anthony o'hear - immanent and transcendent dimensions of reason [a]

8/16/2019 Anthony O'Hear - Immanent and Transcendent Dimensions of Reason [a]

1/16

Ratio New Series I V Dcccmbcr 19910034-0006 2.00

IMMANENT AND TRANSCENDENT DIMENSIONSOF REASON

Anthony O’Hear

In a way, my theme is a variant of Pascal’s insistence on themultiple simultaneous realisations rational reflection brings aboutin us. We realise that our most basic beliefs and practices areassailable by sceptical doubts, but that these doubts are not onesanyone could live by. In living our lives we have to take so manythings for gran ted, but in reflecting on what we take for granted we

realise that it lacks the type ofjustification our reason seeks for i t .We conclude, then, that there is something unreasonable inpushing demands for justification too far, in pushing them as far asthe man who recognises the force of sceptical arguments wouldhave us go; but there remains a niggling feeling that there might besomething highly parochial in seeking to constrain rational enquirywithin the framework set by that meld of instinct and traditionwhich we think of as constituting the framework within which we

live. The niggling feeling that there might be something irrationalin curbing thr pretensions of reason to criticise and conceivablyeven to undermine the basic premises of our lives and practicesgrows into something more weighty when one reflects that someappa rent ly basic premises of our forefathers and of other culturesnow stand revealed to us as false or irrational. Pascal says that noperfectly genuine sceptic ever existed. And while this is true, andwhile this thought is the necessary counterpoint to the pretensionsof reason to undermine a way of life completely, the dificulty isalways to know whether in a specific case reason is overstepping itslimits. At the same time, for many, the fact that no one hasprovided a generally acceptable solution to Desc‘artes’ dreamingargument , or to Hume an scepticism about induction, or to modernfantasies about brains-in-vats is likely only to evoke Pascalianthoughts about the theoretical inutility and practical irrelevance ofreason when it oversteps its limits.

My thoughts about reason are Pascalian not only in theirrecognition of the ambiguous nature of rational reflection and of itsreal or supposed limits. They also echo Pascal in seeing wha t mightbe thought of as the simultaneous grandeur and faiblesse of reason asstemming from the nature of rational reflection itself. Pascalbelieved that man’s greatness consisted the fact that he, unlike a


2/16

I M M A NI IN T A N D 7 RZ N S C E N D E N I ‘ 1 ) I M E N S I O N SO F RE.4SON 109

tree, knows tha t he is wretch ed. M an is gre at becau se he is abletoreflect on a n d becom e aw are of his l imitations. Pascal tho ug ht t ha tth is grea tness through awarenessof l imitation had religiousimplications,a point to which we shal l re turn , bu t for the m om entIwould l ike simply to focus on the dialect ic involvement in ou rreason ing powers . O n the one hand we have the ab i li ty an d eventhe need to subject an y belief or pra ct ice of which w e beco me aw areof ra t ional scru t iny. On the o ther hand, in conduct ing ra t ionalsc rut iny of beliefsor pract ices , we real ise that o ur reaso ning pow ersfair ly quickly run out , and we are lef t with fundamental bel iefswhose source appears to be th e non-ra t ional opera t ion of ins t inc t ortradi t ion rather than reason i tself and whose s tatus as bel iefs

rem ain accordingly ques t ionable . But , as H u m e famously observed,in those things which we c an no t help believing in ord er to l ive ou rlife the extern al world, induc t ion, the self , cer tain m ora lprinciples na tu re becomes too s trong for pr inciple; we get o n withour l ives in pract ice and bel ieve them anyway, whatever scept icalscrup les rem ain a t the theoret ical level.

As a matter of fact, evenif we have ref lect ive and scept icaltendencies by vir tue of our nature as self-conscious beings, and

