Reason and Analysis

Brand Blanshard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317852285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This is Volume II in a series of seventeen on Metaphysics. Originally published in 1962, The Muirhead Library of Philosophy was designed as a contribution to the History of Modern Philosophy under the heads: first of Different Schools of Thought-Sensationalist, Realist, Idealist, Intuitivist; secondly of different Subjects-Psychology, Ethics, Political Philosophy and Theology.

CHAPTER I

THE REVOLT AGAINST REASON

1. Since this is a book in defence of reason, we may well begin by saying, at least provisionally, what ‘reason’ means.

Unfortunately it means many things. For the philosopher it commonly denotes the faculty and function of grasping necessary connections. The function is seen in its most obvious form in reasoning, in the deductions, for example, of the logician and the mathematician. This may be taken as the narrowest and nuclear meaning of the term. But there radiate out from it a large number of subsidiary meanings. Reason for many writers shows itself not only in the linkage of propositions, but also in the grasp of single truths, provided these are necessary truths; the insight that two straight lines cannot enclose a space would be as truly an insight of reason as any demonstration in Euclid. Sometimes the meaning of reason and cognate terms is further extended to include reasonings that are less than necessary, such as inferences from past to future. Mr Ayer writes: ‘for us, “being rational” entails being guided in a particular way by past experience’;¹ and Mr. Feigl goes as far as to say: ‘the procedure of induction, therefore, far from being irrational, defines the very essence of rationality.’² Sometimes reason is broadened again to describe the sceptical and reflective turn of mind generally. For Hobhouse it is ‘that which requires proofs for assertions, causes for effects, purposes for action, principles for conduct, or, to put it generally, thinks in terms of grounds and consequences.’³ Reason in the widest sense of all, says Thomas Whittaker, is ‘the relational element in intelligence, in distinction from the element of content, sensational or emotional,’ and he points out that both the Greek term

and the Latin ratio, from which ‘reason’ has largely drawn its meaning, were sometimes used to denote simply ‘relation’ or ‘order’.⁴

What is present through all these expanding meanings is the grasp of law or principle.¹ Such a grasp is intellectual; it is not a matter of sensing or perceiving, but of understanding. The principles thus understood are assumed to be valid independently of our grasping them, and therefore to be valid for all men alike. Hence it belongs to the idea of the rational man to be objective or impartial. So far as one is governed by reason, one’s conclusions will follow the evidence without being coloured by feeling or deflected by desire, and one’s conduct as well as one’s thinking will be ordered by principle. If, in addition to being rational, one is also a rationalist, one will hold that the truths apprehended through intellect are the most important and certain that we possess, and probably also that they reveal, at least in fragmentary fashion, an intelligible structure in the world.

We shall see in the next chapter that the belief in reason in its wider senses has been a cardinal component of western culture since the time of the Greeks. It has determined the main tradition of western philosophy. In great measure, though less exclusively, it has fixed the pattern of Christian theology. And though it formed no part of the original Christian idea of goodness, it contributed powerfully, through the influence of such men as Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, to the ideal of the good life as the rational life.

2. Both reason as a source of knowledge and rationality as a practical ideal are today under attack. Indeed there has been no period in the past two thousand years when they have undergone a bombardment so varied, so competent, so massive and sustained, as in the last half-century. The purpose of this volume and the two that follow it is to examine the most important of these criticisms as they apply to the theory of knowledge, theology, and ethics. This book will be concerned with the theory of knowledge only, and we shall therefore be concerned with reason in its narrower senses alone. The criticism here has been more technical than in the other two fields; and though the path of the argument will be made as clear as possible, it will take us over parched sands and through some rather dense thickets. Plainly the journey is not one to take unless it is necessary.

