Is rationality a fiction? Nope

The Philosophy Garden, Stoicism and beyond

The Charioteer, Delphi Museum, photo by the Author.

It is fashionable these days to argue that the merits of reason are exaggerated, that it is has limits, and that in fact we may even be better off by checking it at the door and relying instead on a number of alternatives, from intuition to emotional thinking, from mysticism to faith.

If you think I’m exaggerating, or presenting you with a strawman, you might need to take a look at an article written by the Institute of Arts and Idea’s (IAI) Charlie Barnett entitled Is rationality a fiction?, with the disturbing subtitle “Rationality and reason are overrated.” Since I’m generously quoted in that article, I figured I would share some thoughts triggered by reading it and see what happens.

I’ve known Barnett for several years, as he is a senior producer for the How the Light Gets In (HTLGI) festival of philosophy, science and music, and he has booked me for several editions. The problem with the festival, and the IAI in general, is that they need to appeal to a wide public, which means that their events and writings inevitably mix serious intellectuals with the likes of, say, Rupert Sheldrake, a peculiar character whom my colleague Jerry Coyne described as “a notorious quack who combines his pseudoscience with an extraordinarily thin skin.”

Back to Barnett’s article. He begins by stating that “We are often told to favor the rational approach over the emotional one, tending to relegate the latter to secondary status in decision making.” That depends. If we are considering how to invest our money, yes; if we are talking about falling in love with someone, no. But that very phrase buys into a false dichotomy between reason and emotions that can be traced back to Plato and his famous analogy of the human mind conceived as a chariot. In the Phaedrus, Plato writes:

“First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome.” (246b)

The charioteer is reason, who struggles to control the spirited (i.e., noble) and the appetitive (i.e., troublesome) aspects of the human soul, represented by the two horses. But the mind doesn’t work like that. Modern neuroscience has demonstrated what the Stoics have maintained since over two millennia ago: emotions have cognitive components, and there is no such thing as a sharp distinction between emotions and reason. There are, rather, emotions that are rooted in bad reasoning (say, hatred for a minority) and emotions that are rooted in good reasoning (say, love of justice).

But Barnett says that it isn’t straightforward to distinguish reason from unreason. He mentions a discussion I’ve had at one of the HTLGI events, opposite philosopher Tommy Curry. I argued that, for instance, nobody could reasonably call himself a cosmopolitan and yet at the same time being in favor of killing people who don’t look like him. To which Curry replied with what he considered a counterexample: Josiah Royce, an American pragmatist active between the late part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. Apparently, he advocated both cosmopolitanism and anti-black racism. (There actually is an ongoing scholarly dispute about this, but I’m not an expert on either Royce or American pragmatism.)

But Curry’s response is a non sequitur: I said that nobody can reasonably consider himself a cosmopolitan and then go on to advocate the oppression of others. I didn’t say that no human being would take such a patently contradictory position. If there is anything that recent politics should have taught us is that you will always find someone willing to adopt the most absurd ideas without batting an eyelash. That’s not reason’s fault, it’s the fault of truly bad reasoners—and the people who believe them.

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After that, Barnett provides us with by now familiar examples: Kant, the philosophical epitome of reason, was nonetheless a racist. And so was David Hume. Though the latter is a rather strange witness to bring up, since he famously argued that reason is, and ought to be, the slave of passions. Go figure.

Moreover, emotive responses to situations are themselves not all they are so often cracked up to be. Research in psychology has exposed the issue that empathy, for instance, is easy to manipulate and can lead to gross ethical blunders. There is a reason the subtitle of Paul Bloom’s book on empathy is “The Case for Rational Compassion.”

Barnett poses a good question, however, when he writes: “If we accept that the application of rationality from leading philosophers in the 18th and 19th century [i.e., Hume and Kant] was mistaken, what’s to stop us thinking the same now?” Nothing. Indeed we ought to always be open to the possibility that we are mistaken in the opinions we currently hold. That’s the, ahem, reasonable attitude to hold. You know who, in my experience, doesn’t do that? People who are absolutely convinced that their gut feelings are right, or people who invoke faith and scorn reason.

As usual in these discussions, at some point the work of sociologist Jonathan Haidt comes up. In his The Righteous Mind he allegedly showed that most human reasoning is actually confabulation, that is, an attempt to rationalize what one already believes and square it against whatever inconvenient fact may threaten one’s beliefs.

But at best Haidt has shown that a lot of people are bad reasoners, something that has been known since the time of Cicero, at a minimum. His research is descriptive, it tells us what the situation may be on the ground. It is not prescriptive, that is, it doesn’t advise us about what we ought to do. Indeed, faced with the entirely unsurprising result that most people don’t reason too well we ought to redouble our efforts to teach logic, critical thinking, and perhaps even just plain common sense. What we really shouldn’t do is to say, oh well, most people reason badly, so what the heck, let’s all give up on it.

