reason

The Silent Truth

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There is a simple truth that defies all explanation because it forms the basis of all explanation. It towers over our philosophies, religions and sciences, dwarfing the edifices of knowledge by which we claim to know. It can’t be magnified by theory, refined by belief, or preserved in tablets of stone. Neither is the ratification of discovery or reification in fact sufficient to define its boundaries. Nor can it be captured by the finesse of the artist, or the subtleties of scholarship, or the trappings of authority. Indeed, it empowers knowledge by stripping away all authority in what we can claim to know – for the knowledge that needs to be bolstered by authority is not true knowledge. And history shows that it is not with the mouth of truth that the facts are said to speak for themselves.

In the name of reason, we reject the possibility of a knowledge beyond the reach of our understanding, except as we allow it to be held in trust for us by others believed to know better. Thus we entertain proxy truths in relying upon the edicts of appointed authorities to tell us what we can and cannot know – as if personal knowledge is a recipe for ignorance, contradiction and delusion – as if reason can resolve the paradox of existence – as if paradox is the antithesis of truth. So we try to overrule the simple truth, believing that it must give way to the necessity of explanation. Yet the more we come to know, the more we come to realise the sheer scale of what we don’t know. Meanwhile, the fact of existence remains a mystery and the simple truth remains silent within the paradoxical pre-existence of possibility.

Mike Laidler

Words of Reason

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If there was no ambiguity about the nature of ‘the real’ there would be no need to single out or believe in the fact of it. As it happens, most of us live in a literal reality – our understandings being shaped by the words used to divine ‘the real’, with the intellect aspiring to truths couched in words of reason, echoing facts said to speak for themselves. Yet words are but foils for ‘the truth’, expounding a logic drawn from the precepts of which we explain our understandings – or is it understand our explanations? – in any case, being expressly validated as a outlook that defers to the facts, as if the facts tell us what to know. But this derived form of realism sidesteps the real task of philosophy – to expose the fictions and unseen contradictions generated by a reasoning that sees no greater truth than itself. For despite knowing that the reasons of today can turn into the regrets of tomorrow, we dutifully abandon our doubts and rationalise away problematic truths with ever more sophisticated forms of sophistry – thereby to convince ourselves that the rhetoric of reason remains our ultimate mentor – as if it is ‘the truth’ that abhors the contradictions – as if the intellectual impasse of contradiction also delimits the nature of ‘the facts’.

Mike Laidler

The nature of the beast

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Either we think through nature or nature thinks through us – either way, nature gains the power of thought.

Part 1: Dualities

Our presence in nature goes to show that there is more to reality than the unseeing and impersonal. Something has changed, and if that change is natural, then nature now forms a duality that is both sensible and insensible. In this duality the body retains its own needs and predilections, though like the ‘tame’ beast it can be pressed into the service of larger causes. Likewise, the dualities of change raise our schemes and intentions into powers and perversions under the influence of an emergent knowledge, or at least our version of it. We presume to identify truths, defend principles and know ourselves by espousing something that is no thing, something we see as all the more real for being more than us – whereby basic drives and noble values come to co-exist in us, and nature. Thus there is a paradox at the heart of nature: we know and so a part of nature knows, and it seems that all we know is owed to an erstwhile nature that knows nothing.

Part 2: Possibilities
We are a part of a nature that is in a process of change, in the act of becoming something more than it was. So it is possible to see evolution as something happening to nature. However, whilst it is patently obvious that thought has a presence in the universe, we are loathe to conclude that nature thinks through us, or even that will power makes a fundamental difference. Nonetheless, we introduce possibilities in the form of purposes, meanings, goals and designs that change the face of nature. Then, as a part of nature, we embody convergences of possibilities, each acting on the other and building into changes that extend the vital facts of nature into burgeoning faculties. And as nature comes to perceive itself though us, so self-perception elevates the natural into the realms of a super-nature – because nature doesn’t behave like that at its lower levels. Meanwhile, there remains the fact of what we were and still are – as animals contending with the dilemmas of our pleasures and pains. Typically, we crave food as much for the sake of pleasure as hunger, yet we make sacrifices and put ourselves under pressure to accomplish ends which place our basic needs and desires in conflict with our higher aspirations.
Part 3: Realities
In the bigger picture, the incongruous presence of personal existence in an impersonal universe is indicative of a convergence of possibilities with different natures. Thus nature changes through a series of ‘quantum shifts’ whilst losing nothing of what it was. So here we are. We look to the origins of the universe in terms of ambient possibilities of a different nature to the observable laws of physics, yet downplay the more obvious presence of animate possibilities acting upon the austere laws of nature. Nevertheless, something has obviously changed and the best example of this change is ourselves. We are both animal and animus, and the brain straddles this duality: being the insensible source of sentience, the impersonal seat of personality, the dark root of illumination, the blind cause of choice. And the mysteries of the body are eclipsed by yet deeper mysteries of the ‘known mind’ by which we presume to master ourselves, for it remains evident that the stark aloofness of our crowning glory in logic and reason can lead us to acts of wanton brutality that far surpass the savage nature of the beast. Paradoxically, our intellectual rowess is no surety against ourselves; and logic is not everything – for the nature of reality is such that we act through the auspices of other natures, binding our choices – and reason can serve any master.

Mike Laidler

Where is reason?