even if we a gree wi th Socra tes (a nd P ascal?) tha t in a cer ta in sensethe e xam ined life is thc o ne m ost wo rth l iving, we a re s ti ll cre atu resof nature. As such we have inst incts and biological dr ives whichimpose cons t ra in ts on o ur conduc t an d, indirec tly, on the way w eperce ive and th ink about the wor ld . Whi le the would-be moralreformer might on rat ional g rou nd s an d in the spir i t of aPlato o r aBe ntham propose an ent ire ly unh eard of form of existence as th ebest for man, human beings are not inf ini tely malleable, nor canhappiness be brought about by the unt rammel led exerc ise ofindividual choice (however rat ional in intent ion) i f the choicesinvolved do too much violence to our nature. Analogously,Isuspec t tha ti t is going to be very hard to ge t hum an beings ac tua l lyto see the day-to-day world in th e tcrms proposed by physicsif a n dwh en those terms s tray too far from the del iverances of the senses.Hum e’s scept ica l dou bts vanished when he turn ed f rom his s tud yto the backgam mon tab le , bu tI w on de r if Ne wto n himself failed tofeel a tension bctwecn what hisOpticks taugh t a n d h is senses to ldhim , a n d w here, if such a tension were fel t, the victory lay as far asevery day existence w ent.Or, to put th is poin t ano ther way, i s thereany physicis t of to-day who teaches his chi ldren the conceptsofphysics before they ha ve ma stered the vocab ulary an d world-viewof ins t inc t a n d common-sense?


3/16

11 A N T H O N Y O’HEAR

When we look at our behaviour, we can see that once againinstinct seems at critical moments to present us with essentialmodes of response. These modes present themselves as impulses orimperatives which any amount of thought and reflection can dolittle to weaken. A mother in defending her children against attack,a man in responding to insult or invasion of his territory, can surelybe seen as repeating primaeval pat terns of behaviour deeply rootednot just in our species, but in ways of life far more primitive thanour own. And in one way it is well that we do draw on this pool ofun-thinking, natural response. It is another symptom of the factthat we are natural beings, with a nature partially formed bynature, rather than by our conscious choices and decisions. It is a

sign of our lack of absolute malleability and, at the same time, ofthe inheritance which defines individuals as individual humanbeings, and not as unformed plaster awaiting the hands of somewould-be sculptor of human nature.

‘The mother who fights in fury to defend her child is one wouldhope obeying the call of instinct, not the advice of some materna lguidance leaflet.’ Bruce Chatwin’s eloquent paean in praise ofhuman instinctive behaviour touches on a crucial point. The call

of instinct of the young woman fighting for her child, which ismanifested equally (as Chatwin avers) in the fighting behaviour ofyoung men presents itself as something to most people as anabsolute, an imperative unconditioned by reason, not done for thesake of some other end. The mother defending her child does notreason that this is what she ought to do; at least she does not if herfeelings are healthy and not sicklied o’er with the pale cast ofthought. The pale cast of thought reasoning can never, despiteKant, present us with an action as required of us absolutely. Wemay learn through reasoning that prudcnce would suggest such acourse of action, that morality requires of us something else, thatcertain virtues hang together in a certain concept of the good life. Ido not want to denigrate the important role reasoning can play inaction and in developing our conceptions of what we ought to do.But it is hard to find in pure reasoning that initial push in favour ofmorality or of long-term prudence, or of a given conception of thegood life. Indeed, without a pre-emptive strike of the sortat tempted by Kant in favour of morality, it is hard enough to workout on purely rational grounds why in a given case the demands ofmorality should take precedence over those of prudence or of some

Brucc Chatwin, Sonxlines I.ondon, 1989 p . 240


4/16

I M M A N E N T A N D T R A N S C E N D E N T II I M E N S I O N SOF R E A S O N 1 11

other conception of the good life; at the very least Kant can beaccused of overlooking the diversity of calls made on us in our livesby conflicting claims and interests, of which morality and the moralform but one set. And, as we find out from a quick survey ofmodern moral philosophy, infanticide, lying, ‘deep’ ecology,absolute pacifism, forcible population reduction and theiropposites can all be defended on rational (o r ‘rational’) grounds.It all depends on your initial starting point. In the case, though, ofthe mother and her child, there is no start ing point of principle, noreasoning from principles, there is ju st the response.

The contrast we are drawing between the imperatival, categoricaldemands of instinct and the provisional, hypothetical conclusions

of reasoning processes raises a question as to the nature of reason.If reasoning is what reason goes in for, i t can seem less a source ofultimate ends (which might be supplied by our biology, ourinstincts or even our station in life), than some means by which wecan be enabled to fulfil our ultimate ends or bring them intoharmonious conjunction in cases where we face conflicts of ends.The contrast between instinct and inherited or acquired duties, onthe one hand , and reasoning processes on the other has notoriously

led many to follow Hume in thinking of reason in purelyinstrumental terms: reason can deliberate about means, and refineor improve them, but about ends it must be silent. And where basicbeliefs are concerned, too, nature is too strong for principle andbreaks the force of all sceptical arguments.* Once again, we get ourbasic beliefs from a non-rational source.

