[lit-ideas] In Praise of Folly
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 19:42:42 EDT
J. M. Geary lectured:
>>>Philosophy is about thinking
>>>rationally; none of your
>>>daddy feelgood about it.
E. Holder replied:
>>uh oh. I'm in trouble.
M. Chase reassures her by praising folly and claiming "Reason is on the way
out."
Some running comments below.
>[Erin Holder would] be in trouble only [Geary's grand]
>statement, "Philosophy is about thinking rationally",
>were true. But it's not.
>We should start with a definition: what _is_ "rational thinking",
>as Geary sees it?
>There are in fact many possible answers, but
>analytical philosophers - that is, philosophers that reside in
>Anglo-Saxon countries -- like Canada (in part), but not
>France -- a Gallic country -- assumes everybody knows
>that already.
Well, in 1977, H. P. Grice (then teaching in UC/Berkeley) gave the Immanuel
Kant lectures at Stanford, entitled, "Aspects of reason and reasoning", so
_he_ thought that there was room for a conceptual elucidation of what
'reasoning', or 'rational thinking' was. (He gave the lectures again in Oxford
as the
John Locke Lectures and they were published posthumously in 2001.
Indeed, there is a whole tradition of philosophers -- in the analytic
tradition -- questioning or analysing the idea of 'reason'.
M. Chase continues.
>What *is* true is:
>"*anaytic* philosophy is about what *it
>considers* as rational thought".
I would make a distintion between 'rational' (or even 'reasonable' or
'reason-based', or 'reason-oriented') as applied to _thinking_ and as applied
to
_other_ (propositional) attitudes. Grice, who sees himself as a follower of
'Kantotle', is for example fighting _against_ David Hume's idea that the
reason/folly divide has to do with the _thinking_/feeling faculties of the
mind. For
Kantotle, and Grice, there is such a thing as a _rational_ (or reasonable)
_will_ (and _willing_ is not _really_ thinking, or is it?)
M. Chase continues:
>But [analytic philosophy] could [also] be wrong [even about that],
>and there are other philosophical tendencies that don't cotton
>to this hegemony of the "rational". Let's take standard formal logic.
>Paradigmatically rational, of course, and the basis of any possible
>philosophy, right? Well, not really. Continental philosophy tends
>to reject it, on the grounds of its fundamental defects -- the
>dominance of proposition, the separation between language
>and reality, language and thought, the dominance of the
>principles of identity and non-contradiction (v. Franca D'Agostini,
>From a Continental point of view: the role of logic in the
>Analytic-Continental divide, International Journal of
>Philosophical Studies, 9:
>"as long as science is associated with reason, and reason
>or rationality is equivalent to logical analysis, it will be analytic
>style which gives the imprimatur to proper philosophical
>approaches. Analytic talk remains the dominant strategy of legitimacy
>and distinction in the demand for clarity and coherence. And it is
>fundamentally flawed not just for the tastes of those who are not
>convinced of the salutary or edifying values of clarity and coherence
>but according to its own rationalistic terms as well. For there is no
>obvious connection between deductive (or inductive or abductive) logic
>(or grammar or language) and ther world. Assuming such an elementary
>or obvious connection as axiomatic or given, the analyst ends up so
>preoccupied with refining her logical tools, that she
>forgets having renounced contact with the world"
>(Babette E. Babich On the Analytic-Continental divide in philosophy.
>Nietzsche Heidegger on truth, lies, and language
>http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/babich02.htm=A0";.
Well, there is an etymological point that D'Agostini (or is it Babich) is
forgetting: that 'logos' (as in 'logic') translates as _ratio_ (as in
'rational'). True, the etymology of Latin _ratio_ has more to do with
_reckoning_ than
with 'logic' (and "logos" sometimes got translated as "verbum", but that's
gnostic).
So the idea of a logic of the irrational sounds counter-etymological.
