SUMMATION: An Overview of the Limitations of Reason

This series has demonstrated the limitations - and therefore the inadequacy and failure - of reason not only in dealing with metaphysical / spiritual matters, but also in securing a foundation for reason itself.  Every attempt to justify reason as a power superior to or even adequate for comprehending the metaphysical / spiritual has failed.

With Hume’s attack on causality, a principle absolutely necessary for the grounding and functioning of reason (how can Aristotle’s syllogisms work without it?), rationality suffered a setback from which it has never recovered.

To be clear, let us put Hume’s dilemma in these terms:  You say that because you see one billiard ball strike a second which moves, you believe the impact of the first billiard ball upon the second caused the second to move.  Suppose, however, that each instant the universe is created and destroyed.  Suppose the universe you perceive - including you - is created for a instant, destroyed, then re-created with your “memory” of the “preceding” instant created as well.   We then have a series of universes with no causal connection between them.   You have no reason to believe that the next instant that is created will have anything to do with the current instant.   Your belief in causal connection is just that, a belief, it is a faith, not reason.

The only way to give adequate grounding for reason was shown by Kant to be the premise that reason (and therefore causality) is a concept of the mind, imposed upon our own exprience by our mind as a way of understanding the world.  This exposes a critical limitation for reason:  reason alone, or pure reason, is not sufficient to even deal with the objective world, much less the spiritual.  Reason must be combined with the empirical before any sense can be made of the objective world.

Unfortunately for the materialists, this also means that the understanding of the mind can  grasp only so far as the categories of the mind - and they are not limitless - allow.  These categories have limits, therefore, so does reason.  Reason cannot know the things that are beyond the scope of the categories of the mind.  Reason is thus grounded through an acceptance of its limitations.

The history of western philosophy since Kant has been in some sense a series of failed attempts to set reason free from the Kantian paradigm.  Hegel attempted to present a dialectical form of logic (reason) where the known merged with what was not known in order to approximate, or approach the unknown by degrees through the process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis until absolute knowledge is obtained.  Hegel was met with disdain on a number of fronts.   The Romantics were discovering constituent powers of the Self besides and perhaps beyond that of reason - intuition, or Nietzches’s Will to Power, for example.

Meanwhile, Kierkegaard rejected the Hegelian dialectic as wholly inadequate in regard to the individual Self. The Self represents a truth different from objective truth, and speaks in another language altogether.  To suggest that reason may totally rule the human self is a little like suggesting we go herd cats.

Moore suggested we ground our reliance upon reason on what he called “common sense,” but soon encountered the limited consciousness of man.  If I am contemplating a coin, I can only know one side of it at a time and I do not now the insides.  We may grasp only portions of an object, not the whole object, so how can we ever certainly know anything but portions of the object?  A limited perception is not the totality of the object itself.

Russell saw, with the help of Frege, that mathematics was logic (reason), so our language of assertions and propostions can be formulated in mathematical terms.  Though Russell and Frege did help to show that Aristole’s syllogstic logic is too narrow - there is such a thing as relational logic - Russell’s attempt to ground mathematics without assumptions failed, however:  Godel showed that Russell’s system presented in Principia Mathematica was incomplete and must always be necessarily so.  There must always be insertions for the outside of a system in order to prove it.

Russell also failed to refute Hume.  He presented the postulates which must be true in order for causality to function, but he admitted that none of the postulates could be proven.

The Logical Positivists were even more ambitious than Russell, and they failed as well. They started out by saying that metaphysics was nonsense and ended by saying that it’s just one language among many.  Their rule that every statement must be emprically ascertained before it is accepted as fact can not be empirically ascertained.    Their assumption that the language of logic (reason) reflected the world because it had an isomorphic relationship with the world met with dismal failure, because language could not be formulated that was both undeniable and verifiable.   Manipulations of the forumulae failed because they could not escape the inner, subjective experience and finally they had to admit that there were many languages, many logics, not just reason.  There are many ways of seeing the world.  Is an atom a wave or a particle?  There is not only Euclidean geometry but non-Euclidean geometry, all of which have their assumptions or axioms.

The history of western philosophy thus has shown that reason is no more founded than faith - because in order for reason to function, certain assumptions have to be made.  Whether you have faith in causal connections or faith in the resurrection of Christ, your “operating system” or “schema” rests on faith in something.  In order to function, a system needs its operating assumptions, its axioms.  As Godel showed, a system in incompletely proved without information from outside the system.   Reason cannot ground itself.  The essence of reality, it seems, then, is Faith.

The history of philosophy has also shown that, rather than there just being one logic, there are many.  How does one choose from among them?  Does one use logic to choose from among the many logics?  Which logic from among the many does one use to choose?

Finally, formulaic logic is simply inadequate to grasp ME.  I simply cannot be reduced to an equation and a manipulation of symbols.  Formulaic logic doesn’t end where the Self begins, but in encompassed and comprehended by the Self, not the other way around.    The barriers of reason are thus the barriers of the individual self. The limitations of reason are the categories of the individual mind and of particular, limited consciousness.  The Way, the Logos, the Tao, is a Person who grasps the equation, not an equation that grasps the Person.   With the omniscience of that Person comes expanded power for reason.

This concludes my series on the limits of reason.   Perhaps more can be said with a discussion of Quine and Derrida and perhaps one day I will do that.    I do intend to proceed with a series on Language, which would discuss Wittgenstein, Austin and Chomsky among others.  I also intend to discuss what is happening with French Philosophy which is in direct contrast with the Anglo-American rational atheism.  For the French Philosophers - particularly of the last half century or so - have understood the limits of reason and in them we find a resurgence of theology and talk of God.