It would indeed be hard to quarrel with the view that a greatdeal of explicit reasoning activity is reasoning about means andwhat Aristotle would call intermediate ends and this both inmatters of practice and of belief. In physics and cosmology, forexample, we do not spend much time examining the beliefs thatthere is an external world apart from us, that it has existed for along time and tha t it manifests and will continue to manifest causaland other regularities. What we do could be seen as the at tempt towork out the implications of these ideas given the phenomena weexperience. Analogously, in ethics and in politics disagreementover fundamentals often becomes relatively unimportant whenparticipants in a discussion begin attempting to devise practicalproposals to deal with some admitted problem of mutual concern.And thus the suspicion grows that the reason why reasoning is

David Hume Treatise q Human Nature R k I PI. IV, C h .


5/16

112 A N T H O N Y O ’ H E A R

about means is far more common than reasoning about ends is notjus t because the latte r is far more difficult. Might it not be that thelatter is far more difficult jus t because in the end, ends firstprinciples ar e not given by reason a t all, but by nature, instinct,tradition, form of life, or some other basically non-rational source?(Or a source, which if rational is rational in virtue of what Hegelthought of reason’s cunning or what followers of Adam Smithmight characterise as an invisible hand , ra ther than by anything anindividual rational enquirer could necessarily perceive as reason-able a t any given time?)

The idea that reasoning proper is only ever about means andnever about ends is, of course, too crude, as countless critics of

Hume and his followers in this thesis have pointed out. For onething, ends adopted by one individual or group may in practiceconflict and the individual or group be forced to reflect on therelative desirability of the various ends they are proposing tothemselves. For another the very fact that a given end requires suchand such means can lead people to question the desirability of theend. (Many of those who have initially been attracted by Platonicideals of strict equality of opportunity in education have come to

question the validity of those ideals once they have realised thatonly the Platonic means of taking children away from their parentsat birth would have any hope of achieving them.) Then again,reasoning in the broad sense of having the requisite intelligence andsensitivity is needed in order to perceive that such and such anaction is what courage or some other virtue requires in givencircumstances. It is not always immediately obvious what our endshould be; reasoning, then, is required in the determination of endsjust as much as in the choosing of the best means to reach ourchosen ends.

The considerations of the last paragraph strongly suggest that inpractical matters ends and means are far more closely intertwinedthan is realised by those who think of reasoning just in terms ofmeans. The consequence is that it is impossible to restrict theoperation of reason to the discovery of means alone; reasoning isalso involved in the determination and choice of ends. Analogousconsiderations apply in the epistemological case. Even if, as Iargued earlier, we do not spend time in physics or cosmologyarguing about the existence of the external world, or its longevity,physics and cosmology have had a huge impact on our conceptionsof the na ture of that world and of its actual time span. I n this way,a study initially undertaken within certain presuppositions has


6/16

I M M A N E N T A N D T R A N SC E N D EN T D I M E N S I O N SO F R E A S O N 13

changed our ideas about those presuppositions in ways which couldnot have been foreseen when human beings first embarked on thestudy.

However, even though we would be right to reject a crudedemarcation between the rational and the non-rational in terms ofproximate and ultimate ends or assumptions, i t remains true thatour ideas about what it is reasonable to hold in matters of belief andof practice do not float free of our systems of belief and practice.They are embedded within them, required by them and are notjustifiable outside them. Even giving reason a wider scope thanreasoning about means, it remains true that Cartesian scepticismabout dreaming, or Humean doubts about induction or about the

rationality of ultimate practical ends cannot be settled by uswithout assuming the validity of the very practices such scepticismis intended to cast doubt on . And the fact is that as human beingswe have no option but to accept the validity of at least some of ourpractices, and to take their deliverances and st andards as thecriterion for the reasonable. In terms which would have made senseto both Cardinal Newman and Wittgenstein, reason in the sense ofthat which determines what is to count as reasonable should be

seen as abstracted from the flow of life, and not as st anding outsideour life.Reasons of an explicit sort, then, should as Michael Oakeshott

