Returning to Reason Reasonably.

September 28, 2002 7:54 PM

Returning to Reason Reasonably. Dreams of rationalism now dog university life, says Stephen Toulmin in his new book, Return to Reason. He argues that we must restore faith in our ability to reason about the moral life. Via Arts & Letters Daily.
posted by gd779 (19 comments total)

A sympathetic review, and by someone who disagrees fundamentally with Toumin. But I guess that's to be expected from a conservative Catholic magazine reviewing a book that espouses pragmatism, a contemporarily relevant philosophy.

This book does not sound different from the tack that Toulmin has had for 10 or 20 years now in books like Cosmopolis. But it is very timely.
posted by goethean at 8:17 PM on September 28, 2002

On the other hand, there are those that call the primacy of the rational tradition in the west a 'dictatorship'...
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:24 PM on September 28, 2002

Actually, stavros, I don't think that Toulmin and Saul are very far apart. Toulmin is advocating a return to a much more modest practical rationality--pragmatism--as opposed to a more abstract, arrogant rationality that is more common among philosophers and which Saul rightly condemns. The reviewer condemns pragmatism:

But Toulmin is wrong to affirm Dewey’s disenchantment of theory and the world as a principal achievement supporting the return to reason. For the reduction of theory to a form of practice is itself an aggressive act of theorizing. And it is one that is false to experience and hamstrings reflection about the moral life.

So to the reviewer, life is subordinate to theory. That's what both Toulmin and Saul object to.
posted by goethean at 8:43 PM on September 28, 2002

Thanks for the clarification, goethean.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:51 PM on September 28, 2002

Is this even a modern debate? Wasn't Socrates first question along his quest for an impregnable virtue a significant blow to the idea of ritual and rite as the way to a good life -- an achievement of excellence, rather than its thinking, as espoused by Homer in the Illiad and the Odyssey?

"And it is one that is false to experience and hamstrings reflection about the moral life."

Actually, I don't know. Maybe it's a false assumption that anything other than ritual can get us to right living -- Hell, even Plato thought it unwise to begin philosophizing until 30, when one's ways were sufficiently well-set that the inherently reductive act of philosophy wouldn't irreparably tear the fabric of one's soul.

This, I think, is the genius of pragmatism: it does not place the lived life in a subordinate position to the Idea. And if any century suffered the horror of life in thrall to the Idea, it was the 20th.
posted by minnesotaj at 8:55 PM on September 28, 2002

A minor point to be sure but one which Berkowitz (the reviewer) manages to glide over gracefully: Is the economic comparison apt? It is disputable still whether we are or are not Homo Economicus (that is, rational utility-maximizing agents) so the premise here of deep rationality as a modern laurel in moral or even economic philosophy seems rather flawed.

My own view is that, philosophically, we can set demarcations at the extremes of most moral arguments (e.g. un-provoked murder is always wrong) but that all other demarcations must be arrived at by a sort of cultural consensus which is not the sole province of reason and in some cases is completely arbitrary. An example from biology may be helpful: We may define plants as creatures which feed on light and animals as creatures which move. If we discover (and I believe we have) an organism which both moves and manufactures chlorophyll, we cannot appeal here to reason for a resolution - the answer lies in examining how we classify and imagine the world.
posted by Winterfell at 10:12 PM on September 28, 2002

Alisdair MacIntyre (who I just linked to in another thread) has a book called After Virtue in which he argues that the problem with modern moral discourse is that we're still trying to use language that was developed in an age when people could appeal to God as a source of moral judgements.

When we see a woman shaking and beating her child in a parking lot, we don't want to just say, "I don't like that!" or even, "That's against the law!"; we want to say, "That's wrong!" as if there were some universally agreed-upon standard of Right and Wrong that we could appeal to and everyone would recognize.

MacIntyre argues that without such standards, we are constantly talking past each other. You can't use reason to demonstrate that going to war with Iraq will achive something good if you can't agree on what good is. And no one has come up with a way to use reason to get everyone to agree on what good is.
posted by straight at 12:55 AM on September 29, 2002

straight, that book's on my "to read" list (since i found out that mary warnock rates it) and when i read the review i did wonder if it was relevant, so thanks for the summary. anyway, i'm curious - does he propose any kind of solution?
posted by andrew cooke at 1:47 AM on September 29, 2002

I've had something of a unique first-hand view of some of these matters. I spent some time at an art school, under the tutelage of some real, honest-to-god communists and cultural relativists, before deciding to study mathematics, the holy citadel of pure rationality.

I find that neither is really enough to live on. If I spend too much time in relativism-land, then everything takes on an arbitrary hue, and the words that I write and the makers on my pages become no better and no worse than radio static. But on the other hand, when I'm doing nothing but mathematics, I fell as though I'm turning into some kind of machine, turning coffee into theorems, as Erdos put it. Neither extreme leaves me feeling very human at the end of the day.

