Faith, Rationality and the Passions

Sarah Coakley

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781444361933
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118321683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Faith, Rationality and the Passions presents a fresh and original examination of the relation of religious faith, philosophical rationality and the passions. Contributions see leading scholars refute the widely-held belief that religious Enlightenment forced passion and reason apart.

• Leading Philosophical experts offer new research on the relation of faith, reason and the passions in classic and Enlightenment figures
• Overturns the widely-held presumption that the Enlightenment was responsible for creating a gulf between reason and passion
• Presents original and innovative research on the importance of the late-19th century creation of the category of 'emotion', and its striking difference from classic ideas of passion
• Brings together secular science and philosophy of emotion with philosophical theology to seek a new integration of belief, emotion and reason

1

REASON, FAITH, AND MEANING

CHARLES TAYLOR

1

There are two connected illusions, it seems to me, which have become very common today. The first consists in marking a very sharp distinction between reason and faith—even to the point of defining faith as believing without good reason! The second is to take as a model what I want to call “disengaged” reason. And these two are tightly linked.

To start with the first, since the Enlightenment, a notion has been developed of “reason alone” (I’m taking this from the title of Kant’s book, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). By that was meant, reason no longer augmented (or disturbed) by revelation. It was in that way explicitly contrasted to reasoning which operates along with, or on the basis of, revelation.

Obviously, the proposal to dispense with revelation was something new, but there was still an important continuity with earlier understandings. For the scholastic tradition, reason was capable of establishing important truths on its own. It could demonstrate the rational nature of human beings, and the ethic which should follow from this. It could even establish the existence of a Creator. But it needed revelation to take us farther, for instance to bring us the insight that this Creator was the Triune God of the Bible.

What seems agreed between pre- and post-Enlightenment positions is that reason and revelation can be clearly distinguished as distinct sources of truth. Many post-Enlightenment thinkers took over this conception of the two sources, and simply discarded or denied one of them.

But I would like to argue that the vicissitudes of the appeal to “reason alone” force us to depart more radically from this tradition. For a whole host of important purposes, “reason” is not the name of a reliable source offering univocal and reliable answers; and “revelation” itself is a category by which we try, rationally, to make sense of the truths we discern.

I have just said that “reason” doesn’t offer univocal and reliable answers in a number of domains. But there are some in which it seems to come very close to this. Let’s look at these, because they provide the basis on which the belief in “reason alone” has been grounded. (A) Reason gets pretty close to univocal validity when it comes to the kind of reasoning whose rules are codified in formal logic and mathematics. And we might see (B) the discovery of reliable truth in natural science as a fruit of reason. Being rational here involves applying a correct method; we painstakingly validate our observations; and then we infer from them to the best explanation.

But while the Vienna positivists in their heyday may have thought that this suffices to generate valid scientific theories, the reflections of philosophers of science like Canguilhem and Thomas Kuhn have shown us that we need more. Good explanation—and then the further rational discovery which this enables—depends on (C) an adequate conceptualization. Our explanations can improve radically with a shift in what Kuhn called our “paradigms.” As well as painstaking observation (1), and explanatory inferences (2), we need the exercise of (3) the theoretical imagination which enables us to reframe our questions. Sometimes our grasp of some domain remains very incomplete, and full of unexplained anomalies, until we transform our understanding of the crucial questions through a paradigm shift.

One famous example can suffice to illustrate this. Post-Galilean mechanics arose through shifting the crucial question. According to the Aristotelian mechanics which had dominated for centuries, in order to explain the continued motion of a projectile after it has left the hand (or the cannon mouth), one had to find some agency which went on propelling it. All motion required a motor force contemporary with it. The crucial question was: what causes continuing movement? Various candidates were proposed which all proved unsatisfactory. Continued motion remained an anomaly. The adoption of the inertial perspective changed the question; now it was: what causes changes in velocity? At once it became possible to make sense of the whole domain of imparted motion. The anomalies were explained and thus overcome.

Reason in this domain of natural science must include this third dimension, a creative recasting of the problem, which can’t be “delivered” through a reliable pre-existing method. It requires something in the nature of insight, which can be validated, but only afterwards, through the overcoming of anomalies. Now in the domain of natural science, this doesn’t seem to exclude our arriving at solid and agreed conclusions. Because even if the new insights can’t be generated at will, and we may labor a long time before someone hits on them, we can generally agree which paradigm shifts have been valid. These impose themselves because they resolve the anomalies which earlier theories generated, without creating equally difficult ones in their place. This kind of progress can thus be credited to “reason alone.”

