Facts, Logic and Our Empty Cult of ‘Reason’

 

    “This kind of spiritual terrorism is showing up on a national scale and, as in my own faith journey, only reason can get us out.” So says an author in the Huffington Post (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/evangelical-christians-covid-19-Pandemic). This author is a disappointed Pentecostal and calls herself a ‘skeptic’ though I can hardly imagine a statement less in the spirit of the skeptical schools of antiquity or the early modern period than the one cited above. I am not here to belabor a naïve author, however, I ALWAYS cringe when disaffected fundamentalists talk about ‘reason’. This because they have swapped one talisman for another: they speak of reason exactly as they once spoke of Jesus. After all, what are we referring to when we say that ‘reason’ will get us ‘out’ of something? What reason? Deductive reason? Inductive reason? Dialectical reason? Practical reason? Hermeneutic reason? Further, why reason and not also intuition, imagination or compassion? What about art or charity or empathy and trust. Indeed, what about reason’s ancient counterpart will? Isn’t it obvious to all that to know the good is one thing but to do it another? What is this mysterious ‘reason’ that will save us?

Well to hear one proponent of reason it consists of ‘facts and logic’. The rules of logic applied to facts produce truth. Reason is ‘formal’ or ‘methodical’ reason applied to a neutral, external world of atomic facts. Further, all statements not produced by a such a process are meaningless. This certainly is how many in the early 20^th Century conceived reason though Wittgenstein, the man who was perhaps most influential in developing and popularizing this account, abandoned it as hopeless in the second half of his career. This was because it could not account for something as simple as the meaning of a finger gesture. Further, he embarrassed positivists by claiming, in what seemed a mystical fashion (he even used the word!), that the excluded nonsense was, in fact, everything important in life. For reasons I will go into below, Fundamentalists hew to this dessicated account of reason while they are fundamentalists but do not abandon it at all when they leave those confessions. “Facts and logic” become things they are for rather than against but their understanding of those terms does not alter in the slightest.           

I have taught logic, alas, and I can assure you the reader (and Mr. Shapiro) that it is literally nothing but the dead exo-skeleton of discursive thinking. It is purely positive and determinate but only by way of being utterly empty and formal. It is a useful tool for clear and precise expression but generates no insight or knowledge of any kind. Nor for that matter do ‘facts’. One can stare at a set of facts all day and learn nothing. The product of empty, atomic facts and bare, skeletal logic is exactly zero. This is why actual concrete reason involves intuition, creativity, symbolism and the construction of models and analogies. This is why it involves not only inductive reason but counter-inductive reason as in a thought experiment. This is why it involves empathy, emotional intelligence and imperfectly rationalized leaps of faith. This is why it involves acts of interpretation and practical judgment as well as mechanical deduction or inference. ALL of these constitute reason in its living, moving reality. After all, if we were simply slaves to formal logic thought could not progress in science, history, theology or any other human endeavor. This is because formal logic is constituted by the law of contradiction (which Aristotle says is a law of determinate discourse and finite investigation) whereas all living thought, indeed all living processes, unfold precisely by means of contradiction. The formal laws of thought are necessary to order our speaking but they do not dictate to the ultimate realities for they embody a logic of simple identity: A is A. Reason, in its highest manifestation, is dialectic and dialectic unfolds through structured opposition and difference held within identity. Reason is NOT the dead, formal abstraction of ‘rationalism’ that is the exact philosophical equivalent of the fundamentalist God who is empty, purely formal power.

There is a reason conversions are easy and cheap between Atheism and radical Protestantism. This is because they involve no change of underlying principle. If thought is simply an empty logical skeleton what do you fill it with? You could fill it with simple empirical content as immediately given. Then you would be a 'materialist' and perhaps an ‘atheist’. Alternatively, and with equal logic, one could speak in tongues. One could bow down to dead external matter or a divine power that is simply other to reason. Neither position differs for both bow to a simple other, a pure atomic fact, outside of thought: an un-derived and origin-less empirical difference or a God whose followers who babble unintelligibly in a language with no content because he is pure unmediated power and not order or subsistent reason.