D'Agostini's approach seems simplistic in that _many_ (so-called) analytic
philosophers would be _willing_ to endorse to the idea that "clarity" (as per
conceptual analysis) _is not enough_. Indeed, a book by that title, "Clarity
is not enough" is a classic of English analytic philosophy.
I'm less sure about 'coherence' (as in 'coherence is not enough').
M. Chase continues:
>Nor does one have to be a beret-wearing, baguette-toting,
>Gaulois-snorting Continental philosopher to suspect that standard logic
>and the analytic philosophy based upon it might not be the only game in
>town. In The Way we Think: conceptual blending and the mind's hidden
>complexities (New York, Basic Books), M. Turner and G.
>Fauconnier argue that the emphasis on Reason in work in the humanities
>over the past few centuries has led to an over-emphasis on form to the
>detriment of content. The obvious and analysable processes of reason,
>of which standard logic is a model, are merely the most apparent
>end-results of more fundamental processes -- Identity, integration,
>and imagination - basic, mysterious, powerful, complex, and mostly
>unconscious operations - are at the heart of even the simplest possible
>meanings. The value of the simplest forms lies in the complex emergent
>dynamics they trigger in the imaginative mind.
>What analtyic philosophers gloated over now was the complete
>exclusion of figurative thought from core meaning. Core
>meaning is, as the formally minded philosopher sees it, the part of meaning
that
>can be characterized formally and truth-conditionally. Therefore, goes
>the logic, it must be the only important and fundamental part of
>meaning. Inevitably, these analtyic approaches were blind to the
>imaginative operations of meaning construction that work at lightning
>speed, below the horizon of consciousness, and leave few formal traces
>of their complex dynamics".
As the passage well indicates, Turner and Fauconnier are against standard
analytic philosophical approaches to the problem of _metaphor_ (as per
Davidson). As far as Grice is concerned, he was well aware of the possibilities
of
_figurative_ thought, and gave many illustrations of this -- indicated as
'conversational implicature'. His most famous example:
You're the cream in my coffee.
(Studies in the Way of Words, p. 34).
Only a _rational_ mind can _infer_ that the utterer of such a cliche does
_not_ *really* mean (although that's what she said) that the addressee is a
milk-derived produce about to be in caffeine (see Grice, p. 34ff).
M. Chase concludes:
>Finally, that bastion of analytic ethical thought, the
>difference
>between "statements of fact" and "statements of value", has recently
>come under withering attack from no less a (formerly) analytic thinker
>than Hilary Putnam: see The Collapse of the Fact/Value dichotomy and
>other essays, Harvard UP, where, based in part on the
>theories
>of Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen, Putnam argues that fact and
>value are inevitably entangled in all our thoughts and statements. The
>result is that analytic philosophy's beloved ideal of Objectivity comes
>crumbling down into pieces.
--- Well, talk of _value_ is slightly different from talk of _reason_.
Coincidentally, the 1981 Paul Carus lectures delivered by Grice (and _cited_ by
Putnam) were on "The Conception of Value". There are, Grice notes, _epistemic_
values (like a 'true belief'). 'Facts' cannot be contrasted with 'values' like
that (as Putnam does). Rather, what's basic is the attitude or activity of
_valuing_ something (or of finding some x as having some intrinsic or
extrinisic value). Science is thus valuable (to scientists and others), etc.
Facts do
not enter the picture so _easily_ like that.
M. Chase notes:
>I could go on, but the patience of the few brave souls who have
>read
>this far is probably already exhausted. The moral is: take courage,
>Erin. The hegemonic conception of "Reason" that has made you and so
>many other students suffer for generations, is just a cultural fad, and
>it may well be on its way out.
On the other hand, a student may be presented with a dictum like S. Weil's
-- a Continental philosopher -- and find it even _more_ puzzling than
_anything_ a pro-rationalistic philosopher (like Grice) may have said. "Le
style,
c'est la femme", as they say.
Cheers,
JL
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