We should note, however, that this happy result is only possible through a stringent form of self-restriction; “scientific” language in the meaning of the act must be purged of all reference to its significance for us; it must be used to make “literal” claims, in a sense which excludes metaphor, except those which can be “cashed out” quite “literally.” It is a special “insulated” form of expression.¹

But when we come to those issues in which the explanation and evaluation of human life is at issue; when we come, for instance, to ethics, political theory, social science, history, literature, philosophy, aesthetics, and the like, we are in a very different predicament. “Insulated” language is no longer adequate. New creations of our theoretical imagination (we might call this our “moral-anthropological imagination”) are not lacking. But we find it very difficult to arrive at the kind of universal consensus which we at least approach in natural science. On the contrary, people of different cultures, different ethical outlooks, different aesthetic and moral intuitions, adopt very different paradigms for their accounts of human action and the nature of our moral life; and they cannot easily convince each other, or converge on a favored view, except in certain milieux and often for a limited time.

Faced with this disagreement, some conclude to relativism, and claim that there is no fact of the matter. Human nature is shaped by the interpretations we offer of it, and there is no given basis on which we must eventually converge. I haven’t got the space to argue this here, but this inference doesn’t convince me. We don’t need to assume that there is no fact of the matter. Continued disagreement springs rather from this profound connection between the explanatory paradigms we find convincing in explaining human life, on one hand, and our moral and aesthetic, or spiritual sensibility, on the other. It is very often extremely difficult even to understand each other when we are arguing over a significant gap in spiritual outlook, and actually changing someone’s mind may involve a thoroughgoing reorientation of his/her spiritual life, and not simply a punctual shift in a particular opinion which leaves the rest of his/her being unchanged.

An example may help clarify this. Take a widespread paradigm (alas) in social science today, that is based on rational choice theory. The affinity with the ethical theory we call utilitarianism is fairly evident, and both share a faith in a kind of transparent rational grasp of our motivations and moral predicament, which others (myself included) believe is bought at the expense of a considerable distortion of human experience. The attraction of the explanatory account is obviously linked to the attraction of this construal of the human moral predicament, and both express the powerful draw of a certain notion of rationality. You need a big change in your stance towards the world to get out of this pervasive construal.²

So I would like to claim that there is a truth of the matter underlying this kind of dispute; I would like also to say that we can reason about it; for instance we can debate which view really makes sense of human action, and put rational choice theory under severe strain when it is confronted with certain human actions in history. We can also show a rational path from one to another moral construal, by demonstrating how the better account can free us to take account of important things which the inferior one was blocking out.³

But I can’t argue this here.⁴ I would like rather to say what this means for our understanding of reason. What this means is that our reasoning always involves a third dimension, beyond accurate observation and reliable inference, namely what I called “theoretical imagination” in connection with natural science, and what we could call the “moral-anthropological imagination” in relation to human affairs. Reason has, in other words, a creative component; it can and must generate new ways of conceiving the reality it is trying to understand. How do we generate these? There is no standard answer, no sure method, but in general we can say that we do so by articulating what start as barely definable hunches, or inchoate insights. These unformed insights draw us strongly; we are willing to engage our attention very deeply in them. We have an as yet unfounded and nonetheless powerful anticipatory confidence in them; we might even speak of this as a kind of faith.

Fides quaerens intellectum: it may seem shocking to invoke this formula in a discussion of scientific paradigms. But I believe that there is a distant but discernible analogy with the theological. There is, in other words, a similarity of structure which can be discerned in all uses of the imagination which leap ahead of and set the path for more certain knowledge. Of course, this structure is visible in an impoverished mode in the scientific “hunch.” The impoverishment resides in the fact that the act of faith is not in the general case in God, in the love and fidelity of one (a Being? but God is not really a Being) who is capable of these. And correspondingly, our faith emerges from and is nourished by our whole sense of what is of ultimate importance in life, whereas the scientific hunch relates to a much more circumscribed area. Thus one can say that the faith in God which seeks intellectual expression defines a direction for the intellect only because and to the extent that this faith gives a direction to our whole being. But nevertheless a loose analogy holds. The dawning sense of a new paradigm leaps ahead of what we know, and defines the direction of further inquiry which aims to clarify what draws us to it.

This richer notion of reason has often been neglected or forgotten in recent centuries, but it returns us to Plato. His “logos,” which we translate “reason,” involves the articulation in words of insight, whose full nature can nevertheless not be fully communicated in words. Reason cannot be simply reduced to explicit reasoning, the methodical rational operations which we carry out on our already articulated insights.