argues, be seen as an abridgement of our practices, which arethemselves a meld of our instincts and traditions. When we ask asHume does -whether it is more reasonable to prefer the scratchingof our finger to the destruction of the whole world, or when we seek,like Descartes, to establish whether or not we are dreaming, wemight seem to be asking for principles on which to found ou r beliefsand practices. Examination of the questions and of the principleswhich might emerge, though, suggests that these and similarsceptical questions can be answered only given that we accept theframeworks of instinct and tradition which we inherit. C 'ivenhuman life, desire and community, it is naturally preferable not tdestroy the whole world, but as a host of ethical thinkers, includingSchopenhauer and Tolstoy, have suggested, there need from anabsolute point of view be nothing sacrosanct or abstractlycompelling about seeking the preservation and continuation of thehuman race. In everday life, i t is only in very abnormal conditionsthat there is any doubt as to whether one is awake or dreaming.And not even abnormal circumstances can make one's really beinga brain in a vat seem plausible. Nevertheless, as the history of


7/16

114 A N T H O N Y O ' H E A R

philosophy teaches, scepticism and solipsism remain constanttemptations to the rational mind, and rational argument alonecannot dispose of them, unless one is prepared to start from aninitial acceptance of the reasonableness of animal belief and humanpractice.

In the view of Pascal, reason's last step is the recognition thatthere ar e an infinite number of things beyond it.3 Pascal may havebeen thinking there of truths of a transcendent sort; what I amsuggesting is that there is equally a sense in which the most basicand mundane truths are beyond the power of reason to establish, orindeed, to undermine. Th ere can actually be something unreason-able, something only half-serious, about engaging in the sort of

fundamental sceptical doubt about our basic beliefs and practiceswhich the practice of the sceptic continually belies. To admit thelimits of reason in both the criticism and the justification of ourbeliefs and practices is not unreasonable. What is unreasonable isto think that reason can be effectively employed outside the contextof belief and practice in which reasons and reasoning have theirhome.

What has so far been said about reason and reasoning has no

transcendent implications. Human beings are being seen ascreatures of nature, with certain naturally and culturally givendispositions and beliefs. Deeply embedded belicfs and practicesabout the external world, about induction, about the imperativeneed an individual has to survive and to protect his or her youngcan plausibly be seen as having been embedded because they havepromoted the survival of individuals who held them, and indirectlyof the species as a whole. We can also speculate that the unavoid-ability of what Hume refers to as animal belief in body andprobability and the rest, and the unthinking and immediate natureof many of our responses to what we perceive as threatening toourselves or our dependents is due to nature having done thethinking for us over millenia. These are the beliefs and responseswhich those who have survived best in the past have possessed.These are the beliefs and responses which have been demanded byand have themselves fostered the flow of human life, expressed andreinforced through a dialectic of instinct and tradition. As such,they make absolute demands on us, demands which reasoning is, inthe main, powerless to weaken however much it might makesceptical noises. Nature is, as Hume says, too strong for principle.

cf Blaisc Pascal, Penshs n o . 188


8/16

I M M A N E N T A N D T R A N S C E N D E N T D I M E N S I O N SOF R E A S O N 115

In the light of what has been said, reason has a wider role thanmerely discovering means to ends not rationally assessible or justworking out the detailed implications of a largely inherited pictureof the world. By reasoning we can both develop our systems of endsand our picture of the world. Nevertheless reason and reasoningcan still be seen to play a largely ins trumental role within the flowof life. At any given time there is much which simply has to beaccepted because i t is demanded by life, beliefs and dispositionswhich a re neither justifiable by reason in the abst rac t noroverthrowable by reason. Reasonable values and beliefs ar e alwaysthose which in some sense conduce to life, assist us in ourcommerce with nature and with our fellows.

I am well aware of the vagueness and ambiguity of the idea ofvalues and beliefs being conducive to life. Very likely whatNietzsche might see as satisfying such a description would be quitedifferent from what some representative of the deep ecologymovement might see in such terms. Some readers, too will bealarmed by the mention of Nietzsche in this context; what is fromone man’s point of view conducive to his life might look toanother like the suppression of his rights and the undermining of

his cherished projects. Speaking of life as the foundation of valueinevitably raises the spectre of the will-to-power and of socialDarwinism. Nevertheless there remains some plausibility in theidea that at a certain level some beliefs and dispositions are simplyforced on us by the facts of life. If this is so, though, then it need notbe the case that the rationale for the beliefs and dispositions inquestion be utterly transparent to those on whom they are, so tospeak, forced. They may find themselves, like Hume, jus t acceptingthe cogency of belief in body or inductive inference without beingable to justify these beliefs to themselves. I t may also be the case, asHayek has argued, that we are not always clear ju st what our usefuldispositions are, or why they are useful. If they have been selectedbecause they conduce to the well-being of those who hold them,what mat ters is whether those who hold their act in the appropriateway, not whether they are clear just what the dispositions are orwhy they are useful.