How necessary it is we shall know only if we have some idea of the range and power of the revolt against reason in all its aspects. This revolt is not merely a technical attack by specialists. It is that, to be sure, but it is very much more. The suspicion of rational standards is part of the attitude of our day, which enters in subtle and manifold ways into our artistic criticism, our religious belief, our psychology, our sociology, and our politics, as well as our philosophy. It is part of the revolution of our time. ‘Since the Renaissance,’ as MacNeille Dixon says, ‘there has been no such upheaval of thought, no such revolution of values as in the century upon which we have entered. Now as then, within about fifty years, within the span of a single lifetime, all the old conceptions, the previous beliefs in science, in religion, in politics, have been wholly transformed; a change has taken place, one might almost say, in the inclination of the earth’s orbit.’¹

3. What has produced this revolution? Most conspicuously, of course, two world wars. To one who, like the present writer, can look back to student days in the American middle west, in England, and in Germany, just before the first of these wars, the old order has the distance and unreality of a dream, and August, 1914, marks the breaking of a dam and the submergence of a civilization. Secondly, three powerful dictatorships have appeared, two of them destroyed in war, one of them still remaining, which undertook to conscript reason in the service of their own ends. Thirdly, there has been the advance of science, which according to Whitehead, has covered a greater distance in fifty years than in the whole preceding history of man. Fourthly, there is the resulting advance in technology— lengthening life, multiplying populations, raising standards of living, spreading literacy, bringing New York and the south seas, Paris and the Congo, within easy range of each other. Fifthly, and as a coordinate result, there is the secularization of life, the withering away of divinities above and demons below, the disintegration, in the new and sharp scientific atmosphere, of the great cloud-castles of dogma in which men once lived so securely. Sixthly, there is the continuing cold war of east and west, with its menace of incalculable destruction.

4. There was nothing in these events, cataclysmic as they were, that led necessarily to an eclipse of reason; and the advance of science, which has had so conspicuous a part in the revolution, might even be expected to raise its prestige. But this is not what happened. Along with the advance of science went an increasing insistence that the reason employed in this advance had nothing to say about values, and a readiness to surrender the whole field of value to the non-rational side of human nature. Our interest for the moment, however, is less in the causes for the depreciation of reason than in the fact. That it is a fact few will doubt, but some testimonies may be in order. The English philosopher L. T. Hobhouse in the twenties, lamenting irrationalism, wrote: ‘philosophy itself, once the appointed guardian and advocate of reason, shares in the irrationalist tendency. We shall end by defining man as the irrational animal, and the modern philosopher as his prophet.’¹ The American philosopher Morris Cohen noted in the thirties that ‘the decline in the avowed faith in reason is … one of the central facts of recent intellectual history.’² Addressing the British Academy in the forties, Dr A. C. Ewing remarked that ‘if there is one thing more characteristic of the intellectual climate of the world as a whole during the last ten years than any other, it is the widespread distrust of reason.’³ A few years later the German philosopher Max Horkheimer complains of ‘a state of affairs in which even the word reason is suspected of connoting some mythological entity. Reason has liquidated itself as an agency of ethical, moral, and religious insight.’⁴ And the Cambridge critic, F. L. Lucas, wrote, as he looked back from the middle fifties: ‘the irrational, now in politics, now in poetics, has been the sinister opium of our tormented and demented century.’⁵

This reaction against reason has taken very different forms in different provinces. It will be well to see first what has happened in the field with which we shall be chiefly engaged, philosophy.

