The Edge of Reason: A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World

235 Pages·2016·1.39 MB·English

by  Julian Baggini

Copyright © 2016 Julian Baggini All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,
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Publication Data
Names: Baggini, Julian, author.
Title: The edge of reason : a rational skeptic in an irrational world / Julian Baggini.
Description: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016009433 | ISBN 9780300208238 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Reason. | Rationalism.
| BISAC: PHILOSOPHY / Movements Rationalism. | PHILOSOPHY Ethics & Moral Philosophy. |
PHILOSOPHY / Criticism.
Classification: LCC BC177 .B18925 2016 | DDC 128/.33–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016009433
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of my father, Lino Baggini. This was the book he most wanted me to write.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: The Judge
1. The Eternal God argument
2. Science for humans
3. Rationality and judgement
Part II: The Guide
4. Lives of the mind
5. The challenge of psychology
6. Guided by reason
Part III: The Motivator
7. Rational morality
8. Scientific morality
9. The claims of reason
Part IV: The King
10. The rational state
11. Political reason

Conclusion: using reason
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
This books brings together and develops ideas that I first explored in various
journal articles, conference papers and book chapters. I am grateful to all those
who have given me the opportunity to develop my thinking, and I apologise if
the following list leaves anyone out: Russell Blackford, Havi Carel, Catherine
Fieschi, David Gamez, Alastair Hannay, Volker Kaul, Chad Meister, J.P.
Moreland, Rachel O’Brien, Anthony O’Hear, Udo Shüklenk, J.B. Stump, A.
Sweis.
Richard Newhauser’s enthusiasm for an earlier iteration of this project was
critical to its eventual completion and I am only sorry we could not work on it
together. At Yale University Press, I am indebted to Melissa Bond, Rachael
Lonsdale and Heather McCallum. I am also grateful for Lizzy Kremer’s solid
and consistent support. The rock at the base of it all is, as ever, Antonia.
Introduction
We have lost our reason, and our loss is no accident. Gradually, the
contemporary West has become more and more dismissive of the power of
reason. Caring for it less, we often find we have carelessly left it behind. When
we do try to use it, we’re not quite sure how to do so. We have become
suspicious of its claims, unwilling to believe that it can lead us to anything
worthy of the name ‘truth’.
Once outré dismissals of reason have become the new common sense. Once
radical claims like ‘People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational
exposition end by starving the best part of the mind’ now feature in many
collections of inspirational quotes (attributed to W.B. Yeats). Our image of the
typical human being is now like Dr Nathan in J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity
Exhibition, for whom ‘reason rationalizes reality for him as it does for the rest of
us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient
explanation’.1
In the popular imagination, reason has ceased to be a universally admired
faculty and is portrayed as the enemy of mystery and ambiguity, a cold tool of
desiccating logic. It is seen as standing in opposition to emotion, denying the
role of feeling and sentiment in daily life. Rationality is dismissed as a tool of
hegemonic oppression, a patriarchal construct, a Western imposition or a
mistaken privileging of one hemisphere of the brain over the other. The
Enlightenment is no longer almost universally revered but often condemned as
the birth of the age of dehumanising industrial capitalism, the start of the road
that led to Auschwitz. Popular culture has absorbed bastardised versions of many
of these ideas, and it is now widely believed that we are guided more by genes,
manipulative corporations and unconscious psychological biases than we could
ever be by reason.
It was not always thus. For millennia, rationality was held up as the highest
human achievement. We once followed Aristotle in maintaining that the capacity
to reason is what sets us apart from the other animals. Reason was not the cold
hard enemy of warm-blooded virtues like love, faith or aesthetic appreciation. St
Augustine, for instance, said ‘we could not even believe if we did not have
rational souls’.2
We have always recognised that irrational impulses can take a grip on us, but
it was believed that, with effort and application, our better, rational selves could
reign sovereign over the soul. Plato, for instance, said that ‘It’s not at all
uncommon to find a person’s desires compelling him to go against his reason,
and to see him cursing himself and venting his passion on the source of the