So the possibility has to be admitted that, in addition to theHumean animal beliefs in basic metaphysical realities, myths andreligions could be the means by which life-conducive dispositionsare passed on from one generation to another, even thoughindividual rational minds may fail to understand the function orvalidity of the beliefs in question. That speculation of this sort is the


9/16

116 A N THON)’ 0 ’ H I 3 , \ R

stock-in-trade of sociobiology is not enough to discredit it. If asmany post-Humean philosophers ar e prepared to admit, epistemo-logical scepticism and solipsism is rationally undefcatable, anddefeated in practice only by pressing biological and social needs,why should not o ther rationally indefensible myths a t times play anequally salutary role in the lives and cultures of those societieswhich foster them? And no one cognisant of the history of thiscentury will underestimate the difficulty of upholding and trans-mitting basic moral values outside a context of religious myth.)

Without denying that what is to count as reasonable in mattersof belief and practice is often to be seen in terms of the embeddingo f a belief o r practice in a way of life, I want now to argue that ou r

reasoning ability itself cannot be constraincd by the useful. Thereare powerful reasons for maintaining this, which arise from thena ture of human beings as self-conscious agents, even if we wish tomaintain that self consciousness an d what I will call reasoning wereinitially selected for the evolutionary advantage they brought to ourspecies. What is crucially at issue here is not how human self-consciousness might have come about , but what its significance forits possessor is once it has come about.

What do we mean by reason and reasoning? There are, to besure, many aspects of hu ma n lifc which have at one time or anotherbeen seen in terms of reason. On e main distinction which h as to bedrawn immediately is that between reason as content or productand reason as activity or process. When, as we have done ourselves,we talk of beliefs or practices which arc reasonable, we first meanbeliefs and practices which have emerged as reasonable, or whichhave survived the scrutiny of reasoning. An extended sense of thereasonable is tha t described by Hegel as the cunning of reason andby Hayek, following Adam Smith, as the work of the invisible hand:where practices and beliefs survive in a community because theyar e the beliefs o r practices of those who ar e successful and soeventually of a successful community) despite the fact that thosewho hold or practice them may be so subjcctively for qui te o therreasons or may, in the extreme case, not even be aware tha t theyhave the belief or disposition in question).

Now while reason as content is a crucial aspect of reason, andone which cannot be over-emphasized, for how else can reasonwork without a framework delimiting what the reasonable is?), it isthe activity of reasoning which I want to focus on now. In thePolztics 1253a 7-17), Aristotle speaks of the real difference betweenman and animals being the perception on thc part of humans of


10/16

I M R I A N E N TAN1 ‘1’KANSC:KNI EN‘I‘ 1 1 X I O N S OF’ R E A S O N 17

good an d evil an d of the ju s t an d the unjus t .H e connects th is to thes ha rin g o f acommon view on such m at ters (which is w ha t cons t i tu tesa household or a s ta te ) , an d on the possession of hu m an s of speech(logos) as oppo sed to me re voice o r expression. I n terms of thedistinction I am drawing, Aris tot le’s common view wil l be thecon tent of reason . Speech ( logos) is w ha t the act ivity of reason is .

T h e Ar isto te l ian idea of speech and indeed the Pla tonic not ion ofthought as the dialogue of the soul with i tself suggest a reflectivequ estio nin g of w h at is initially asserted or believed. I t is thisreflective qu estio nin g wh ich is the essence of reas on ing activity, th elooking for reasons for what is asserted or believed, the testing ofwhat is asserted or believed in the l ight of what is really true or

good. I t i s , I will now suggest , an essent ial concomitant ofself-consciousness; it is, indeed, part of what self-consciousnessamounts to .

