. In
the present day there's an increasing tendency to use the terms interchangably, or to see logic as the most pure or the defining form of reason.
Neurologist
Terrence Deacon, following the tradition of
Charles Peirce, has recently given a useful new description of reason in modern terms. Like many philosophers in the English tradition, such as
Hobbes,
Locke, and
Hume, Peirce starts by distinguishing the type of thinking which is most essential to human reason as a type of
associative thinking. Reason, by his account, requires associating
perceptions with
icons. For example, the mind may associate the
image (or
icon) of smoke with not only the
image of fire, but may also associate the word "smoke", or indeed any made-up
symbol, with the image of fire.
Reason, truth, and “first principles”
In western philosophy,
reason has a twofold history. In
classical times a conflict developed between the
Platonists and the
Aristotelians concerning the role of reason in confirming
truth.
Both Aristotle and Plato considered this question. On the one hand, people use logic,
deduction, and
induction to reach conclusions they think are true. Conclusions reached in this way are considered more certain than basic sense perceptions. On the other hand, if such reasoned conclusions are only built upon sense perceptions, then our most logical conclusions can never be said to be certain because they're built upon the very same fallible perceptions they seek to better.
This leads to the question of
first principles.
Empiricism (associated with Aristotle and, more recently, with
British philosophers such as
John Locke and
David Hume) asserts that sensory impressions are primary.
Idealism, (associated with Plato and his school), claims that there's a "higher" reality, from which certain people can directly arrive at truth without the need of the senses, and that this higher reality is the primary source of truth.
In Greek, “
first principles” are
arkhai, starting points, and the faculty used to perceive them is sometimes referred to in Aristotle and Plato as “
nous” which was close in meaning to “awareness” or “
consciousness”.
Among those who would argue that reason can not be based upon experience alone, at least two major strands might be discerned. On the one hand, philosophers such as
Plato,
Aristotle,
Alfarabi,
Avicenna,
Averroes,
Maimonides,
Aquinas and
Hegel are sometimes said to have argued that reason must be fixed and discoverable - perhaps by dialectic, analysis, or study. In the vision of these thinkers, reason is divine or at least has divine attributes. Such an approach allowed religious philosophers such as
Thomas Aquinas and
Étienne Gilson to try to show that reason and
revelation are compatable.
On the other hand, since the
Seventeenth Century rationalists, reason has often been taken to be a subjective faculty, or rather the unaided ability (pure reason) to form concepts. For
Descartes,
Spinoza and
Leibniz, this was associated with significant developments in mathematics.
Kant attempted to show that pure reason could form concepts (time and space) that are the conditions of experience. Kant made his argument in opposition to Hume, who denied that reason had any role to play in experience.
Reason, language and mimesis
The recent writings of Deacon and Donald fit into an older tradition which makes reason connected to
language, and
mimesis, but more specifically the ability to create
language as part of an internal modelling of
reality specific to humankind. Other results are consciousness, and
imagination or
fantasy.
Thomas Hobbes describes the creation of “Markes, or Notes of remembrance” (
Leviathan Ch.4) as “speech” (allowing by his definition that it isn't necessarily a means of communication or speech in the normal sense; he was presumably thinking of "speech" as an English version of "
logos" in this description). In the context of a language, these marks or notes are called "
Signes" by Hobbes.
David Hume, following
John Locke (and
Berkeley), who followed Hobbes, emphasized the importance of associative thinking.
Concerning mimesis and fantasy being important in defining reason, see for example Aristotle's
Poetics,
De Anima,
On Dreams, and
On Memory and Recollection (and for example the Introduction by Michael Davis, printed with the 2002 translation by him and
Seth Benardete of the Poetics), Jacob Klein’s
A Commentary on the Meno Ch.5, and
Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories".
In more recent times, important areas of research include the relationship between reason and language, especially in discussions of
origin of language. Modern proponents of
a priori reasoning, at least with regards to language, include
Noam Chomsky and
Steven Pinker, to whom
Merlin Donald and
Terrence Deacon can be usefully contrasted.
Reason and emotion or passion
In
western literature, reason is often opposed to
emotions or
feelings -- desires, fears, hates, drives, or passions. Even in everyday speech, westerners tend to say for example that their passions made them behave contrary to reason, or that their reason kept the passions under control. Many writers, such as
Nikos Kazantzakis, extol passion and disparage reason.
It is also common, particularly since
Freud, to describe reason as the servant of the passions - the means of sorting out our desires and then getting what we want, or perhaps even the slave of the passions - allowing us to pretend to reason to the object of our desire. Such feigned reason is called "
rationalization".
Philosophers such as
Plato,
Rousseau,
Hume, and
Nietzsche have combined both views - making rational thinking not only a tool of desires, but also something privileged within the spectrum of desires, being itself desired, and not only because of its usefulness in satisfying other desires.
Modern
psychology has much to say on the role of
emotions in belief formation. Deeper philosophical questions about the relation between belief and reality are studied in the field of
epistemology, which forms part of the philosophical basis of
science, a branch of human activity that specifically aims to determine (certain types of)
truth by methods that avoid dependence on the emotions of the researchers.
Reason and faith, especially in the “Greater West”
In
theology, reason, as distinguished from
faith, is the human critical faculty exercised upon religious truth whether by way of discovery or by way of explanation. Some commentators have claimed that
Western civilization can be almost defined by its serious testing of the limits of tension between “unaided” reason and
faith in "
revealed" truths - figuratively summarised as
Athens and
Jerusalem, respectively.
Leo Strauss spoke of a "Greater
West" which included all areas under the influence of the tension between Greek rationalism and
Abrahamic revelation, including the
Muslim lands. He was particularly influenced by the great
Muslim philosopher Al-Farabi. In order to consider to what extent
Eastern philosophy might have partaken of these important tensions, it's perhaps best to consider whether
dharma or
tao may be equivalent to
Nature (by which we mean
physis in Greek).
The limits within which reason may be used have been laid down differently in different churches and periods of thought: on the whole, modern religion tends to allow to reason a wide field, reserving, however, as the sphere of faith the ultimate (
supernatural) truths of theology.
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