Reason--a vent
Jul. 22nd, 2012 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerAnother thing I don't understand (along with people who brush past the cut-text saying "this is not a reasoned argument" in their eagerness to start refuting it and then get all aggrieved when I point out that the post is about how I feel and thus not the opening statement in a debate) is when some people claim to be guided principally or even solely by reason. I don't get how they can say that and believe it, knowing as they must, as I do, what reason is.
Reason is the headlights on the car by which you read the signs; passion is the compass that tells you where you're going.
Reason, to put it another way, is one horse. It's a good horse, sound of wind and limb, but it's not a guide and it can't pull the chariot on its own. Passion tells us where we want to go and why; reason finds the best road there and avoids the potholes. Passion tells us what we want to be true; reason takes facts and finds meanings for them that support our predetermined conclusions, or if that is not possible, puts up a big red flag that says WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT. But it's very, very seldom not possible, in the ordinary non-scientific world, to make the facts mean whatever you want them to mean, because facts are just facts; they mean nothing till we give them meaning.
One of the reasons why I know people who say they live by reason alone are mistaken is that their passion shines through all their arguments, in the facts they select and the facts they deny (and, of course, in the very fact that they're arguing with me, as though it could possibly matter what I think in the scheme of things). To take an example; it's often taken as a given in arguments about religion that belief and reason are polar opposites, that if you are capable of reasoning you must be an unbeliever and vice versa. This overlooks the colossal fact that behind every Abrahamic religion and probably a lot of the others are volumes and volumes of argument, interpretation and commentary, by thousands of scholars, working over centuries and all well versed in the techniques of reason. Christian scholars reasoned about Christianity, Judaistic scholars reasoned about Judaism, Islamic scholars reasoned about Islam. At no time, in all those ages, did reason fail to support and justify their beliefs. And since Christians, Jews and Muslims laid the foundations of the world of science as we know it, I'd hesitate before trying to make out they were no good at it.
Reason is a tool and it does what you want it to. It will help you find facts to support what you want to argue, it will help you reshape the ones that don't fit. It has no bias, no agenda, no purpose other than what you give it. It will not find truth. It will not decide what's right and what's wrong. Passion does that, always, without exception, and reason helps passion to achieve its goals. Anyone who believes that reason alone, unsullied by base emotion, will lead to the greatest truth and thus the greatest good has misplaced their faith.
And that's why I don't go all jelly at the knees when someone tells me they're done with me because I don't acknowledge the supremacy of reason; because it isn't supreme, it can't be, it shouldn't be, it never has been and never will be. Passion drives reason. Always. And that's how I know that my reasoning may be flawed, may lead me to a wrong answer; and I know the same of everyone else's too.
(And I especially know it of that form of reasoning which consists of using a calm and measured tone to say something utterly infuriatingly preposterous, such as that the share of the kill a female lion gives a male one is equivalent in any way to a banker's multi-million-pound bonus extracted from a billion people's taxes without their foreknowledge or consent, or that there is any correspondence at all between the way the Native Americans treated their territory before we came along and the way the big businesses treated it after they had got a piece of paper saying they "owned" it.)
But I know that my passion is true. It can't find me proofs, it can't assess arguments, it can't tell a fact from a falsehood. All it can do is point north. But that's all I need a compass for. And till someone proves to me that north is the other way, I'll keep on following it.
No comments, because I haven't got the spare energy to cope with another argument with someone who will never see my reason or convince me of theirs. But that's all right, because nobody is reading this.
Reason is the headlights on the car by which you read the signs; passion is the compass that tells you where you're going.
Reason, to put it another way, is one horse. It's a good horse, sound of wind and limb, but it's not a guide and it can't pull the chariot on its own. Passion tells us where we want to go and why; reason finds the best road there and avoids the potholes. Passion tells us what we want to be true; reason takes facts and finds meanings for them that support our predetermined conclusions, or if that is not possible, puts up a big red flag that says WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT. But it's very, very seldom not possible, in the ordinary non-scientific world, to make the facts mean whatever you want them to mean, because facts are just facts; they mean nothing till we give them meaning.
One of the reasons why I know people who say they live by reason alone are mistaken is that their passion shines through all their arguments, in the facts they select and the facts they deny (and, of course, in the very fact that they're arguing with me, as though it could possibly matter what I think in the scheme of things). To take an example; it's often taken as a given in arguments about religion that belief and reason are polar opposites, that if you are capable of reasoning you must be an unbeliever and vice versa. This overlooks the colossal fact that behind every Abrahamic religion and probably a lot of the others are volumes and volumes of argument, interpretation and commentary, by thousands of scholars, working over centuries and all well versed in the techniques of reason. Christian scholars reasoned about Christianity, Judaistic scholars reasoned about Judaism, Islamic scholars reasoned about Islam. At no time, in all those ages, did reason fail to support and justify their beliefs. And since Christians, Jews and Muslims laid the foundations of the world of science as we know it, I'd hesitate before trying to make out they were no good at it.
Reason is a tool and it does what you want it to. It will help you find facts to support what you want to argue, it will help you reshape the ones that don't fit. It has no bias, no agenda, no purpose other than what you give it. It will not find truth. It will not decide what's right and what's wrong. Passion does that, always, without exception, and reason helps passion to achieve its goals. Anyone who believes that reason alone, unsullied by base emotion, will lead to the greatest truth and thus the greatest good has misplaced their faith.
And that's why I don't go all jelly at the knees when someone tells me they're done with me because I don't acknowledge the supremacy of reason; because it isn't supreme, it can't be, it shouldn't be, it never has been and never will be. Passion drives reason. Always. And that's how I know that my reasoning may be flawed, may lead me to a wrong answer; and I know the same of everyone else's too.
(And I especially know it of that form of reasoning which consists of using a calm and measured tone to say something utterly infuriatingly preposterous, such as that the share of the kill a female lion gives a male one is equivalent in any way to a banker's multi-million-pound bonus extracted from a billion people's taxes without their foreknowledge or consent, or that there is any correspondence at all between the way the Native Americans treated their territory before we came along and the way the big businesses treated it after they had got a piece of paper saying they "owned" it.)
But I know that my passion is true. It can't find me proofs, it can't assess arguments, it can't tell a fact from a falsehood. All it can do is point north. But that's all I need a compass for. And till someone proves to me that north is the other way, I'll keep on following it.
No comments, because I haven't got the spare energy to cope with another argument with someone who will never see my reason or convince me of theirs. But that's all right, because nobody is reading this.