I n being consc ious of myself a s myself,I see myself as sep ara tef rom wh a t is no t myself . I n be ing conscious, a being reacts to thewor ld wi th fee l ing , wi th p leasure and pain , and responds on thebasis of felt needs. Self-consciousness, though, is something overa n d ab ove th e sensi tivi ty an d feeling implied by consciousness. As

self-conscious I do not s imply have p leasures , pa ins , exper iencesand needs and reac t to them:I am a lso aware t ha tI have them,tha t there is a n‘I’which is a sub ject of these experiences an d w hichis a possessor of needs, experiences, beliefs and disposit ions. Inbeing o r becom ing a w are of experiences, disposi tions an d beliefs asmine, I am a t the same t ime aware tha t the re i s o r migh t besomething which i s not me or mine , something which myexperiences an d beliefs a rc of, som eth ing towards w hich mydisposi tions are directed. And this essent ial contrast of my me ntaluniverse witha world which i s not me and not mine immedia te lyraises the que st ion for me a sto the adeq uac y of my men ta l universeas a representat ion of the world which is not me or mine.

A self-conscious person, then, does not simply have beliefs ordisposi t ions, does not s imply cngate in pract ices of various sorts ,does not ju s t respond to or sufk r the wor ld .He o r she is aw are ofhaving beliefs, practices, disposit ions and the rest . I t is thisaw are ne ss of myself a s a su bje ct of exp erien ce, a s a ho lde r of belief‘sand an engager in pract ices which const i tutes my self-conscious-ness . A conscious anim al might be a knower, an d we might extendthe epi the t to m achin es if they receive info rma tion from th e worldand modify their responses accordingly. But only a self-consciousbeing knows tha t he i s a knower. This knowledge, I wantto


11/16

118 A N T H O N Y O’HEAR

suggest, introduces a dimension to reasoning which we have not yetexamined.

In becoming aware that I am a knower or believer, andanalogously that I am an agent, I cannot but begin to understandthat my beliefs and dispositions ar e jus t t hat mine; and tha t beingmine, they are not necessarily in tune with those of others or withthe world. I n other words, they a re not necessarily true or correct;they are but one route through a world apart from me. Once thesoul becomes aware of the nature and condition of its ownknowledge and dispositions it is led to postulate an absolutestandard against which its mental map is to be judged. And so weget an aspect of reason and reasoning quite different from our

earlier conception of reason as the instrument and slave of life. Itsnature is also to be the critic of lifc and of the passions and of thatwhich we cannot but believe. Many philosophers take the reallesson of scepticism to be the revelation of the simultaneousgroundlessness and the necessity of our knowing and our practices.But equally significant is the way scepticism is a striking symptomof what I might call the transcendent aspect of reason. At anymoment the demands of life’s flow can be held up by us to scrutiny,

as if to see if they satisfy some standard not limited by the limits ofour life or cognitive powers. We can, as it were, step outside ourcognitive and practical frameworks and question the validity of theframeworks themselves, or a t least of fundamental aspects of them.

The lesson of philosophical scepticism is that such transcendenceof the everyday and the commonplace is not confined to cases suchas that in which Einstein questioned the absoluteness ofsimultaneity.Einstein was certainly questioning something fundamental to theconceptual scheme of his contemporaries, but not sceptically. Hewas proposing to replace one plank of the ship of physics andcommonsense with another. T he sceptic, by contrast, has nothingto put in the place of what he attacks. But he can raise questionsabout it nonetheless.

Because he has nothing to replace what he attacks, and becausehe cannot live without it, the sceptic’s questioning is, as we haveseen, unavailing and in a sense unreasonable. He takes it uponhimself to judge life and its demands, to point to the groundlessness

of our beliefs and the arbitrariness and contingency of ourpractices. From the point of view of his questioning, the scepticdemonstrates the infirmity of reason, but in so doing, he alsodemonstrates its ability to step outside the particular content of anygiven set of beliefs or practices, and to assume the role of


12/16

I M M A N E N T A N D T R A N S C E N D EN T D I M E N S IO N SO F R E A S O N 1 19

transcendent judge. It is, of course, our nature as self-conscious,reflective agents which enables us to assume this role. But when wereach the Iimits of ou r beliefs or practices it is not a role we can doanything with, or at least not anything which will itself survive thescrutiny of transcendent reason. The reason for this is thatwhatever we might put in place of what our questioning hasundermined will be vulnerable in its turn to further rationalcriticism.