I approach philosophy as an applied art: the craft of living well. But in the pages of theory, all I find are these words inhuman, and I can't help but think that it isn't well to try to live as something you are not. Maybe that's Thoreau's influence on me. So where are we to look to the answers? Methinks it's not in academia.

disillusion disaster.
posted by kaibutsu at 2:55 AM on September 29, 2002

MacIntyre doesn't have any solutions to give in After Virtue; he's just laying out the problem there. He looks for solutions in a later book, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, where he argues that ethical ideas only make sense within the context of a tradition (not necessarily religious, but that's the implication; his example is medieval Catholicism). Your tradition can certainly meet other traditions, engage in dialogue, learn from them, come to some sort of synthesis -- but first you have to be within it. It doesn't work to just reason about ethics in some universalist way that stands above and apart from history, as Kant or Mill try to do.
posted by ramakrishna at 7:50 AM on September 29, 2002

thanks!
posted by andrew cooke at 7:57 AM on September 29, 2002

ok, now i've had time to think about that - how does it help? isn't it equivalent to the relativist position for people within the same culture (where, presumably, they are all judged "relative to" the same standards from either viewpoint)? if so, then any difference would be evident only in cross-cultural conflicts - how do you decide then what to do? if macintyre says nothing about such problems then he's avoided the hard problem; if he ignores the other culture then it's just the old imperialism; if he accomodates other views then aren't we back with relativism again?

or is the "advance" simply that it acknowledges the context in the "conservative" case? i could have pointed that out...

any guidance appreciated. cheers.
posted by andrew cooke at 11:11 AM on September 29, 2002

Three Rival Versions does discuss cross-cultural conflict in detail. His claim is that the best way to assess a moral position is the way it is able to account for the existence and meaning of opposing positions, and respond to them rationally. The three versions of enquiry in the title are Encyclopedia (ahistorical universalist rationalism), Genealogy (relativist skepticism, a la Nietzsche) and Tradition. He claims that tradition can make a reasoned response to encyclopedia and genealogy, in a way that they can't make to tradition or to each other.

As for traditions meeting each other, his model is Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas found himself in a situation where he was dealing with what seemed to be the radically opposed claims of Aristotle's followers and Augustine's followers. What he managed to do was pull them together rationally, in a synthesis that preserved what he saw as the essence of both.

Admittedly, it's not clear that this would work in the case of the conflict of all traditions -- especially if you were trying to do more than two at a time! It's not clear how you could apply all this to a political state; in a sense I'm not even sure that you're supposed to. MacIntyre is adamant that social institutions are vital for preserving ethics and ethical inquiry, but he looks more at small-scale institutions -- universities, medieval monasteries, perhaps churches -- than at governments.
posted by ramakrishna at 11:25 AM on September 29, 2002

ok, thanks again. sounds like that's more the book i should read. cheers.
posted by andrew cooke at 12:26 PM on September 29, 2002

What [Aquinas] managed to do was pull them together rationally, in a synthesis that preserved what he saw as the essence of both...Admittedly, it's not clear that this would work in the case of the conflict of all traditions -- especially if you were trying to do more than two at a time!

Hegel and Schelling also provided models for this kind of non-relativistic integration. A model that Anglo-American philosophy has been studiously ignoring for a century now.

It is my opinion that overcoming relativism is the task par excellence for a twentieth-century thinker. Also, that one cannot do it without Kant.
posted by goethean at 12:29 PM on September 29, 2002

andrew: Three Rival Versions is maybe his most advanced book on the topic, but After Virtue is the one everyone points to as a classic statement of the problem, it's also more fun to read (although all of MacIntyre's books are pretty heavy reading). He starts with a great Science Fictionish scenario in which he compares the current situation of moral discourse to an attempt to recover science after a catacalysmic fall of civilization -- people use the old vocabulary but have lost touch with what it originally meant. (e.g. to say a man was good used to mean something like saying a watch is good -- a factual statement meaning that something is doing what it was designed and intended to do).

goethean: MacIntyre takes on Hegel and Kant in After Virtue but I'm unable to summarize his argument. I think he argues that both smuggle in unacknowledged value judgements that they inherited from Judaism and Christianity (and maybe Greek philosophy too): "In the second book of the second Critique [Kant] does acknowledge that without a teleological framework the whole project of morality becomes unintelligible. This teleological framework is presented as a 'presupposition of pure practical reason'."

But MacIntyre's main point is that although Hegel, Kant, et. al. continue to have devoted followers, they can't come to any sort of agreement. If there were a rational basis for morality, then thinking rationally ought to produce consensus and progress, as in mathematics or the sciences.
posted by straight at 2:54 PM on September 29, 2002

If there were a rational basis for morality, then thinking rationally ought to produce consensus and progress, as in mathematics or the sciences.

If people were generally capable of thinking about morality rationally, it might. However, most people make moral decisions based on how things feel to them, and only afterward rationalize those decisions.
posted by kindall at 3:55 PM on September 29, 2002

If people were generally capable of thinking about morality rationally, it might. However, most people make moral decisions based on how things feel to them, and only afterward rationalize those decisions.

And most people don't know how to think about statistics, but it would be weird if statisticians had worked for a couple hundred years and still couldn't agree on the basics of how to do statistics.

About the only way you can claim that morality can be based on thinking rationally is if you're willing to severely restrict the definition of "thinking rationally" to exclude even most other philosophers, almost to the point where "thinking rationally" means "thinking like me."
posted by straight at 5:35 PM on September 29, 2002

straight: Remember a morality based on thinking rationally isn't necessarily the same as one based purely on thinking rationally. The latter is the problem. On MacIntyre's account the moral inquiry that goes on within the tradition (or even across traditions) can, indeed must, be rational.

Also, there's a big difference between Hegel and Kant. Hegel, unlike Kant, would agree with MacIntyre about the importance of tradition and history for ethics. The difference is that where MacIntyre thinks that valid moral inquiry must happen within some tradition, Hegel (like most thinkers in most traditions) thinks it must happen within his tradition, namely modern institutional Protestantism.
posted by ramakrishna at 8:34 PM on September 29, 2002