Alternatives to reason

For any being, reason can attain to the one truth about it, which is objective.

Supposing that you do not wish to use reason, and would rather live like a beast, it is very advantageous to come up with some denial of the sentence above, so that at certain convenient times, you may use it to delude others into thinking you are being reasonable. What follows is a division of ways to deny it. Some of these have apparent arguments supporting them, but these are not explored here.

The result of all of them is the same: the slumber of reason and the practical triumph of the flesh; for sense experience is never ousted from practical use.

0. Contents

1. Reason cannot attain to all truth
1.1. Some being is unintelligible through defect of the being
1.2. Some being is unintelligible through defect of the reason
2. Reason cannot attain to any truth
2.1. All being is unintelligible through defect of being
2.2. All being is unintelligible through defect of reason
3. Truth is not one
3.1. Truth is none
3.2. Truth is many
4. Truth depends on the subject
4.1. Truth depends on the intellect
4.2. Truth depends on the will

1. Reason cannot attain to all truth

Truth is the correspondence between the intellect and the thing. So, if the intellect, ex hypothesi, cannot attain to some truth, this can be either through defect of the intellect or through defect of the thing.

1.1. Some being is unintelligible through defect of the being

This would be the denial of the principle of sufficient reason, and the affirmation of the opposite, that is, that there are brute facts, which are in principle unexplainable.

Here are some ways to do it:

• some things come into existence without a cause
• some motion happens without a mover
• some appearances have no necessary connection with any realities
• some activity is wholly undetermined by the nature of the agent
• some accidents inhere without any subject

1.2. Some being is unintelligible through defect of reason

This would be the affirmation of scepticism, as may be opposed to dogmatism, or sometimes to rationalism. The claim is that reason is somehow insufficient for attaining to some truth, which is to say, that attaining to that truth requires something that reason cannot do.

Here are some ways to do it:

• man cannot know the nature(s) of any physical things
• man cannot know anything immaterial
• man cannot know moral laws
• man cannot know aesthetic truths
• man cannot know logical laws
• man cannot know other men’s minds

2. Reason cannot attain to any truth

This is the universal version of the preceding section; I thought it should go in its own place.

2.1. All being is unintelligible through defect of being

This opinion would deny that anything has a sufficient reason. This would assert that the world is pure chaos; reason, attempting to find reasons for things, necessarily embarks on a doomed enterprise. It is the idea that philosophy cannot be useful, on which I have written before.

2.2. All being is unintelligible through defect of reason

This would be universal scepticism, the denial that any knowledge is possible. The earlier versions, which are sceptical only about particular objects, are sometimes called local scepticism by contrast, although I would rather oppose universal to particular. Pyrrhonian scepticism, the most famous form of scepticism, was of the universal kind.

3. Truth is not one

To deny that truth is one is also to stifle the operation of reason. For reason must make affirmative judgments, and deny their contradictions; if it both can be true, or neither can, then the enterprise of reason is necessarily vitiated.

3.1. Truth is none

Which is to say, there is no truth. This opinion, in a universal sense, is very uncommon, and so lacks a specific name; it is sometimes called nihilism, but that word can refer to other opinions as well.

This can only be distinguished from scepticism if its holder means not only that nothing can be known, but rather that there is nothing to know, which amounts to an “ontological nihilism” that was perhaps only proposed by the sophist Gorgias.

3.2. Truth is many

The opinion that there are many contradictory truths, which may sometimes be generically called pluralism, is most commonly joined today to a form of relativism, on which see below. But contradictory true beliefs may also be thought to be held within the same system, as in dialetheism, or by the same subject in different modes, as in the double-truth theory which was allegedly held by some Averroists.

4. Truth depends on the subject

Although for a judgment to be true is for it to be adequate to its object, it remains that judgments are always made by a subject. Because of this, when someone wishes to eschew reason by claiming that reality or adequation are divided or inaccessible, a popular way to achieve this confusion is to divide them according to the subject making the judgment.

4.1. Truth depends on the intellect

This is what is done by any form of relativism, as well as by what Mises called racial polylogism. The latter specifically emphasizes different groups thinking by different logical rules, whereas the former may think that they must add different premises to the inference, or something else. (Addendum 2023-12-16: so-called “standpoint epistemology” seems to be similar to, or the same as, polylogism. I should look further into this.)

4.2. Truth depends on the will

One may also claim that a judgment’s truth bears relation to the interests or desires of the judging subject, rather than his intellectual qualities. This is what is done by what Mises called Marxian polylogism; the Marxists would claim that different classes think in different ways because they must arrange their thoughts in a way that defends their class interests. Reference to ideology often implies such a notion.

Pragmatism would also seem to claim that the truth of a judgment depends on its usefulness with relation to the desires of the subject. As William James put it, in the preface to The Meaning of Truth:

[W]hen the pragmatists speak of truth, they mean exclusively some thing about the ideas, namely their workableness; whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of truth they seem most often to mean something about the objects.

As he noted, this causes a lot of confusion, and such confusions were the theme of that entire book. James spends much energy in redeeming himself from the charge that he attempts to justify irrational thinking; and while he might be successful in that, it remains that his mode of speech is, undeniably, extremely convenient for someone who did wish to do so.