Mon 11 Sep 2006
What does the expression “to reason” mean?
Since classical antiquity, and likely earlier, human beings have been conscious of the fact that they are in possession of a faculty that animals appear to wholly lack. That faculty, given the name ‘logos’ by the Greeks and ‘ratio’ by the Roman and Medieval thinkers, was translated into French as ‘raison,’ thus giving rise to our term ‘reason.’ Just what is this faculty? What are we doing when we engage in the activity of reasoning? Is it true to say that man is a rational animal, and if so, in what sense?
Reason (logos) is the same faculty as intellect (nous), but exercised in different way. When Aristotle speaks of intellect, he has in mind our ability to grasp what might be called simple, unitary intelligible essences. The world we live in, however, is not made up of single, self-contained, unitary essences. Everything we encounter in our experience is complex, having many intelligible aspects. Reasoning is the intellect distinguishing one intelligible aspect from another, and then recognizing the intelligible relation each aspect has with the others and with the whole from which it was abstracted.
So reasoning is a particular way in which nous can function – and must function if it is to grasp the kind of world we live in.
Reason as a faculty seems to be understood by Plato (Divided Line) to mean an ability to proceed from hypotheses to a conclusion, as in the sciences, while understanding (or wisdom) is the ability to arrive at first forms or principles, the governing dynamics of things. Reason in this sense appears to be a (necessary?) stepping stone to wisdom.
Reason can also be defined as an explanation, as in “What was the reason for Prof. Latona using a split infinitive in the first sentence of his comment?”
Trying to understand reason rationally poses a dilemma. The more we attempt to understand the nature of reason, the less rational it seems.
Reason’s distinctive feature is its ability to make judgments that appear to go beyond the particular cases we have experienced, to form necessary and universal concepts: In understanding the nature of triangles I come to understand things about triangles that I have never seen before. This led thinkers from Plato to St. Thomas Aquinas to conclude that reason must be a non-natural faculty, part of an immaterial soul.
As reason does its work, however, it turns its eye upon itself and upon its relation to our body and brain. Just as reason reveals that the properties of the triangle can be understood in terms of the points and lines that compose it, so it naturally attempts to understand the rational activities of the mind as arising from simpler non-rational activities the way that a psychologist or physiologist or computer scientist do. But the machinations of a computer program or the coordinated firings of a network of neurons don’t seem quite rational. Can reason be the result of natural events?
Reason attempts to explain the powers of things in terms of other simple universal properties and the laws that govern them. What happens when reason turns upon itself?
Sometimes metaphor has virtues: reason is the light of the mind that illuminates what is intelligible in the world.