An insightful colleague recently told me: philosophy is about problems.1 Itâs about how problems are identified and dissected; itâs about how concepts are included and excluded when circumscribing problems; and itâs about how we uncover and re-discover forgotten problems and solutions. Shortly after this conversation, I came across a passage from Aristotle: âFor those who wish to get clear of difficulties it is advantageous to discuss the difficulties well; for the subsequent free play of thought implies the solution of the previous difficulties, and it is not possible to untie a knot of which one does not knowâ (1941, 995a28â30). Aristotle understood as well as anyone that the philosophical landscape we are traversing is well worn. Others have previously asked the same questions, and, for better or worse, they have offered answers. The ways in which issues are formulated and responses to problems are proffered do help us untie knots in our thinking. Sometimes it pays for philosophers to do a little archeology.
If philosophy is indeed about problems, one of the most vexing of them is undoubtedly âreason.â The concept has fallen on hard times. The most vehement attacks often come from the so-called continental and American pragmatist traditions, which set themselves sharply in contrast with positivismâs willingness to take a Cartesian model of methodological reason, wed it to a radical empiricism, and consign everything else to the flames. Nevertheless, as Anglo-American philosophy has slowly freed itself from this truncated picture of reason, it, too, has adopted a more critical stance toward Cartesian instantiations of the concept. Regardless of philosophical tradition, the cries against reason have become louder and louder.2 This is no accident. The aspects of a full human life are varied and involve far more than what can be empirically verified. Positivism, in particular, makes evident how, under strictly interpreted modern assumptions, very little of human life is meaningful, or even worthy of investigation. The purely scientific view of rational method is, at this extreme, suffocating.
What I find so striking is how a concept so central to the discipline has come to be held in such disrepute. After all, it is difficult to imagine what philosophy could be in the absence of rational argumentation, whatever we mean by ârational.â Richard Rorty may think he knows what this image looks like. He may believe that philosophy should become cultural criticism âall the way down.â But even cultural criticism requires some means of constructing arguments capable, in principle, of convincing oneâs opponents. If we go so far as to emphasize the counter-concept, irrationality, we find ourselves unable to defend our conclusions.3 Stated slightly differently, even Rorty in his most radical incarnation relies on reasons. After all, in the absence of rationality we lack a guide, a standard, a heuristic principle for how we are to proceed in our efforts to engage others. At that point, philosophy is truly pointless. Even beyond its importance for philosophy, however, rationality very much appears to be what binds the elements of our lives together and allows our lives to be meaningful. We use our faculty of reason not just for solving logical problems but to plan and make dinner, to get us to work, and to maintain friendships (all matters outside the domain of positivist concerns). For millennia, humans have defined themselves as essentially rational beings. How is it that reason has fallen on such hard times? And, how can the concept be salvaged?
Answering these questions entails adopting various perspectives on reason, perspectives like the small window openings in Henry Jamesâ house of fiction. âThe house of fiction has,â says James, ânot one window, but a million âŠ. They have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from any other âŠâ (James 1934, 46). The âhouse of reasonâ appears not all that different. To examine current impressions of reason is to notice that reason has a great many windowsâand to notice that each of these exhibits a subjectivity/relativity of perspective. It is to notice much hand-wringing over reasonâs various incarnations and to notice much doubt over whether we even need to retain the concept at all. It is to notice that at each window stands figures with pairs of eyes, not so much ensuring a distinct impression as struggling to figure out how to develop a wider field of vision. It is to notice that perhaps, just perhaps, standpoint epistemologists are right: reason is always socially situated.
We always come at reason from some perspective which is limited and biased in one way or another. Of course, this is hardly a comforting observation. While pairs of eyes or field instruments ensuring distinct impressions may be relatively unthreatening in fiction, the image is a far more destructive one in philosophy and in science. That the need for some sort of so-called objective constraint on cognition is a central theme of the modern era is not an accident, nor is it an accident that critics of modernism struggle to recover a meaningful notion of objectivity. What critics of modernism, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, understand is that âthe standpoint of the forums of modern liberal culture presupposes the fiction of shared, even if unformulable, universal standards of rationalityâ (MacIntyre 1988, 400). These critics call the moderns on their âfictionsâ and ask us instead to acknowledge a diversity of perspectives and traditions, shaped, or even stratified, by race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Then again, if reason is simply determined by the perspective or tradition we adopt, literally anything goes. The windows on reason must in some way be interconnected so that the vision of each pair of eyes shares something in common with others; elsewise, we lose the normative power of reason.
So what exactly does any of this have to do with the fact that reason has fallen on such hard times? What does any of this have to do with salvaging the concept? I believe stories are available to answer these questions, and like most stories, fictional or not, there is a short version and a long version of the tale. The short version starts like this: modern accounts of reason are distorting and oppressiveâand, letâs face it, a lot of people are tired of being left out. As Emmanuel Eze explains andâas I will argueârightfully so: âmodern philosophyâs pretension to universality and cross-cultural values has often been just that: a pretenseâ (Eze 2001, x). Of course, Enlightenment thinkers would take issue with this claim. After all, the Age of Enlightenment is supposedly an Age of Equality, an age where science allows us to master the material world, where hierarchical social conceptions are overthrown, and where rights become universalâexcept, of course, for colonialism, slavery, the disenfranchisement of women, and similar âunimportantâ issues. At the founding of the USA, for example, âall men are created equalââonly if one is male, wealthy, and white. As feminists and race theorists have effectively argued, the status of ârational agentâ is not accorded to all, and for those who are excluded and objectified, the Enlightenment hardly seems enlightened at all. The second part of the story concerns how we âsolveâ the problem of reasonâs exclusionary bent through a revival of a pre-modern or nonmodern understanding, an understanding which is much more complex, open-ended, and inclusive than the moderns ever thought possible. This account of rationality considers the insights of the Greeks, who view nous as part of a functionally complex and embodied soul and of post-Cartesian philosophers who insist that reason is a communal activity constrained by features of the world which lie outside individual minds.
