On the Rule of Reason

It might seem clear that allowing reason to be the sole arbiter of things to also be the way to freedom. For, if any law or institution, through the course of reasoning is found to be arbitrary or unnecessary by those over whom the laws or institutions rule, then why should they not be abolished? I agree entirely with this statement. However, if we examine reasoning closer, we find that reason is not an appeal to some Platonic logos through which we might find harmony in the perfected freedom of the mechanical order of reason. Unless one reduces all conversation to propositional logic (and even then), the elusiveness of meaning foils us. This implies that the possible paths of reasoning are laid out by the totality of the language within which reasoning takes place.

In the case of foreign languages, Hans-Georg Gadamer says,

when there is understanding, there is not translation but speech. To understand a foreign language means that we do not need to translate it into our own. When we really master a language, then no translation is necessary – in fact, any translation seems impossible… For you understand a language by living in it (TM, 386).

One might know this experience if one has ever begun to think in a foreign language or attempted to translate a term that has no corollary in one’s mother tongue. Although one might have a command of both languages, one finds oneself speechless. When we understand a language, i.e., when we live in it, we can switch into speaking in the foreign tongue without needing to think about the grammar or vocabulary – we do not first think in our mother tongue and then methodically translate it into the foreign tongue. The foreign tongue becomes like the mother tongue to us. As such, the world of that language – the ideas and existences that compose it – opens up to us as it does for another whose mother tongue is the foreign language.

There are concepts that at the more abstract levels in a language become untranslatable. Take the Greek word arate. It has been translated as "excellence" and "virtue", among other things. After 2,000 years, we're still not entirely sure what arate means, because no one lives in ancient Greek language anymore. Although we can roughly translate it, we are constantly brought up against contradictions in its definitions when we try to enter it into other translated statements in the same language. Ancient Greek hung together as an entire language; no one word, especially as a concept removed from the material world (like freedom or justice or anarchism) can live in a foreign language as comfortable as it does in its own.

So what does this aside have to do with reason? Abstract concepts exist within language, and the meanings they employ (when we try to define freedom, we employ other terms, and when we want to define them, we employ even others) open up only the possibilities that exist in that language. If I have no metaphorical concept of heart as we do in many Western cultures, i.e., - he has a big heart meaning he is generous, loving, etc., then I cannot speak of anyone or anything having a big heart, and this limits what I can express.

Certainly, we Euro-Caucasians have a rich historical discourse of freedom and anarchy that found most prominently its beginnings in the Renaissance (of Greek culture). But if we look to Japan, for example, we might find something different. One of my professors had said that while he was in Japan teaching teachers of English he had them read Emerson's Self-reliance. They found it practically unintelligible in spirit, because, they said, what was primary to them was not one's individual freedom, but harmony of the group. I think this has purchase, as we find find traces of this idea in the strongly influential philosophical thinking of Taoism and Confucianism (circularity, interconnectedness and harmony).

The danger with reason is that we might universalize it an impose our own linguistic world onto another, asserting that our reason is the correct reason, and that, ultimately, if one only heard correctly, truth will be shown. However, as I hopefully made clear above, each language has limits placed in its reasoning by the very thing which gives the power to reason -- language. This mistake primary for the horrors of Western colonization. We believed other cultures as "backwards," and it was the "white man's burden" to free these people from their shackles of ritualistic pre-modernity, not recognizing that our own anti-tradition antics were a tradition in themselves (yes, anarchism is a tradition; why else would many of us read Marx, Spooner, Bookchin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, et. al, or even refer to them with authority? From where do we get the ideas that rule and regulate our thinking?).

Lastly, the appeal to reason also misses the psycho-historical nature of human existence. Arguing over ideas, we find our identities tied up in them and we have a hard time letting go. Ernest Becker quotes Otto Rank:

And so [Otto] Rank could say, 'Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over … immortality.' If anyone doubts this, let him try to explain away the life and death viciousness of all ideological disputes. Each person nourishes his immortality in the ideology of self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a fit of rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible.

So, to close this thought, I think reasoning is a powerful and necessary means of acquiring and maintaining our freedom, but it is limited to the particularity of language and it cannot be made independent of our own individual historicity or that of our culture.