Understanding Reason

    Understanding Reason.

Philosophers are not able to connect religion to morality. Beliefs about god are unrelated to beliefs about what is good. There is no logical connection. The claim that facts lead to conclusions about what is good is called the naturalistic or is-ought fallacy. Reason is only able to address whether a claim that something in factual is true or false, not whether it is good or bad, right or wrong. Secularization arrived during the 17th century (30 Years War) and replaced morality with legality – not that moralists do not still examine motives and conscience. Morality is reduced to feelings, emotional assertions, and failed solutions like majority rules (utilitarianism) and practical reason (deontology). Some emotional expressions are related to legal injunctions and arguably to moral justifications. But, religion has for so long been criticized for its connection to evil (witness the present day fundamentalism of Islamism) that moral claims are merely their own preferences and have no logical connection to human nature or any universal way to live life. Terms like Merry Christmas refer more to one's religious preferences and beliefs in marriage, babies and love but also conceal prejudices historically related to this same religion to which others are sensitive. The concepts that words refer to have changed their meaning during history. Reason is limited and has been acknowledged as limited since Kant to determining what is factual and not to what is good, right, ethical or moral.

There are different degrees of truth: the truth mentioned here as what is out there is not something that you can know in its entirety or totality because the truth out there is truth in terms of everything that exists or can possibly exist. Truth at another level is truth that is actual: you may not observe it happening but you can observe its results or effects. A third kind of truth is empirical: you can know it and observe it and it may be expected of you to tell the truth. You know what that kind of truth is - it is something that is inside of you about something that happened, some event that you know about. But, the notion of truth out there as existing before you can know a bit of it is entirely unconscious or even outside of your awareness.

There is the question of god, gods, or ancestors that pervades our culture - culture as belief system and set of institutions and rituals. The key question is whether the monotheistic god is actually the supreme god. Cultures with several gods, polytheism, or ancestors, acknowledge that each deity is both good and evil, has strengths and weakness, but the monotheistic god has been posited as entirely ideal. Whichever religious belief-system that you are from or address, there is the issue of evil, or death, of unfairness or political instability. When Nietzsche calls us slaves, he must be referring to the attitude towards those laws which do not matter and which make no difference, that is, to the mere cultural beliefs and moods which have made moderns both criminal and/or paranoid.

What exactly is reason - standards of validity, evidence and justification? Self-preservation instinct?

Freud labors over this ad nauseum! For 30 years his basic duality-synthesis is Eros and self-preservation just like Darwin. Starting in 1920, he juxtaposes this opposition which involves several contradictions with the death instinct!

It is not clear then if the basic duality is Eros-Thanatos or self-preservation - Thanatos!

Is this actually reason as reasonable, as reason giving, as related to criteria of validity? Habermas contrasts power and validity and indicates instances where power illegitimately passes for validity. For example, inflicting pain or using anger often pass for reason - imperatives which must be addressed!

Freud, very intelligently, wrote about these puzzles of pain and anger in several articles on masochism. Firstly, he claims everyone is masochistic - it is the normal situation. Bye bye Bentham who posited reason as the distinction and judgment between pleasure and pain! But, not only are humans normally masochistic - taking pleasure in pain, whereas the sadists are perverts, but everyone is a moral masochist which is why laws, customs, traditions and new trends tend to work!

I doubt anyone becomes a sadist - taking pleasure inflicting pain, without spending an inordinate amount of time in the masochistic position. However, pain is an important consideration concerning the nature of man.

Some of Nietzsche’s ideas were adopted by Freud, i.e. ‘id’ and “super-ego!” Freud is good about citing his sources, but Freud was also a scientist and details his literature searches, similar to Aristotle and the standard today.  Freud’s morality is not similar to Nietzsche’s nihilism or will to power, or transvaluation! Freud borrows little from him. Does the id and super-ego, or the unconscious, constitute reason? Structuralists might assert that the structure of our minds as effects of signifiers and under basic oppositional binary alternatives constitutes reason!

Fear is another puzzle. We all fear especially the low grade stressful annoying type, but the Stoic disposition, grin and bear it, stiff upper lip, courage and bravery, etc., are basic characteristics of human cultures. So, “reason” has I think countered the emotions! Alasdair MacIntyre points out that moral rules, and I would add certain laws, are precisely designed as constraints, as "painful" restrictions on pleasure seeking.

So, how is cognition related to the self?

I am wondering about why the term ‘cognition’ or ‘cognitive’ is often misunderstood as a substitute for the self or ego. Cognition comes from ‘cogito’ which Descartes posited as the part of our thinking substance from which body and sensation and feeling are differentiated (this is the key cognitive term). Cognition is the pure rational judging part of mind distinct from subjectivity!

Broughton (in Rieber and Salzinger 1980 "Psychology - Theoretical and Historical Perspectives) explains that not only did Descartes posit the body-mind dualism but also the subject-other dualism. The result is an objectification of subjectivity.

In terms of Eros, self-preservation and Thanatos, which all seem like subjective feelings with perhaps some problem-solving calculations, cognitive reflexivity jettisons subjectivity leaving only the cogito in relation to the world!

Does sympathy, compassion, and/or free will constitute reason?

