By IHE Graduate Fellow Thomas Holman
These days we are exposed to a lot of cross-cutting accusations of irrationality. A near-ubiquitous trope in contemporary political discussion is that those with whom we disagree are stupid or need to be reeducated. The people on the other side of the argument are just not being reasonable.
But what exactly is reason? In his book Rationality, Stephen Pinker defines “reason” as a set of tools such as “logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation” which help us to “[avoid] folly in our personal lives and public policies . . . calibrate risky choices, evaluate dubious claims, understand baffling paradoxes, and gain insight into life’s vicissitudes and tragedies.”
Yet one might be left wondering: is that all there is? Do these admittedly important aspects of reason exhaust the concept? It would seem that, particularly in the case of moral questions, reason in this narrow sense has little to offer in the way of resolution. Alasdair MacIntyre has famously demonstrated the possibility of “conceptual incommensurability.” That is, opposing sides of moral questions can be perfectly reasonable in Pinker’s sense and yet remain completely at odds with each other.
What are we to make of this problem? Aristotle foresaw the possibility of these types of disagreements more than 2,300 years ago when he wrote that “There will be no scientific knowledge of the primary premises . . . [because] demonstration cannot be the originative source of demonstration, nor, consequently, scientific knowledge.” In other words, scientific modes of knowing like those outlined by Pinker cannot exhaust the concept of reason, because on their own, they cannot discern the “primary premises” on which a moral outlook depends.
How might we discern the primary premises of moral knowledge? For Aristotle, it is an “intuition” which “apprehends the primary premises.” “Intuition” here refers to the Greek nous. It is far more than the emotive guesswork which the translation seems to invoke. Rather, it is “that highest principle within us, either divine or partaking of the divine, that informs the highest virtue—intellectual virtue.”
But how are we to access this “highest principle” within us? One possible response comes from the twentieth century political philosopher Eric Voegelin, who argues that nous is the divine source of order in the soul that, though it is only found within the human person, finds its source beyond. It is that divinely-inspired insight that allows us to categorically identify moral and cultural disorder when we see it. In other words, it can only be accessed via the practices of a well-ordered spiritual life.
On this understanding of nous or reason, we are more than just extremely efficient problem solvers. We are embodied beings who have a divine spark and ability to ask the questions that characterize the human person. As the Greeks and their interpreters like Voegelin show, this spark is not something that can be studied scientifically in the way that this term is understood today. If we limit ourselves to Pinker’s outlook, we will never be able to approach its meaning in any depth. It is something given, something from which we cannot escape.
In light of all this, Alisdair MacIntyre has famously called for a revival of Aristotelian “virtue ethics.” As we look forward to Easter, let us remind ourselves that we Christians have already been given the greatest possible foundation for such a virtue ethics: the Incarnation. The testimony of the philosophers demonstrate what Aquinas brought to its fullest expression in light of the moral meaning of Christ’s life: that grace perfects nature; that right reason unfolds only through a proper relationship with the transcendent God.