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The mind in nature sees something nature cannot – itself.  It introduces unique faculties into nature, such as intention, design and reason.  Reason is regarded as our ‘highest’ faculty – a fact seen as a part of nature and apart from nature.  We observe that the facts we illuminate and explain in nature don’t reason or find things out about themselves; nevertheless, we conclude that everything belongs to something else that causes it to be the way it is.  We use our unique faculty of reason to tell ourselves that we are not alone, adducing that our perception of the world as it is, is caused by the world as it is.

Everything has a cause, including causality.  Causality is a statement of reason that the mind projects upon the world.  We impute powers to causes by identifying with them the fact of change – as if the cause holds the answer – as if nature explains life or the brain explains thought and reason.  But causality isn’t the whole story.  We create explanations in reason by identifying one fact with another, cause with effect, now said to be ‘the reason’ that the facts have given us.    But reason is a fact of mind that is unlike any other fact that other facts ‘alone’ can supply – in the body, brain, nature, number, pattern, process, structure, order or evolution.  The mind is a fact in addition, a reality uniquely placed to recognise a change in reality, beginning with itself – a change that is then ‘explained’ by causes acting mindlessly, without will or reason, leading some thinkers to deduce that the mind is an illusion.

Explanation is not all it seems.  Causality ‘explains’ one thing in terms of another, and we think that the same applies to our thinking because the mind cannot be fundamental.  But reality exceeds explanation – things are simultaneously one thing and another – perception does and does not mirror the world, the molecular world is and is not alive, nature does and does not comprise and compose our intentions.  Reason pursues the fact of the ‘must be’, but paradoxical facts defy reason and rob us of the conclusiveness we try to invest in an objective world, nevertheless we proceed to draw conclusions by ignoring their paradoxical nature, and our own – we consider that the mind may be prone to illusion but reason cannot be – so paradox is resolvable by the ‘hard’ facts upon which our reasoning rests because fact is definitive and paradox poses but a temporary contradiction in terms.

In explanation, the terms are everything.  We begin by naming things, then proceed to draw connections.  We call it reasoning.  Reasoning seeks to explain itself by referencing its terms to a world outside, but ‘outsides’ are facts relative to ‘insides’.  We project our reasoning onto the world, to find it there – thereby to attribute our reasons to the facts.  We distil from our findings the principles that are ‘there to be discovered’ from all our observations, thereby to construe a fact that pre-empts proof – that things are not alone.  Proof requires the equation of one thing with another, so our reasons are seen to gain their authority from principles that are bigger than us, in reasons that equate to the facts of an outside world, in facts acting without reason or intention.

Likewise, science is an application of reasoning to a world outside.  We see the world as filled with science; but we don’t really find ‘science’ there, except that we create the fact of science in the world.  In reality, proof is relative to the mind that considers something proved according to the principles it brings to the equation.  Furthermore, because reality is bigger than science, we find that the ‘facts of science’ amount to no more than our interim conclusions.  Undaunted, we conclude that science belongs to the outside world, as if our reasoning can now be validated as a fact of science, in facts that can be discovered to speak for themselves.   But however conclusive we may find the facts to be, the fact remains that only minds draw conclusions.

No fact does our thinking for us, not even in the brain.  Finding the cause of thought in the brain does not explain the change to thought in the nature of a physical world, neither does attributing that change to evolution.  Meanwhile, we continue to invest our reasoning in the facts by seeking to confirm a match, thereby to conclude that there is an ultimate conclusiveness to be found ‘out there’, in the facts of the external world.  But our humility veils our hubris; for in deducing that the mind also owes its source to those same externals, we give ourselves the authority to claim that there is nothing better to conclude, since the facts must select our conclusions – facts telling us that reason is grounded – confirming the fact of what is there, as if what is the case is better known from the nature of something else, as if reason resolves the paradox of change by proving that things change without really changing.

© Mike Laidler

Tidings of reason

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It appears that we know more about reason as a cause than as an effect.  Reason is neither recognisable nor explicable as a physical fact in the world until we locate it there through our thoughts, deeds and explanations.  Thereafter, we see a world filled with the relics of reasoned activity; and it is by those representations that we are able to discern its effectiveness in changing the face of reality, even to determine whether it exists anywhere else in the universe.

Before this exchange between reason and reality, the physical world is pictured as subsisting alone, albeit charged with potentials, prospects and possibilities for the future.  Nevertheless, the template for rationality is hardly explicable in terms of the nature of something else, wherein it is absent.  And without a natural cause, we are left to wonder about the origins of something seen as mapping onto the reality, even as it changes the map of reality; for it is one thing to observe nature changing, but it is quite another to observe it changing itself in the acquisition reason for no reason.

Furthermore, just as reason can be depicted within the reality of physical, so the physical can also be depicted within the reality of reason, bearing in mind there is now a mindfulness in the midst of the universe’s physicality whereby nature now incorporates features of rational activity quite unlike the properties of nature as it was.  So we find ourselves returning to the thinking of the ancients to ask: is there reason in the universe because nature establishes it, or is it established in nature because of a higher power of reason?

Mike Laidler

Realisations

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From life to death, science to religion, chance to change, imagination to reality, ignorance to knowledge – the narrow limits that generate facts to focus our attention change within broader limits we know nothing about. For in each case, the narrow limits belong to us, whilst we see them otherwise, as belonging to the facts.

Mike Laidler

Naked Emperors

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Logic and reason and their derivatives in the language of persuasion and explanation, are like naked emperors in the face of truths yet to be revealed, being adorned in the semblance of their own authority, to authorise the facts that authorise them to be right in the meantime – whilst followers rally to the call: ‘Here is the reason for the facts being true’.

Mike Laidler