In fact, the man at the origin of ALL this discourse, the medieval nominalist Occam, directly united both positions (albeit with far more nuance than one would find today and minus the tongues). Universals were mere names denoting pure, unmediated facts and, since this was so, God was not bound by them or for that matter anything. His will was the one efficient cause of all things and was inscrutable because it was only, ever, singular. Proponents of Occam’s famous razor may forget how rigorously he (or if you want to be more exact his followers) applied this principle: the simplest cause one could invoke for anything was the divine will which was purely positive and directly its own ground. What was good was good because God willed it and he might have willed it otherwise. Occam omitted forms and universals because they were unneeded if one could invoke the absolute power of God for all events. Thinking in such scenario is simply formal: as Hume would later say there is math and logic which contain purely analytic tautologies and there are phenomenal ‘facts’ with no intrinsic causal connections. Religion, in this view, becomes ‘enthusiasm’: a pure eruption of the spirit unmediated by nature and history that can submit to no rational categories and moves on the basis of nothing but its own subjective inner certainty. For such a viewpoint the literal panoply of the apocalypse means absolutely no more and absolutely no less than the sermon on the mount.

Religion and reason cannot be corrupted without each in turn corrupting the other. Nominalism and atomism will always generate its fundamentalist other as night follows day. This is absolutely clear from the author cited above who, she tells us, had her Christian formation among radical charismatics which is what we now call ‘enthusiasts’. They taught her to abandon ‘intellect’ for direct inspiration. This is telling because it is the very form of nominalist religion: thought is an empty, tautological frame that can only attain to a content by supra-rational inspiration. This inspiration is not disciplined by reason or church order as in the historical Christian churches Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant. It is direct and assertoric. Since there are no ‘events’ in any way structured by logos everything is a literal miracle. Religion is all miracle and all inspiration all the time.

Indeed, this is just what the author above informs us. If one accepts the resurrection, then miracle becomes the norm and reason is slain: Christianity is based on one singular belief: Jesus raised from the dead: “Once you believe in one miracle, the pathway is paved to believe in the next.” This is a bizarre assertion on its face because the one thing one can say about miracles is that they are, indeed must be, exceptional. If miracle were routine, it would be meaningless. Believing in ONE miracle does not in fact commit you to believing in ANY other though it may TEMPT you to do so. Indeed, just this worry lay behind the reluctance of certain Protestant reformers to accept any miracles but the biblical ones and to claim that in our days, miracles have ceased (as they are no longer needed to establish the faith). History, alas, often ruins the claims of pure ‘reason’. Of course in the radical reformed tradition (certain expressions of it at least) this is not the case. The miracle is indeed the norm and we can confidently expect them in the case of Covid 19 and other crises. And why not? Personally, I wish that more people would employ reason in its function of historical investigation. In that case they might discover that people like Athanasius, Origen and Augustine enfolded the miracle of the resurrection in a rigorous conception of reason and order. The ancient Gnostic sects often included Nous or mind in their account of the spiritual hierarchy causing Origen to quip that people who talked so much about Nous should consider actually employing some. I think his jibe is just as pertinent today.          

Here, though, we come to the nub of the issue. If reason is purely formal and instrumental, cybernetic and computational, then all reason amounts to is a tool of power and manipulation: in our case the managerial ‘reason’ of an oligarchic elite. If this is all reason amounts to then it no surprise whatsoever that large numbers of people will prefer myth. Moreover, this kind of reason will ‘save us’ from nothing. Myths give people a sense of agency and identity whereas managerial reason, by and large, just empties their pockets in the name of ‘economics’ and its ‘objective laws’ which a capitalist God (or if not that his secular counterpart natural selection) wrote into the very structure of nature. In such a state of disenchantment people will flee reason for something else: they will flee logic AND its endlessly malleable facts for whatever supra-sensible content they please ranging from New Age crystals to the Rapture. One final caveat. I am not an enemy of ‘ecstasy’ in religion or any other sphere of life. If people want to speak in tongues that is not my concern either so long as that is part of the religious life and not its all-consuming whole.Nor do I even deny that reason (in the full sense) may culminate in a supra-rational intuition of the divine as in Plotinus or the Vedanta. I do agree with classical scholar R.T. Wallis however: “That religious experience must be given its due the contemporary mystical revival makes clear; yet in turn our present day prophets, notably those of the psychedelic cults, too often ignore the necessity to the religious life of discrimination and self-discipline, and in this they differ from the best mystics of all traditions, including the Orientals they profess to follow.” I’m not particularly concerned about the drug takers these days (whose activities now seemed addressed to medicating their crippling anxiety rather than searching for enlightenment) but I think enthusiasts, charismatics and their rationalist ‘alter-egos’ all should take note of what Dr Wallis says.