The longer version of the story is, not surprisingly, more complex. It involves tracing the ways in which the questions and answers of mainstream philosophical discourse create the infrastructure for nefarious uses of the concepts of race and sex. Put as straightforwardly as possible: Cartesianism gives us just plain, old-fashioned, radically bad ways of thinking about philosophical problemsâand these bad ways of thinking actually encourage the marginalization and oppression of those who are non-white and non-male. Such marginalization occurs because the shift of focus toward introspectively accessible ideas means that somehow, someway these ideas represent an external world, but not just any representation will do. My ideas are, after all, going to have to be relevantly similar to your ideas if they are to be deemed objective. As a result, moderns turn to observational and deductive methodologies which result in their inability to deal with difference and diversity.
Since something about our understanding of rationality goes horribly wrong in the seventeenth century, the narrative I offer concerning reason and its problems begins with the moderns. Here, the ways Hume and Kant respond to the epistemological threat of subjectivism is telling about and critical for their attitudes toward non-whites and non-males. After analyzing the problem, I turn to possible solutions, including post-Cartesian (i.e., nineteenth and twentieth centuries) responses to the core philosophical assumptions that give rise to modernist exclusions. However, there is another nonmodern philosophical tradition that has a great deal to say about reason, or, more accurately, soul: the ancient Greek tradition. For the Greeks, soul is something diverse, something integrated within the world, something that has nutritive and emotional functions. In many ways, they have a vision of the soul that we are clumsily trying to restore. In the end, I seek to parse, somewhat selectively and electively, two millennia of philosophy in an effort to get to âthe good stuffâ and to demonstrate how reason can morally demand inclusion.4 As I will argue, reason has some serious crimes for which to atone, but the concept can and should be rehabilitated. My task here is to reformulate the problem of reason and to transform the concept itself, all while taking the advice of Aristotle: to know the knot one attempts to untie.
1.1 The Terrain of Reason
So much for opening moves. Before I begin unpacking my argument in earnest, a bit more explanation is in order. My attempt to untie the knot of reason will be at times anachronistic, slightly unorthodox, and admittedly idiosyncratic.5 In some ways, the idiosyncrasy is almost inevitable given my explicit rejection of universal standards and my intent to characterize a diversity of approaches to reason. In other words, I will not for one second make a pretense to necessary or sufficient conditions for rationality. As my argument progresses, I will occupy a variety of windows on reason, partly to discuss the differences well, especially when it comes to the difficulties of modernism, and partly to find a solution to previous difficulties. Although it may be true that thinking and acting according to principles properly captures some aspects of what it is to be rational, I take it that rationality is not something as easily captured in deterministic principles as the moderns would have us believe. After all, the fact remains that one can follow principles and remain terribly, even frustratingly, unreasonable.6 Another sort of practical limitation on principles is given in a story shared by Stephen Toulmin. A series of doctors could not properly diagnose a patient until one of them expressed interest in the personal, not just medical, aspects of the patientâs condition.7 That is, before they could correctly diagnose the medical condition of the patient, they needed to look beyond the merely biological or physiological concerns. As Toulmin concludes, âthis failure to handle the case on a personal basis can be put down to the narrowing of attention we called âprofessional blindersââ (2001, 114). The modern outlook on reason, with its attention to consciously following logically rigorous methods, is akin to âprofessional blinders.â It may capture some aspects of our livesâbut not all. In its messy and functionally diverse totality, rationality captures a range of abilities and sensitivities that extend well beyond logical principles. My starting point, then, is one I share with Eze, who maintains, âit is only at the most general levels that one best explores the answers to the question What is rationality?â (2008, xiii).
As Aristotle and Eze both understand, âwhat we mean when we refer to a person being rational in general ⊠is not only complex but also, in more than the surface features, elusive, enigmatic, and mysteriousâ (Eze 2008, xi). I am interested in these enigmatic and mysterious aspects of reason. Those reasoners most closely associated with less formal, more inscrutable aspects of reason are the ones generally deemed less capable, when they are noticed at all. Yet, as it turns out, the inscrutable aspects of reason are absolutely central to our lives as rational beings, and they are almost always ignored or made invisible by modern ways of thinking. Even more significantly, a willingness to consider often overlooked aspects of reason makes visible people who have been invisible. In addition to âprofessional blinders,â which can hide the human being behind physiology, a simple example of the dismissal of those who âreason wronglyâ are cases in which men refer to âwomenâs logicâ when at a loss to understand how women think. The phrase is almost always pejorative and implies that women are not, in fact, logical. This is in no way surprising since women have been, throughout the history of philosophy, most closely associated with a lack of formal, procedural reason. In this regard, however, women are in no way special. After all, anyone who falls outside of the domain of properly circumscribed reason (e.g., slaves and barbarians) gets excluded. What is slightly more surprising is how narrowly the domain of reason is circumscribed in an age of supposed equality and the expansion of rights. In bringing to the fore how limited a modern account of reason is, I seek not only to make visible the sources of marginalization but also to develop a more inclusive rationality. That is, I seek something many believe is elusive: a âplace on the terrain of Reason to which women [and non-whites] can claim rightful occupancyâ (Code 1991, 119).8 As it turns out, the terrain on either side of Enlightenment thinking is much wider and has much more solid footing. It actually offers some stable ground for those who have been expelled from more exclusive territory. This is because both Greek and post-Cartesian accounts of reason better consider and cope w...