5. At the turn of the century rationalism was in a complacent ascendancy in Britain, Germany, and America, though it was being sharply challenged in France. The form it most commonly took was absolute idealism. For Bradley, Bosanquet, and Edward Caird in Britain, for Windelband, Wundt, and Eucken in Germany, for Josiah Royce and John Watson in North America, reason was the yardstick of reality. That the world was rational was a philosophic postulate, for philosophy was the attempt to understand, and why set out on the enterprise of finding intelligibility in the world unless one believed it was there to be found? For the present, to be sure, the world has a recalcitrant way of rebuffing our attempts to find in it a rational order: we do not know why roses are red or the sky is blue; we do not know, as Hume showed so conclusively, why one billiard ball rolls away when another strikes it. Of course the idealists were familiar with Hume’s arguments. They held that in this matter he was right about what we did know, and wrong about what we might know. Granting that we could not now answer these questions, there must be some reason for the colour of rose and sky; and if billiard balls, rivers and planets follow an invariable course, we cannot suppose this to happen by chance or miracle. Within the unvarying sequence there must be some thread of necessity, and with time reason may isolate it. Indeed, ‘nothing in this world is single’; every thing, event, and quality stands in relation to others, and is what it is because of those others. Hence we shall not fully understand it unless we see it in the context of the relations that determine it, and ultimately in the context of the universe as a whole. Whether any bit of alleged knowledge is true will depend in the first instance on whether it coheres with our system of knowledge as a whole, and the degree of truth possessed by this system will depend in turn on its coherence with that all-inclusive system which is at once the goal of our knowledge and the constitution of the real.

The idealists carried their rationalism still farther. They held that reason supplied the measure for beauty and religion as well as for truth. Each mind was a little world, struggling to widen and set in order its own experience, and the good life lay in harmonious self-realization. They hastened to add, however, that the powers to be realized were not those of one’s own mind only, but those of humanity, conceived somewhat metaphorically as one great organism in which our various minds were cells. So again of beauty and values generally. Bosanquet in his GifFord Lectures of 1911¹ argued that the test of truth appointed by logic, namely coherence within a system, provided also an objective standard of taste. And it was the thesis of Watson, Royce, and the Cairds, of Ward and Haldane and Sorley, in an impressive shelf-full of further GifFord Lectures, that religion itself could become adequate to its object only as this object was conceived, and continually reconceived, by an advancing reason.

6. To mention these philosophers is to evoke an era that seems already more remote than that of Hume, though they are all within easy memory of persons still living. There are very few philosophic chairs in Britain or America now occupied by persons of their outlook; their philosophy is gone like Prospero’s pageant, leaving hardly a wrack behind. Their main conclusions are either rejected or set down as merely meaningless. Their logic is pronounced naive. The reason of which that logic was the organ, and which supplied at once the main instrument of their philosophizing and the main test of its validity, is widely held to give no knowledge of the world at all. Even their style, which, in Bradley and the Cairds at least, was thought to have distinction, is dismissed as painfully loose and overcharged with ‘emotive meaning’. Their earnest and laborious books gather dust on library shelves.

The structure they built was not destroyed quite abruptly. What happened was rather that its foundations were sapped by a rapid succession of waves. They threw up such breakwaters as they could, but the blows followed each other so fast and with such mounting force that resistance had little effect. These waves call for separate mention. They bear the not very inviting names of realism, naturalism, pragmatism, existentialism, and the philosophy of analysis.

7.The realistic attack was led, in England, by Moore and Russell, and in America by the six ‘neo-realists’ and seven ‘critical realists’ who produced joint manifestoes. What they all disliked in the idealists was the taint of subjectivism, the suggestion that what exists is dependent for its existence on some experiencing mind. The marches and counter-marches of the realists would make an engrossing tale; it is significant that one of their leaders, Lord Russell, came round in his later years to a position close to Berkeley’s about the status of what we immediately perceive.¹ But the realist attack, effective as it was in undermining idealism, was not directed in the firs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Chapter I The Revolt Against Reason
• Chapter II The Idea of Reason in Western Thought
• Chapter III The Rise of Positivism
• Chapter IV Logical Atomism
• Chapter V The Theory of Meaning
• Chapter VI Analysis and a Priori Knowledge
• Chapter VII Linguistic Philosophy—Some Earlier Forms
• Chapter VIII Linguistic Philosophy—Some Later Forms
• Chapter IX Universalis
• Chapter X Necessities in Nature
• Chapter XI Necessity in Causation
• Chapter XII Some Intimations of Cosmic Necessity
• Books mentioned in the text
• Index