Some would draw from this tale the moral that reason shouldstay firmly within the limits of whatever is required by the flow oflife, that reason should recognise its enslavement to the passionsand its subservience to animal nature. One dificulty with this

approach is that it is not obvious just what these requirementsmight be. Reason itself will have to be called on to determine them.Moreover, reason itself is a product of nature and it is hard withoutspecial pleading to say why following reason wherever it might leadis not staying within the confines of animal nature. I n any case, anyinjunctions to cu rb rational questioning are bound to be unavailing.Such questioning is bound to arise once self-consciousness hasmade its appearance in our species, being an inevitable concomitant

of the self-conscious mind.What I suggest is that we need to admit both the infirmity ofreason and its transcendence, its infirmity or limitation regardingcontent and its transcendence as process, its need to find t ruths andstandards which stand absolutely .justified and its inability todiscover any. Recognizing this predicament should lead us to avoidtwo opposite, bu t related pitfalls. The one is that of the rationalist,who recognises the limitations of our cognitive and ethicalinheritances and the infinitely questioning and critical aspect ofreason, but fails to appreciate the value of these inheritances and(what comes to the s ame thing) , our inability to do without them.T he other pitfall is represented by the conservative who recognisesthe limits of reason from a constructive point of view, but whosereaction to these limitations is to seek to curb reason's questioning,critical aspect. In the case of reason, neither censorship norconstructivism are going to work. The one unavailingly seeksarbitrarily to limit the scope of rational enquiry, arbitrarily becausethe conservative will make full use of the reason as an instrument,without realising that the instrument is naturally geared to reflecton anything that comes in its path. The other, though, whileunderstanding the limitless ambitions of reason does not under-stand that we, as human beings, are always in medias res and can


13/16

120 A N ‘ I ’ H O N Y O ’ H FA K

neither escape life’s demands (through philosophical scepticism),nor rewrite them by making some form of fresh and rationallyunderwritten fresh start in either belief or practice.

‘l’he simultaneous recognition of both the demands and the limitsof human reason receives concrete expression, and, some wouldsay, its natural fulfilment in religion. From the perspective of purereason morality might seem to be based on merely humaninstitutions and sentiments, but through the experience of guilt itsdemands nevertheless present themselves as unconditionally bind-ing on us. Religion solves or attempts to solve this dilemma byassuring the believer that the demands of morality are indeedabsolute and transcendent, reflecting the will of God rather than

simply serving human utility. Similarly our beliefs about thenatural world and our science may appear constrained by the limitsof our minds and perceptual faculties. But in religion we gain anassurance that our knowledge does stem from God, who is thesource of all truth, and that we are not completely limited by thefiniteness of our minds.

What I am suggesting is that there is in our nature as self-conscious but finite beings an ontological tension which naturally

expresses itself religiously: that religion in its intimations of humanlimits and their overcoming mirrors very precisely our nature asthinkers and reflective agents who are nevertheless constrained inpractice by the finitude of our powers. From the religiousstandpoint, humanistic approaches to belief and practice will beinevitably flawed, reflecting either an intelligence-denying conser-vatism or a hubristic rationalism, whose outcome is only too likelyto be ethically and practically disastrous.

Religious belief does not simply understand and express ourinterconnected limitation and transcendence. It also sees our driveto something transcending human powers as reflected in the fabricof the universe, our yearning as for something which actually exists.Religious belief implies that there is a transcendent aspect to realityand that we are part of and related to this aspect. Th e non-religiouswill, of course, reject this, even where they find themselves insympathy with the religious via media between inflexible conser-vatism and hubristic rationalism. l h e religious will no doubt pointto what is widely regarded even by material ists o be a mystery,namely the existence of consciousness and self-consciousness. Thedifficulty is that of accounting for the appearance and nature ofconscious and self-conscious processes, of accounting for the way inwhich biochemical processes lead in animals and humans to a felt


14/16

I M M A N E N T A N D T R A N S C EN D E N T D I M E N S IO N SOF R E A S O N 121

awareness of the world and the body and, in humans at least, to areflexive awareness of oneself as an agent and a thinker. It will benatural for the religious to interpret this emergence of conscious-ness and self-consciousness as revelatory of something deep in the

universe, something inexplicable by physics, something behind thematerial face of the world.