Another HTLGI guest, author and Spectator writer Rory Sutherland, argued that reason is “highly” overrated. On what grounds? Well, you know, a number of progress has been made in science by chance, for instance Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, which took place when he noticed changes in a leftover petri dish he was about to discard. Wait, what? The observation by Fleming may have been prompted by a random occurrence. But the realization that such observation was crucial, not to mention all the work that he did later to investigate what was happening and to put it into medical practice required sound reasoning. And a pretty good amount of it too.

Sutherland went on to point out that reason (probably) evolved as a strategy to win arguments, not to discover truths. Setting aside that the so-called Machiavellian hypothesis for the evolution of reason is highly speculative, Sutherland is engaging in yet another non sequitur: just because trait X evolved for a particular function, it doesn’t mean that it cannot be profitably deployed for another function, e phenomenon called exaptation (as distinguished from adaptation). Indeed, that’s how a lot of evolution actually works. For instance, biologists think that feathers initially evolved for heat regulation and possibly sexual attraction, not flight. And yet they work marvelously in making possible the aerial acrobatics of thousands of species of birds.

Sutherland also quoted G.K. Chesterton, who wrote that “Those who appeal to the head rather than the heart… are necessarily men of violence.” This one ranks as one of the most nonsensical pieces of crap I’ve ever heard. Are Chesterton and Sutherland aware of the modus operandi of, I don’t know, Hitler and Mussolini, just to mention a couple of recent historical examples? I’ll tell ya, they didn’t go for the head to convince millions to help them with war and genocide.

Novelist Joanna Kavenna brought up the famous incompleteness theorem by logician Kurt Gödel, which Barnett summarizes as stating that within any reasonable mathematical system there will always be a true statement that cannot be proved. There are actually two Gödel theorems, which don’t even mention the word reason at all, since they are more narrowly concerned with the limits of provability within certain formal axiomatic systems. But forget the details, Gödel himself did not quit logic after his discovery, a strong hint that perhaps the consequences of his theorems do not include the devastating critique of reason Kavenna and Barnett seem to imply.

But wait, did you not know that French social-cognitive scientist Dan Sperber pointed out that plenty of animals live just fine without the use of reason? Indeed they do. They also do without photosynthesis, which doesn’t mean the latter is not very useful to a host of living organisms from bacteria to plants. The ability to reason has evolved in a particular evolutionary branch of highly intelligent social primates, and it is crucial to their survival. The fact that other species don’t need it says precisely nothing about its usefulness to Homo sapiens.

Another contributor to the debate quoted by Barnett is philosopher Rebecca Roache. She pointed out that while philosophers agree on logic and the rules of inference, they still need to begin with assumptions that cannot themselves be justified by reason. Do they, though? First off, even if true, this would be equivalent to mathematicians starting their proofs by picking certain axioms rather than others. That’s no good reason to throw away mathematics, or even to imply that it is affected by some strong limitations that cannot be overcome. But in fact, mathematicians do have justifications for their choice of axioms: they pick them because they lead to interesting and useful theorems. If they don’t, the axioms are dropped in favor of others. The same goes in philosophy. Justification of assumptions is either indirect or pragmatic. But neither philosophers nor mathematicians pull axioms out of their arse.

Roache goes on to say that we simply cannot do without intuitions. Nor do I know anyone who has actually suggested such course of action. Interestingly, she immediately admits that some intuitions are wrong. And how do we find out? You guessed it: we reason about them (or we subject our intuitions to empirical tests and then we reason about them).

Near the end of his essay, Barnett reminds us that people with damage to their prefrontal cortex can still reason, yet lack effective emotion. That is indeed an unenviable pathological condition. However, so is impaired reasoning brought about, for instance, by dementia. Again, a well functioning human being has to have both emotions and reasoning abilities, and moreover the two have to be highly and harmoniously integrated. There is no such thing as having one without the other and living a flourishing life.

One more observation. Did you notice that all of the people I have mentioned above have been arguing their case against reason? The irony reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Epictetus:

“When someone in his audience said, Convince me that logic is necessary, he answered: Do you wish me to demonstrate this to you? — Yes. — Well, then, must I use a demonstrative argument? — And when the questioner had agreed to that, Epictetus asked him. How, then, will you know if I impose upon you? — As the man had no answer to give, Epictetus said: Do you see how you yourself admit that all this instruction is necessary, if, without it, you cannot so much as know whether it is necessary or not?” (Discourses, 2.25)

QED