What Do You Think of This?--Limits to Reason
Damon Lynch
It seems to me as though much of what is taught at University, or is
discussed amongst intellectuals, is somehow missing something important.
I could never articulate in a satisfactory matter exactly what was
missing. Recently, I stumbled across the writings of an Indian
intellectual, an excerpt of whose writings I have included below. I am
very interested to know what readers of this newsgroup think of the
writings below, because I believe they articulate in a brilliant manner
what had been of concern to me--articulated in a way I have never been
capable of!
1. It is often claimed that reason is the highest faculty of man and
that it has enabled him to master himself and to master Nature. Has
reason really succeeded?
... Apart from the stumbling action of the world, there has been a labor
of the individual thinker in man and this has achieved a higher quality
and risen to a loftier and clearer atmosphere above the general human
thought-levels. Here there has been the work of a reason that seeks
always after knowledge and strives patiently to find out truth for
itself, without bias, without the interference of distorting interests,
to study everything, to analyse everything, to know the principle and
process of everything. Philosophy, Science, learning, the reasoned
arts, all the agelong labor of the critical reason in man have been the
result of this effort. In the modern era under the impulsion of Science
this effort assumed enormous proportions and claimed for a time to
examine successfully and lay down finally the true principle and the
sufficient rule of process not only for all the activities of Nature,
but for all the activities of man. It has done great things, but it has
not been in the end a success. The human mind is beginning to perceive
that it has left the heart of almost every problem untouched and
illumined only outsides and a certain range of processes. There has
been a great and ordered classification and mechanisation, a great
discovery and practical result of increasing knowledge, but only on the
physical surface of things. Vast abysses of Truth lie allied below
which are concealed the real springs, the mysterious powers and secretly
decisive influences of existence. It is a question whether the
intellectual reason will ever be able to give us an adequate account of
these deeper and greater things or subject them to the intelligent will
as it has succeeded in explaining and canalising, though still
imperfectly, yet with much show of triumphant result, the forces of
physical Nature. But these other powers are much larger, subtler,
deeper down, more hidden, and variable than those of physical Nature.
The whole difficulty of the reason in trying to govern our
existence is that because of its own inherent limitations it is unable
to deal with life in its complexity, or in its integral movements; it is
compelled to break it up into parts, to make more or less artificial
classifications, to build systems with limited data which are
contradicted, upset or have to be continually modified by other data, to
work a selection of regulated potentialities which is broken down by the
bursting of a new wave of yet unregulated potentialities.
2. When reason applies itself to life and action it becomes partial and
passionate and the servant of other forces than the pure truth.
But even if the intellect keeps itself as impartial and disinterested as
possible,--and altogether impartial, altogether disinterested the human
intellect cannot be unless it is content to arrive at an entire divorce
from practice or a sort of large but ineffective tolerantism,
eclecticism or sceptical curiosity,--still the truths it discovers or
the ideas it promulgates become, the moment they are applied to life,
the plaything of forces over which the reason has little control.
Science pursuing its cold and even way has made discoveries which have
served on the one side a practical humanitarianism, on the other
supplied monstrous weapons to egoism and mutual destruction; it has made
possible a gigantic efficiency of organisation which has been used on
one side for the economic and social amelioration of the nations and on
the other for turning each into a colossal battering-ram of aggression,
ruin and slaughter. It has given rise on the one side to a
rationalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, on the other it has
justified a godless egoism, vitalism, vulgar will to power and success.
It has drawn mankind and given it a new hope and at the same time
crushed it with the burden of monstrous commercialism. Nor is this due,
as is so often asserted, to its divorce from religion or to any lack of
idealism. Idealistic philosophy has been equally at the service of the
powers of good and evil and provided and intellectual conviction both
for reaction and for progress. Organised religion itself has often
enough in the past hounded men to crime and massacre and justified
obscurantism and oppression.
The truth is that upon which we are now insisting, that reason
is in its nature an imperfect light with a large but still restricted
mission and that once it applies itself to life and action it becomes
subject to what it studies and the servant and counsellor of the forces
in whose obscure and ill-understood struggle it intervenes. It can in
its nature be used and has always been used to justify any idea, theory
of life, system of society or government, ideal of individual or
collective action to which the will of man attaches itself for the
moment or through the centuries. In philosophy it gives equally good
reasons for monism and pluralism or for any halting-place between them,
for the belief in Being or for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and
pessimism, for activism and quietism. It can justify the most mystic
religionism and the most positive atheism, get rid of God or see nothing
else. In aesthetics it supplies the basis equally for classicism and
romanticism, for an idealistic, religious or mystic theory of art or for
the most earthy realism. It can with equal power base austerely a
strict and narrow moralism or prove triumphantly the thesis of the
antinomian. It has been the sufficient and convincing prophet of every
kind of autocracy or oligarchy and of every species of democracy; it
supplies excellent and satisfying reasons for competitive individualism
and equally excellent and satisfying reasons for communism or against
communism and for State socialism or for one variety of socialism
against another. It can place itself with equal effectivity at the
service of utilitarianism, economism, hedonism, aestheticism,
sensualism, ethicism, idealism, or any other essential me or activity of
man and build around it a philosophy, a political and social system, a
theory and conduct of life. Ask it not to lean to one idea alone, but
to make an eclectic combination or a synthetic harmony and it will
satisfy you; only, there being any number of possible combinations or
harmonies, it will equally well justify the one or the other and set up
or throw down any one of them according as the spirit in man is
attracted to or withdraws from it. For it is really that which decides
and the reason is only a brilliant servant and minister of this veiled
and secret sovereign.
cmo...@pacificnet.net
My God! What a post!! Wonderful!!
You may be interested to read the book, "The Man Who Tasted
Shapes," by Richard E. Cytowic, M.D. It is the true story of a
neurologist who studied the rare and inexplicable condition of
synesthesia (the mixing of senses where a person can feel a color,
for example).
He came to the conclusion after years of research that it is
actually the rational part of the brain that SERVES the emotional
part of the brain and not the other way around. The why
and how of his discovery is what makes his book so amazingly
profound, and the implications of it.
I am going to print and save your post. Truly unique.
Carol