The edge of reason

There are two ways to think about “the edge of reason.” Let us start with the most obvious way, the one that has been under attack from an array of unlikely bedfellows in recent years, ranging from evolutionary psychologists to postmodern philosophers. For them, “the edge of reason” gestures menacingly towards what lies on the other side of reason—so-called “unreason,” a realm of error and disorder that results when we stray from the dictates of logic. Here “edge” functions as a boundary concept. It suggests that reason is something that we already possess but can easily lose if we are not careful and unwittingly pass over to the “dark side.” This is the sense of “reason” that was originally the preserve of priests and then psychiatrists—with modernist philosophers kibitzing from the sidelines.

Implied here is the idea that reason—often written “Reason”—stands as an intellectual bulwark against the baser, unreflective, less comprehensive aspects of our mental life. It is just this image of the mind as a house divided against itself that is opposed by those who would deny reason its edge. For better or worse, these critics argue, we respond most authentically to the environments in which we normally find ourselves, and typically we do so without anything that looks like a rational argument. Our existential problems as a culture or even as a species begin once we try to generalise wildly from this limited base of experience—or still worse our rationalisations of that experience. There is literally no “Reason” to think that behaviours that have proven adaptive in one environment will be successful elsewhere.

But this critique is much too glib. There is a more creative way to understand the phrase “the edge of reason”: What—if any— advantage does reason provide in how we approach the world? Here it is worth recalling that “reason” is more than simply the intellect. For most of the history of philosophy, the intellect has been a faculty that aims to reflect the nature of reality. Its proper working requires that one be in a state of receptiveness, if not passivity. The intellect flourishes when one’s mind is open to what the world has to offer. It is contemplative. In contrast, “reason” has been traditionally seen as a much more active faculty, one associated with judgement and decision-making. As a psychological formula, “reason = intellect + will.” In other words, reason puts you in the driver’s seat of reality: instead of you being open to the world, the world is open to you.

Although many of today’s secular thinkers might not like you to know this (John Gray being an honourable exception), this assertive conception of reason is theological in origin. Having been created in the “image and likeness” of God, we can do godlike things by making reasoned choices about the sort of world in which we would like to live. The Enlightenment is the period when this idea really took hold in both science and politics, and over the past 300 years an unprecedented amount of human effort and natural resources has been mobilised to construct the vaunted “heaven on earth.” The legacy of this has been mixed, to say the least. There is no denying that both the cherished welfare state and the loathed Nazi regime are products of this movement to take reason over the edge of normal human experience into a realm that would turn thoughts into concrete reality.

The trail of Enlightenment projects is littered with people who underestimated the difference between humans and gods. “Gaining the reason edge” is perhaps most fruitfully seen as becoming aware of that difference, in the manner recently put forward by the self-styled “risk engineer,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in Antifragile. The “antifragile” investor is one who envisages the future as substantially different from the past but is uncertain exactly when and how that will come about. Taleb’s preferred strategy is a kind of spread betting, in which you anticipate many losses on the wilder bets, but you treat these as investments in learning from error. In short, the edge of reason lies in your capacity to make strategically designed mistakes in a frame of mind sufficiently open that you do not make them again.

Steve Fuller will be debating the neutrality of reason on 25th May at HowTheLightGetsIn, the world's largest philosophy festival, held annually from 23rd May-2nd June in Hay-on-Wye