On the reasonable discourse of rational animals (part one)

We trace the origin of the term “rational animal” in our tradition through the translation of the Aristotelian conception of the zoon logikon, the animal that “has logos”, into Western languages by way of the Latin animal rationale.

The term logos is notoriously problematic for translators.  In its original cultural context, it seems to have had a wide range of applications in ordinary language, and to have functioned as something like a technical term in philosophical discourse — a term of art spun in various ways according to the purposes of a philosopher or a passage.

The Hellenic term and its cognates have been translated into English terms such as:

i) saying, statement, phrase, word

ii) oration, speech, conversation, discourse

iii) report, story, history, fable, reckoning, account

iv) assertion, promise, maxim, command

v) thought, opinion, reason, ground, principle

vi) language, power of speech, right to speak

Given that broad range of uses, it seems the selection of the Latin ratio imposes a bias in the translation of logos, if the distinction between ratio and oratio divides thought and reason (ratio) from language and speech (oratio).  An Aristotelian conception of human beings as speaking-and-reasoning animals would be thus modified through the act of translation to become a medieval conception of human beings as thinking-and-reasoning animals.  The translation brushes aside the role of language, which was arguably crucial and primary in the original context. The translation emphasizes, or leaves room to emphasize, the role of “inner” thought, characterizable as not necessarily or not intrinsically linguistic thought.

Application of this modified definition as a criterion that distinguishes human animals from other animals would seem to entail that humans “think-and-reason” while nonhuman animals do not “think-and-reason”.

This act of translation may have suited the purposes of Christian interpreters who substituted ratio for logos, but does not seem to reflect Aristotelian intentions.  What’s worse, it seems a false and unwarranted assumption that no nonhuman animals “think”.  By contrast, the claim that no nonhuman animals (observed to date) have language or linguistic capacities like ours seems a reasonable evidence-based report.

Of course animals without a capacity to speak like we do cannot think in linguistic terms like we do, and thus cannot have habits of thought and action organized in part by their own exercise of such linguistic capacities.  This does not entail that such animals do not “think” in any relevant sense of the term. It does not entail that they do not have minds, awareness, sentience, perceptual experience, intentions, intelligence, or conceptual capacities.  It does not entail that they do not communicate.

It seems there are some among us who tend to speak about the difference between human and nonhuman animals in ways that still reflect the prejudices of the medieval interpreters of Aristotle.  Some of these contemporary speakers even appeal to the authority of that troubled old conception of rationality as if it were a sort of justification for their views. I’m not alone in saying that sort of bias seems an offshoot of ignorance, error, and confusion.  It seems reasonable to expect the persistence of such bias to amplify the risk of compounding inherited philosophical problems instead of resolving them. I suggest a review of the history of relevant usage may be one beneficial treatment in pursuit of a corresponding remedy.

Perhaps by now many of us have no need for that particular correction.  I suspect more subtle problems and prejudices lurk in our inherited conception of rationality nonetheless.  Consider for instance the way that divergent attitudes about rationality, and divergent attitudes about what counts or does not count as a reasonable attitude about evidence, plague conversations between atheists and theists, or between metaphysical materialists and metaphysical idealists.  Consider the way that psychologists presume to have authority in deciding what counts and what does not count as a subculture or a community, what counts and what does not count as a culturally or communally sanctioned norm of behavior or belief — as if cultures and communities and norms do not in fact diverge in history due to changes in the attitudes and behaviors of individuals.  Consider the ways that choices made by economists, CEOs, marketers, and politicians inform our attitudes about what counts and what does not count as “rational self-interest”.

It seems that all the empirical and formal sciences put together aren’t sufficient to completely determine our attitudes and judgments about the rational and the irrational, or the reasonable and the unreasonable, any more than they can completely determine our attitudes and judgments about the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the desirable and the undesirable, the tasteful and the distasteful.

Of course empirical science informs us about biological bases and historical trends, and about biological and socioeconomic implications, of our attitudes, judgments, and decisions in such matters.  And formal science helps us sort and extend our thoughts in all matters. But it seems our attitudes about the rational, the reasonable, the good, the just, the desirable, the tasteful, and whatever we should name among such things, are not sufficiently determinable on scientific grounds.  These are matters of persuasion.