It was Descartes among others who caused us to lose this broader understanding of reason. Descartes held that reasoning could be from start to finish guided tightly by a defined method. He had no place for the notion that reasoning relies on articulations, which then only justify themselves, if they ever do so, post factum, by the sense they manage to make of the reality under study. These articulations transform our understanding. So much so, that even the kind of sense we end up making may be undreamt of before the articulation is made.⁵

The path through reason to truth inevitably involves a phase of near-blind groping which only later may be ratified in the clarity of the sense-making that ensues. There are two facets to this ratification. The first comes from the clarity of the sense we make, which each one of us may experience for ourselves. The second comes from the general agreement of all those engaged in reasoning, that we have really made sense of things. Because reasoning is something we don’t only do alone, but which also inescapably involves dialogical collaboration and exchange, these two facets can never be wholly separated from each other. Descartes not only neglected this interplay of groping and ratification, but he supposed the ratification as self-authenticating in the certainty of clarity and distinctness. The dialogical dimension dropped from sight altogether.

Of course, this two-step understanding of reason, moving from articulation to ratification, gives just the most general, abstract form of its progress. This notion has to be augmented and enriched as soon as we think of reasoning as situated in a tradition. I will return to this below.

But for the moment, we should ask: What does this understanding of reasoning do to the post-Enlightenment notion of “reason alone”? In fact, it makes it very problematic to say the least. If reason alone is defined in opposition to faith, then it threatens to collapse as a category when we see the role that faith in our inchoate insights must play. If it is opposed to revelation, then the problem is that “revelation” is a category which we come to articulate in order to make sense of our most fundamental insights. It is itself the fruit of reason-as-articulation.

Maybe we can salvage a category of reason alone as what is operative in certain everyday reasonings as well as in natural science (the categories that Vienna positivists were willing to declare as free from metaphysics). We can say that once the inchoate insight has been articulated in a new paradigm, and once this paradigm shift is ratified through the sense it enables us to make of things, the element of faith is transcended. But for this very reason, the category can’t apply to that whole domain which I outlined above where the anthropological-moral imagination is ever-active. On the contrary, in this domain ratification is never clear without zones of puzzlement and obscurity, and in the dialogical dimension it never comes close to generalized assent.

2

So we begin to see how the too simple separation of reason and faith comes unstuck. It does, indeed, seem to hold in certain domains, for instance, in mathematics and natural science. But once we step bey...

Table of contents

• COVER
• DIRECTIONS IN MODERN THEOLOGY BOOK SERIES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTRODUCTION: FAITH, RATIONALITY, AND THE PASSIONS
• 1 REASON, FAITH, AND MEANING
• 2 THE INVENTION OF FANATICISM
• 3 THE LATE ARRIVAL OF LANGUAGE: WORD, NATURE, AND THE DIVINE IN PLATO’S CRATYLUS
• 4 EVAGRIUS PONTICUS AND THE EASTERN MONASTIC TRADITION ON THE INTELLECT AND THE PASSIONS
• 5 TEARS AND WEEPING: AN AUGUSTINIAN VIEW
• 6 THE NON-ARISTOTELIAN CHARACTER OF AQUINAS’S ETHICS: AQUINAS ON THE PASSIONS
• 7 SKEPTICAL DETACHMENT OR LOVING SUBMISSION TO THE GOOD? REASON, FAITH, AND THE PASSIONS IN DESCARTES
• 8 HUME VERSUS KANT: FAITH, REASON, AND FEELING
• 9 KANT, THE PASSIONS, AND THE STRUCTURE OF MORAL MOTIVATION
• 10 “THE MONSTROUS CENTAUR”? JOSEPH DE MAISTRE ON REASON, PASSION, AND VIOLENCE
• 11 KIERKEGAARD ON FAITH, REASON, AND PASSION
• 12 REVOLTING PASSIONS
• 13 WITTGENSTEIN ON FAITH, RATIONALITY, AND THE PASSIONS
• 14 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RATIONALITY OF EMOTION
• 15 THE NEUROSCIENCE OF EMOTION AND REASONING IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR MORAL THEOLOGY
• 16 INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS
• POSTSCRIPT: WHAT (IF ANYTHING) CAN THE SCIENCES TELL PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY ABOUT FAITH, RATIONALITY, AND THE PASSIONS?
• INDEX