Voluntarism is about free will, choice, effort, determination, etc. This angle is complicated by the problem of starting conditions: given the inequalities in the world, no amount of effort or determination will dent the social structures under which each is born. Maybe it’s luck but otherwise the social system and history are somewhat reified, progress is slow and relativism never goes away. But we should object to the gouging exploitation!

Biologically, emotions are neuropolitical like judgments. The heart is a pump, the emotions are not there, that is a metaphor!

Ego as in ego instincts or ego interests or ego functions is cognition - the split off part of the mind from the self, subjectivity and spontaneity. The objectivation of the ego, the cogito by cognition when differentiation splits mind into subject and object, suppresses the subject.

The critique of reason, its elaboration and explanation, its contrast with understanding emotions/feelings and beliefs, must take into consideration certain the differentiation of the mind or ego, and the problems of faiths and imagination, but reason will always address the issues of truth in reality and meaning or the significance of experience where standards of validity, evidence and justifications are necessary.

Reason is basically the same thing as discourse, language and communication. But, historically, reason has been narrowed from thinking and imagination in contrast to passion and emotion, down to motivation or cause, as in reason giving, or answering the 'why' question dialogically and reflectively. Today, reason is the basis for interaction that consists of standards of validity, evidence, and justification. Therefore, we can easily see that there is a problem of unreason or irrationality, etc.

Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' was a response to several strands of thought in the 18th Century. Hume's prioritization of passion or emotion over reason, reason as the slave of the passions, led to Hume's infamous Dangerous Dilemma where Reason's doubt-inducing mode destroys Hume's own final outcome of reason - that one should assent to reason's final decision. Reason however, for Hume, is essentially probable reason which leads to the problem of low probability reasons!

Kant responds to Hume's skepticism with a somewhat complicated argument that involves the nature of consciousness more than anything else, but Kant settles on the relevance of evidence which can broadly include argument, demonstration, perception, and other logical elements but essentially defends the Enlightenment's scientific thrust.

Kant drastically restricts the human imagination to thinking that is logical and evident-based, thus he is one of the first to disrupt metaphysical systems of thought, namely religions and scientific thinking that is not based on evidence. Not to take any credit away from Voltaire, Spinoza and other Enlightenment thinkers like D'Alambert, the importance of proof as in mathematics and astronomy was an arguable point in the faith versus reason arguments of the 16th to 18th Centuries which saw the Reformation and the 3 major Democratic Revolutions: England, USA, and France.

Kant's reason however is separated from his ethics - the Critique of Practical Reason and the Categorical Imperative which can be loosely compared to the ancient Golden Rule. Although a pragmatic trend, what works, can be traced to Kant, so can a destructive reason, a reason of manipulation and domination, which can be traced back to the realpolitik of Machiavelli.

In the 20th century, several leftists attempted to analyze the history of reason because reason in their minds had been corrupted. Even if we equate reason with truth, truth is not necessarily ethical or moral as observed easily in the 30 Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, WWI, and the Holocaust. This problem of truth and reason can be found in Lukacs 'Destruction of Reason,' Adorno's 'Negative Dialectics,' Marcuse's 'Reason and Revolution,' and in Gramsci's 'Prison Notebooks' in the concept hegemony. These notions of reason detected a split in reason between an excluding and repressing reason and a constituting reason that constructs objects and others! Notice that 'constituting reason' is an abstraction that refers to the construction of the object as in scientific object, or as in another person or group!

All of these ideas grew out of Marxism where Marx identified reason as a function of the mode of production or the position of the worker in the division of labor where reason operated not as a facilitating social mode of communication, but as exploitation, alienation, and appropriation. These ideas were further elaborated by Sartre where reason's negativity was no longer limited to the workplace but overwhelmed all social interaction where the other person was an obstacle, an object to be strategically manipulated. Strategic reason can be found elucidated in Jurgen Habermas's work, particularly, 'Theory of Communicative Action.

Habermas presents reason as communicative, as a practice of communication that differentiates interaction as communicative or as strategic, and he describes how to make this differentiation. Communicative Reason abides by 3 elements: truthfulness, normativity, and sincerity, whereas Strategic Reason is concealing and manipulative.

Reason, however, is today more complicated by several factors since Kant: Freud uncovered each person's unconsciousness or repressed experience which influences the person's behavior and expressions, particularly their level of anger or neurosis. Also, Freud made several important distinctions which deepens the definition of reason from linguistic interaction or f2f or discourse, to interpretation and reflection. Reason is therefore once removed from direct perception and reality into a reflective awareness. Also, Freud indicated that the distinction between perception and thinking, that is, conscious awareness and subconsciousness, is complex so that evidence is not simply observable. Today, we recognize evidence as statistical reality and therefore as somewhat of a nonconscious entity, that is, we are no longer immediately aware of reality and therefore intersubjectivity, measurement, and certain standards of judgment, or procedures, are necessary to evaluate events and behaviors.

The danger now is totalization: any claim that totalizes one's knowledge or understanding is criticisable and fallible. Recognition of this limitation harks back to Kant's Critique, but more importantly, is an inclusive and plural definition which recognizes intersubjectivity, statistical reality, and error.