The religious will be encouraged in this line of thought by therealisation, which we have stressed, that it is through the fact ofself-consciousness that we become aware of our questioningtranscendence of the given, and also of our inability to getcompletely beyond what we have been given. In other words, thatby which we become aware of our dialectical relationship with our

cognitive and ethical inhcritance is that which is also a sign of thesource of resolution of the conflict in a reality behind or beyond thematerial world. In being sclf-conscious we inevitably assess ourbeliefs and practices for their truth and validity. We find in ourexperience no absolute criteria by which we can satisfy this drivefor assessment. But self-consciousness itself intimates a world otherthan the material, physical world, a world where, according to thereligious, absolute truth and absolute goodness exist.

My view of the transcendence of self-consciousness is one I sharewith certain critical theorists, who also see consciousness (or, Iwould say, self-consciousness) projecting us beyond the present. Itdoes so by forcing on us the realization that our path through theworld is but one possible path, and that our beliefs and practicesrepresent only one route through the world, a route which isinevitably clouded by the partiality of our perspective and thephysical and mental limitations of our faculties. As one criticaltheorist puts it: ‘since i t possesses a utopian truth-content whichprojects beyond the limits of the present, consciousness ist r an~cenden t . ’~

There is, though a crucial difference between my position andthat of the critical theorists. I see no reason to believe in utopia as asolution to the dilemma poscd by self-consciousness. Indeed itcould not be: any society on this earth would be constrained by itsown perspectives and institutions, perspectives and institutionswhich would themselves come under rat ional scrutiny and criticism

from the reflective intelligences of their own time.Religion, then, is right to postulate that the goal of the

transcendent aspect of our reasoning powers will not be found on

S. Bcnhabib , Critique Norm and Utopia Clolumbia, 1986, p. 4


15/16

122 A N T H O N Y O’HCAR

this ear th, now or in the future. Anything which we came across onthe earth would lack the absoluteness and unconditionalitynecessary to silence scepticism and criticism. Even if we showedthat life could not go on without certain beliefs, that certainpractices and only those practices fulfilled some deep sense ofhuman need, these demonstrations would only lead to a provisionalabsoluteness. They would show us only that if we want to live andfulfil our natures certain things are forced on us. But this would notby itself silence doubts about , say, the justification of induction orabout the absolute value of human life. As is shown by theexamples of Hume and Popper, on the one hand, and bySchopenhauer and Tolstoy, on the other, it is perfectly possible to

entertain doubts on both these issues without evident irrationalityor insanity, however hard it may be live out the doubts in practice.And the same no doubt goes for scepticism about other beliefs andpractices which are constitutive of human life.

However, while reflecting on ourselves, our beliefs and ourpractices might bring home to us the fragility of the ground onwhich we stand cognitively and ethically, and on the consequentdesirability of finding foundations outside our forms of life, such

reflection does not by itself make religion any more believable. Inparticular as the arguments of Kant, above all, have shown, wecannot get to God by means of discursive argument from empiricalor quasi-empirical premises. I n much the same way tha t a politicalutopia is no solution to the dilemma of our rational self-consciousness being itself yet ano ther empirical and hencecontingent phenomenon the end point of any argument fromcause or design is itself going to be an entity of which further causalquestions can be asked. T he only way out for the believer may be tostipulate that God is a logically necessary being, a being whoseessence it is to exist, but as numerous discussions of the ontologicalargument have shown, it is doubtful that the concept of a logicallynecessary being is coherent.

Nevertheless, even if natural theology fails and the credalstructures of dogmatic religions are unsatisfactory, I want to insistthat in our self-conscious search for what is true and good,absolutely speaking, we attempt to attain a perspective which isgestured at by religious conceptions of the divine. Whether or notthere is actually anyth ing which corresponds to such a perspective,or whether our drive towards i t is, in the psychoanalytic sense, aprojection, i t is nevertheless true t h a t our self-consciousness in itsreflective scrutinising of our beliefs and ideals leads us to formulate


16/16

I M M A N E N TA N D TRANSCENDENT D I M E N S I O N SOF REASON 123

conceptions of the true and the good in and for themselves, apartfrom and independent of what, in various ways, conduces to themaintenance of human life.

Department of Interdisciplinary Human StudiesUniversity of BradfordBradfordWest Yorkshire BD7 DP

anthony o'hear - immanent and transcendent dimensions of reason [a]

Documents