Reason

“Man has only one tool to fight error: reason.”

—Ludwig von Mises

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“Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it.”

—Ayn Rand

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“Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.”

—Max Born

Blanshard

I first came across Brand Blanshard’s name some six months ago in connection with Ayn Rand. One of the few philosophers of reason in the 20th century – he is the author of “Reason and Analysis” – he seems to be a relatively unknown figure outside academia, though that can be said of most philosophers. Anyway, this site links to many articles by and on him; I found “The Nature of Mind” and “Rationalism” to be quite interesting.

Another important resource is the Gifford lectures he gave in ’52 and ’53 on the subjects “Reason and Belief” and “Reason and Goodness.” These lectures formed the basis of his books on those subjects, thus completing his “Reason Trilogy.”

“Absolute submission”

Eternal wisdom (or unadulterated nonsense, as I call it) from the pages of the Times of India; revelation, not reason, as epistemology-

Bhaktivedanta Swami Maharaj said, “There are two approaches: agamanatmak and nigamanatmak. Nigamanatmak is usually taken as perfect means of judgment. We can conclude that all men are mortal hence there is no need to find out how they are mortal. Normally this judgment is acceptable to all. If we judge on the basis of nigamanatmak, we can conclude that a human is mortal. However, one may ask how was it concluded that all humans are mortal?

“The followers of the nigamanatmak process would like to verify and test before concluding. We can make a study that the person died, and then another died and then another and so on. Since whosoever we have observed has died, we may conclude that all humans are mortal. But this process has one major flaw, that is, our limitation. We have never come across a human who is immortal. The power of our senses is limited. Thus we cannot rely on this process of judgment. We have to follow the other method, agamanatmak, which, filled with absolute knowledge, is faultless. This is the same system followed by the Vedas.”

As conditioned souls our senses are imperfect. The sense organs have their own limits. Our eyes cannot see beyond a certain distance, sound is not audible to us beyond certain decibels, our limbs may get tired after a brisk walk of a few kilometres, our stomach cannot digest everything we eat, our teeth cannot chew everything, and so on. So we often tend to judge the situation imperfectly, which leads to imperfect judgment. The decision may sound good at that instant but the fate or result is never known till that decision is acted upon. That is why acquiring perfect knowledge is essential.

One way to gain perfect knowledge is through sharanagati or absolute submission. The Supreme Lord is Supreme in all aspects. He is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent and He is All-Bliss. By the grace of Absolute knowledge we can get complete knowledge. Grace descends to a surrendered soul. All desires will be fulfilled if one submits unconditionally to the Supreme.

Forcing people to be ‘rational’

David Gordon of the Mises blog has reviewed a book – Peter Ubel’s “Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is At Odds With Economics — And Why It Matters.” Gordon writes-

Ubel, a physician trained in economics and psychology, uses behavioral economics to advocate restrictions on the free market. The market, he thinks, has its place: he quotes Adam Smith on the benefits of the division of labor and enthusiastically agrees. But market fanatics have gone too far. They defend the shocking contention that people should be free to choose as they wish, so long as they do not use or threaten force against others. Accordingly, these misguided people defend an unlimited free market: in it, the choice of consumers determines what will be produced.

Ubel agrees, at least to a large extent, that the market does exactly this. (Like most economists except Austrians, he makes an exception for public goods and externalities, but his attack on the free market in this book lies elsewhere.) But he dissents from the view that this justifies the free market. It would do so only if people chose rationally in their self-interest, and this by no means always holds true.

Science, Ubel tells us, has demonstrated people’s irrationality beyond reasonable doubt. Ubel’s tale here has three principal heroes: the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who performed pioneering experiments that show how unreasonably people decide, and the economist Richard Thaler, who developed similar ideas and brought the work of these psychologists to the attention of the economics profession. Their research explodes market fundamentalism

How does it do so? For one thing, our heroes say, people often make mistakes in reasoning. If people reason wrongly, how can they hope to get what they really want?

[...]

Regardless of its causes, though, obesity unquestionably poses health risks to many people, and Ubel wants to bring in the state to rectify matters. If you object to him that people ought to be free to decide how much to eat, or whether to smoke, for themselves, he will answer that their choices, marred by cognitive mistakes, cannot be considered the outcome of rationally self-interested deliberation. This contention, I have endeavored to show, he has failed to prove.