compulsion within him.’ Yet he insisted, ‘I’m sure you won’t claim that you had
ever, in yourself or in anyone else, met a case of passion siding with his desires
against the rational mind, when the rational mind prohibits resistance.’3 Aristotle
also accepted that there is ‘some element in the soul besides reason, opposing
and running counter to it’. But he too believed that this element, ‘in the soul of
the self-controlled person, at least, obeys reason and presumably in the
temperate and the brave person it is still more ready to listen, since in their case
it is in total harmony with reason’.4
It is true that we have in the past often placed too much trust in our capacity
to think rationally and that a greater recognition of the limits of reason is
necessary and welcome. But it is not for nothing that ‘losing your reason’ means
to go mad. Reason needs to be put in its place, and if that place is not close to the
centre of human life then our minds are left rudderless to float this way and that
on the waters of whim, emotion and the influences of others.
The book is an attempt to help us recover our reason. To do this we have to
understand what reason really is. This is a curiously neglected question. There is
a great deal written about particular forms of reason, such as deductive logic and
inductive inference, but much less on what reason, in the most general sense of
the word, involves. This lacuna is reflected in the fact that we have two words –
reason and rationality – which lack agreed, precise philosophical definitions and
are in practice synonyms. (I will use the two interchangeably.)
The rehabilitation of reason is urgent because it is only through the proper
use of reason that we can find our way out of the quagmires in which many big
issues of our time have become stuck. Without a clear sense of what it means for
one point of view to be more reasonable than another, it seems that the position
one adopts is ultimately based on nothing more than personal opinion or
preference. People take sides in debates not on the basis of evidence or argument
but on the basis of the side where they feel more at home. What is best for the
economy? Either what Wall Street wants or what it doesn’t, depending on which
faction you belong to. Are human beings responsible for global warming? Just
see what big business or progressives are saying and back your horse
accordingly. If science appears to challenge your faith, then either reassure
yourself that science has nothing to do with religion or take solace from the
sizeable minority of scientists who are religious. In all these debates people offer
reasons for their positions but, whatever they say, dissenters can tell themselves
‘they would say that’ and ignore them.
Most worryingly, a lack of faith in the power of reason makes good
international relations seemingly impossible. When we give up on reason, the
only tool we have left is coercion. For instance, ‘The brutality of terrorists in
Syria and Iraq forces us to look into the heart of darkness,’ said one senior
American politician. ‘The only language understood by killers like this is the
language of force.’ That politician was not a notorious hawk but President
Barack Obama, often criticised for not being forceful enough in exerting
American power in the world. Obama saw a role for reasoned diplomacy in the
Middle East and even in Afghanistan, but that did not make him popular. Since
reason has become a debased currency, it is no surprise that fewer and fewer
believe it has any value when dealing with threatening foreign powers.
Obama made his remarks in a speech to the 69th assembly of world leaders
at the UN headquarters in 2014. It is telling that the headlines focused on the
suggestion of Manichean conflict beyond the scope of reason. ‘In UN Speech,
Obama Vows to Fight ISIS “Network of Death”’ proclaimed the New York
Times. ‘Obama Addresses Islamic State Threat in United Nations Speech’, said
the Wall Street Journal. And yet the bulk of his address was actually about the
necessity for world powers to work together peacefully. ‘The ideology of ISIL or
al Qaeda or Boko Haram will wilt and die if it is consistently exposed and
confronted and refuted in the light of day,’ he said.5 This message of the
potential of reason to defeat terrorism was lost, in part at least because fewer and
fewer of us believe it.
Plato, Aristotle and their heirs may well have taken an overly optimistic view
of the power of reason. But they were right to think that our capacity to resolve
our differences and arrive at conclusions in the shared space of public reason is
one of our most precious human capabilities. To restore proper esteem for this,
we need to understand how the embrace of rationality does not require a retreat
into a heartless, sterile, scientistic world-view, but simply involves the
application of critical thinking wherever thinking is needed.