It belongs to our nature spontaneously to modify the attitudes and behaviors we inherit — not to apply the norms we receive from cultural and institutional authorities like insensate and unwitting rule-followers.

It seems this transformative process is ceaseless in beings like us, that it continues even while we sleep, that it belongs to our nature as speaking animals and contributes to the freedom we have in fact.

One way to take responsibility for this process is to engage in careful philosophical discourse about matters of persuasion, for instance by examining our thoughts and attitudes about the rational and the irrational.  I expect such conversations have significant personal and political implications in the long run, and that philosophical prejudice and confusion in such matters, compounded over generations and centuries, may tend to multiply personal and political problems and to disrupt communities and ways of life.

It seems fitting to proceed in such conversation by developing a conception of animal rationality and a conception of human beings as speaking animals.

[This essay is the first in a series.  The series continues here.]

Let death take me planting my cabbages

“I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings”.

—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays, Book I Chapter XIX, “That to study philosophy is to learn to die“

First Welcome Sign Appears On The Cabbage Farm

A few days ago I placed this Welcome sign near the entrance to the Cabbage Farm.

It seems fitting to insert this announcement in the blog roll to commemorate the occasion.  Perhaps on some future occasion, if I replace that sign with a new one, I’ll return to this spot in the log to paste the copy.

On “cabbages and kingdoms”

“For how could something count as a language that organized only experiences, sensations, surface irritations or sense data?  Surely knives and forks, railroads and mountains, cabbages and kingdoms also need organizing.”

—DONALD DAVIDSON, “On the very idea of a conceptual scheme”

 

“‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,

‘To talk of many things:

Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–

Of cabbages–and kings–

And why the sea is boiling hot–

And whether pigs have wings.'”

—LEWIS CARROLL, “The Walrus and the Carpenter“

The Doubt Of All Doubt

From time to time I have awakened from a sort of dream or brain fart in which it seems to me I have acquired a solution to some impossible problem along the lines of the square circle, or in any case come to possess some seemingly significant intention — which unravels into nothing as I awake in the attempt to jot down or otherwise discharge that impulse to an impossible deed.

What if all my understanding — including my grasp of the least dubitable things — is another one of those illusions?

We may call puzzlement of this form the Doubt Of All Doubt.

Doubt of this form directs the skeptic to a limit of coherence, and in this respect promises to cut deeper than more customary arguments from dream and hallucination, which may be said to take for granted the coherence and utility of a language, and a logic, and a worldview.

To press on the borders of coherence in this way is to cast shades of doubt on every judgment.

Sense flickers on the horizon of reason.  The right-thinking skeptic merely notes that doubts of this form seem marginally rational to him, and in this respect he can’t entirely rule them out.  To the right-thinking skeptic, an attempt to refute, to deny, or to wave off in principle all consideration of such doubts is an arbitrary act of insincerity or confusion inconsistent with the practice of discursive austerity — no less than an attempt to affirm any of the vaguely and marginally conceivable alternatives indicated in these doubts.

As Wittgenstein suggests:

“To be sure there is justification; but justification comes to an end.”

“The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.”

“At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.”

(On Certainty, 192, 166, 253)

 

Of course the right-thinking skeptic agrees that doubt of this form seems of extremely limited utility.  It seems this doubt acquaints us with hard boundaries between the conceivable and the inconceivable, between the coherent and the incoherent, between the demonstrable and the indemonstrable, between genuine certainty and Absolute Certainty.  Accordingly it seems to reveal something of the character of the rational imagination, the character of rationality and irrationality, for creatures like us. Perhaps no more than this.

Among dogmatists, the Radical Skeptic jumps to the conclusion that the Doubt Of All Doubt is another support for his absurd denials.  The Gothic Philosopher who disfigures his own power of reason with unwarranted faith in Absolute Certainty wages eternal war against the Radical Skeptic, and attempts to refute the Doubt Of All Doubt along with all the arguments of his imaginary nemesis, as if those arguments were not absurd and readily dismissed.