But he also says something else. Why, he asks, should one exalt freedom as the supreme political virtue? Must not freedom be balanced against other components of the good life? Ubel invokes Aristotle, who

viewed one of the major functions of society as being to create an environment that develops virtuous actions in its citizens. We could do worse than to follow his advice. (p. 224)

Ubel for once is right. In order to decide on correct social policy, one must posses a sound philosophy of ethics and politics, one that will consider how various goods can be achieved. Despite this bow to philosophy, though, Ubel shows no awareness that state paternalism is a controversial issue. For him, once we know that a choice has bad results, we can at once legitimately ask what the state can do to improve matters. To think otherwise makes a fetish of freedom; and he quite readily describes his proposals as paternalist.

This is a dangerous – very dangerous – position to take, and is a classic “positive liberty” position (S.E.P) – claiming that people are not “really free.” And that society or government should adopt paternalism and become a “nanny state” to guide people. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article-

[B]erlin, himself a liberal and writing during the cold war, was clearly moved by the way in which the apparently noble ideal of freedom as self-mastery or self-realization had been twisted and distorted by the totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century — most notably those of the Soviet Union — so as to claim that they, rather than the liberal West, were the true champions of freedom. The slippery slope towards this paradoxical conclusion begins, according to Berlin, with the idea of a divided self. To illustrate: the smoker in our story provides a clear example of a divided self, for she is both a self that desires to get to an appointment and a self that desires to get to the tobacconists, and these two desires are in conflict. We can now enrich this story in a plausible way by adding that one of these selves — the keeper of appointments — is superior to the other: the self that is a keeper of appointments is thus a ‘higher’ self, and the self that is a smoker is a ‘lower’ self. The higher self is the rational, reflecting self, the self that is capable of moral action and of taking responsibility for what she does. This is the true self, for rational reflection and moral responsibility are the features of humans that mark them off from other animals. The lower self, on the other hand, is the self of the passions, of unreflecting desires and irrational impulses. One is free, then, when one’s higher, rational self is in control and one is not a slave to one’s passions or to one’s merely empirical self. The next step down the slippery slope consists in pointing out that some individuals are more rational than others, and can therefore know best what is in their and others’ rational interests. This allows them to say that by forcing people less rational than themselves to do the rational thing and thus to realize their true selves, they are in fact liberating them from their merely empirical desires. Occasionally, Berlin says, the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole — “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers. “Once I take this view”, Berlin says, “I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man … must be identical with his freedom” (Berlin 1969, pp. 132-33). (all emphasis mine)

The idea of positive “liberty” is crazy, and so are its proponents – negative liberty is the way to go – the absence of coercion. To the Ubels of the world (his book is after all an attack on capitalism first), Ludwig von Mises had this to say-

If one rejects laissez faire [capitalism] on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

One more thing – Aristotle is not the final word on ethics or politics; for example, in his Politics, he presents a (n unconvincing) defense of slavery.

World views

Ed Cline of The Rule of Reason has a couple of posts on fatalistic world views – the first one is about libertarian philosopher Albert Jay Nock, and the second one is about Margaret Thatcher. Cline is an Objectivist and he makes excellent reading because he brings a historico-philosophical perspective to his posts. But I find ‘some’ of his writings to be pessimistic (go back to some of the posts he wrote about the US presidential elections, especially the one where he said – I am paraphrasing here – that voting only encourages politicians by making them believe that people support their ideas), and I was surprised because I don’t know of too many pessimistic (the word is a loaded one) Objectivists. But then he defines the word in the first post-

The difference between pessimism and fatalism is that the first term reflects a realistic, fact-based appraisal of the outcome of a conflict between ideas, movements or men. It does not rule out the eventual triumph of the good. The second term concedes — too often based on an invalid premise — the inevitable victory of one party of a conflict and the dismal defeat of its opponent. A fatalistic premise promotes the futility of fighting for the good and ensures its defeat.

This definition does not match the one given by COED – “a belief that this world is as bad as it could be or that evil will ultimately prevail over good.” Its definition of fatalism – “the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable,” and determinism – “the doctrine that all events and actions are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the will,” and nihilism – “the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless; the belief that nothing has a real existence.” But then its the same dictionary that says that egotism is another word for egoism.

My pessimistic-cynical-misanthropic world view matches Cline’s definition in the sense that given the present day political and intellectual landscape – if this is the context – I don’t see how “reason” is going to triumph within my lifetime – mankind might, in the next few centuries give up its destructive attitude towards life and the mind, and the world might become a peaceful place where laissez-faire capitalism will thrive because men want it to, but that isn’t going to happen in this century; there are no indications it will. This view dominates most of my posts which deal with politics – the bitterness more than the hope. This is neither fatalistic nor deterministic nor nihilistic – it is based on ground realities. And that’s why I disagree with anyone who calls me a fatalist (I have been called that).

Returning to Cline, he writes-

Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), American essayist and social critic, considered a “grand old man” of libertarianism, was later in his life deemed a pessimist by both his friends and enemies, when in reality he was a fatalist. Mixed in with his many piquant and accurate observations on history and politics is a bitter surrender to a species of determinism — which I would call a secular version of original sin — one which governed his main political thesis and spared him the task of becoming an articulate and powerfully eloquent advocate of freedom. That is, while he advocated freedom, individualism and limited government that would protect life, liberty and property (through what he called “negative intervention“), he did not believe they were sustainable in man, and, in most circumstances, not even desirable by him once he saw a way of securing his existence via political or coercive means (via what he called “positive intervention”).
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After [Nock's] death, his works faded into obscurity, until rediscovered and promulgated by conservatives and libertarians later in the 20th century.

This was a logical adoption; both camps disdain the necessity of a comprehensive philosophy of reason, and treat such concepts as freedom and liberty as self-evident concretes not requiring metaphysical validation or a foundation. Conservatives remain clueless or hostile to a morality founded on a rational, non-religious view of the nature of man. Libertarians remain hostile to a non-subjectivist view of the nature of man as a being of volitional consciousness who must be consistently rational in his mind and actions in order to survive and flourish.

Reverting to my cynical self, I have to say that the connection between “rational” and “survive and flourish” is a weak one in current times. Let me explain. While survival means simply being alive, flourishing is a different concept – it means thriving – it is something beyond mere subsistence. But in the present age where dishonesty is a way of life, people can always rely on adopting practices wherein they “flourish” at some one else’s expense. It won’t work if everyone does it to everyone else, but there will always be one group of people who will get away with it. Is this group being “rational”? If being rational means acting for self-preservation considering reality in the process, then they are – don’t get caught, and you can be as crooked as you want to be, and the law and the political system even helps in your actions; there are always enough people available who can be taken advantage of. If it means the first definition plus ethics-

[The virtue of Rationality] means one’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind (which is the virtue of Independence). It means that one must never sacrifice one’s convictions to the opinions or wishes of others (which is the virtue of Integrity)—that one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner (which is the virtue of Honesty)—that one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit (which is the virtue of Justice). It means that one must never desire effects without causes, and that one must never enact a cause without assuming full responsibility for its effects—that one must never act like a zombie, i.e., without knowing one’s own purposes and motives—that one must never make any decisions, form any convictions or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge—and, above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions. It means the rejection of any form of mysticism, i.e., any claim to some nonsensory, nonrational, nondefinable, supernatural source of knowledge. It means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits or on selected issues or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life.

then they are not. But they will thrive nonetheless.

Cline’s post on Thatcher is in contrast to the one on Nock because he considers her world view to be opposite to Nock’s fatalistic one. He writes-

Britain, by the time Thatcher became Prime Minister, had reached exactly the kind of political and economic nadir forecast by Nock when the State assumed coercive and near total sovereignty over the lives and fortunes of its citizens, otherwise known as “society.” Presumably, by Nock’s formula, the country should have descended into total bankruptcy, anarchy, and extinction. “There is no such thing as Society,” she once remarked. “There are only individual men and women and there are families.” Nock would have agreed with her, but while he condemned most individuals for harboring what he called an “invincible ignorance,” Thatcher was certain that most people would listen to clear reason when their liberty was at stake, and that those who harbored a willful ignorance were in the minority and beyond reclamation (such as Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers).

His only problem with Thatcher is regarding her position on Hong Kong-

Hong Kong was happily a Crown colony, and its dazzling prosperity a reproach to impoverished Mainland China and its communist dictatorship. Thatcher even flew to Peking in September 1983 to discuss the future of the colony. She hated the communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union, but apparently was not so discriminating about the one that ruled China.

The original issue was the status of the New Territories on the mainland per se, for which Britain had signed a 99-year lease with the Qing Dynasty. The leaders in Red China, however, insisted that any “handover” must include Hong Kong island and Kowloon, for which Britain had signed treaties of perpetuity with the Chinese monarchy. In any event, Britain, and presumably Thatcher, caved and endorsed the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984-1985 ceding all of Hong Kong to Red China, to go into effect in 1997.
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Hong Kong now exists in a political purgatory. I am reminded by this whole sorry episode of two of Ayn Rand’s rules on compromise: 1) In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins; 2) In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.

Two very interesting posts; read them both- Nock, and Thatcher.