Rationalism Research Paper

Medieval philosophy revived Greek ideas and cross-fertilized them with Christian doctrine. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 AD) combined reason and revelation by taking his account of nature from Aristotle, and his account of higher things (or ‘supernature’) from Christian revelation. This synthesis, however, soon began to fall apart, and in modern times rationalism has commonly been taken to refer to rejection of Christian revelation because of rational criticism.

1. Modern Rationalism

This was not, however, the view taken by the great rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century, for whom science was the model of understanding. Descartes invoked God’s veracity as a foundation of his system, while Spinoza was a monist who argued that there was only one substance in the world, which he called ‘God or nature’—Deus sive natura. Reason and logic alone could generate certain knowledge. Yet even at this point the idea that nature was to be understood as a result of observation was emerging in thinkers such as Francis Bacon who sought ‘to put nature to the torture’ of experiment. The reason in which seventeenth century thinkers put their faith was less and less the human faculty supposedly giving us access to ends and values than what later came to be called ‘instrumental reason’ which revealed causes and linked ends and means. Confusingly, reason and rationalism have commonly been used to cover both ideas.

Philosophers had seldom entirely lost sight of the fact that understanding of the world depended upon observation and the seventeenth century growth of science brought this idea to the fore. Its germ lay in the medieval doctrine that we can only fully understand what we can make ourselves—a class of things thought to include not only arte-facts but also society and language. After Bacon, the observational basis of knowledge was developed in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke (1632–1704). Locke was sceptical of syllogistic reasoning, and denied in particular the Cartesian doctrine that reason was innate in man. Locke described himself as an ‘underlaborer’ in a generation of giants, by which he particularly referred to Isaac Newton the great physicist. Although the founder of empiricism as a coherent alternative to rationalism, Locke’s philosophy did not fully free itself from rationalism, particularly in his account of ‘powers of the mind.’ Empiricism was refined in the work of Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753) and particularly David Hume (1711–76), a line of philosophical development that for some purposes culminated in the synthesis of Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804), who argued that we can understand the phenomenal world only in terms of the set of categories (substance, causality, etc.) built into the human mind.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) had used instrumental reason to generate the principles on which the state might be based. In Le iathan (1651), he attempted to demonstrate that civil order could be based only on obedience to a sovereign power. The Sovereign guaranteed laws of nature which are rationally derivable as axioms of prudence from the human propensity to avoid death. Hobbes’s work was philosophical in that it analyzed the concept of a Commonwealth, but like most political philosophy, it contained some programmatic elements for practical life—positions clearly revealed in his Behemoth (written in 1668). In the next century, many thinkers of the French Enlightenment turned reason into an instrument for criticizing society. Writers such as Condillac and Helvetius adopted the empiricism of Locke, but by their emphasis on ideas, and their hostility to Catholicism and the ancient regime, they turned it into a form of rationalism. Reason led these philosophers to reject Christian revelation because of its conflict with logic (in the case of the Trinity) or science (in the case of miracles for example). Reason was also invoked against monarchy in favor of a revival of the classical idea of citizenship. These powerful movements of thought exploded in 1789 into the French Revolution, in which reason as the generator of natural rights was pitted not only against experience in epistemology, and against revelation in theology, but against tradition in politics. Reason was now a revolutionary principle seeking to reform everything in social and political life.

2. Rationalism In History

In the nineteenth century, rationalism invaded history by schematizing, as the doctrine of progress, the evolution of mankind from stone age life to the advanced condition of modern Europe. In rationalist terms, the progress of mankind led from superstition and prejudice towards forms of mutual understanding. Each such theory generally located the present as the hour before the dawn of a new era. Auguste Comte the positivist (1798–1857) thought mankind had moved from a theological stage through a metaphysical period and was now moving into a positivist era. The most famous of these adventures of ideas was that of Karl Marx (1818–88), who incorporated his account of human progress into a lossely connected narrative which was passed off as history. The drive to new rationalist accounts of society was inspired by technological optimism. Given that human beings had learned how to control nature, ought they not also to learn how to control society in the interests of human happiness? Rationalism thus became the vehicle of active programs of social reform, while those who took a more pessimistic view of human possibility were stigmatized as reactionary, or even irrational.

Such activist movements often collided with each other, and liberal and socialist programs for the inclusive improvement of the human condition competed for support with exclusivist movements such as those of the Fascists and the Nazis. In terms of the progress of human beings towards universal betterment, the oppression of totalitarian movements seemed not merely irrational, but actually irrationalist. Such irrationalism was often taken to be a form of nihilism, symbolised by the Francoist general whose cry was Viva la muerte (‘Long live death’). Rationalism thus developed a contrast with irrationalism, understood as any general rejection of the liberal program of rights and the liberal search for universal happiness.

Rational understanding seeks to grasp the universal structure of whatever it studies, and is therefore more at home with theory and universal principles—with science and philosophy—than with history. Science and philosophy are thus pre-eminently rational in a sense in which history, as explanation in terms of event and circumstance, is not. Further, philosophy assembles in a coherent manner whatever is known about an activity. If knowledge is power, then theoretical knowledge ought to give us power over the world. The most powerful rationalist impulse in recent centuries has been to create an understanding of human life which will allow us to build what is conceived to be a better world.

The problem is that theory and practice seem not to be related in this way. Plato’s Republic is a masterpiece of political philosophy, but Plato’s attempt to improve the politics of Syracuse was a failure. Nevertheless, the belief that successful practice could be encapsulated in a doctrine of a more or less philosophical kind has powerfully influenced the character of modern Western societies. The fusion of a philosophical method with practical ambitions is one of the central meanings of the elusive idea of ideology. Marx along with Friedrich Engels (1820–95), for example, directed their theory towards a new class of political actor, which they called the ‘proletariat,’ which was instructed in how to take over political power. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) was a pioneering exponent of this kind of rationalism, and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) doctrine of utilitarianism might also be understood in this way as handbooks of political skill designed for new actors on the political stage.

3. Critics Of Rationalism

The central principle of rationalism in politics, as analyzed by Michael Oakeshott (1901–90), is the sovereignty of technique. The skill of politics (which Lenin (1870–1924) and others thought remarkably easy once mystifications had been shed) can be learned from a book containing basic principles. Politics in this sense is thus no longer the conduct of public business by a small set of rulers, but a universal activity, not basically affected by the particularities of any given political culture. This is why for example Bentham’s ignorance of Latin American politics was thought an actual qualification for the project of writing constitutions for that area.

The most common rationalist image of politics is that of a building program, in which abstract foundations logically generate a good society. Such projects are often based on abstractions such as democracy, justice, rights, or community. Rationalist programs focus on only one such desirable foundation, for the danger (as Plato had already recognized) is that two principles might come into conflict. The aim is to solve the problem of conflict, and both rulers and ruled need instruction from theoreticians (called ‘education’) in the philosophical foundations of the proposed good society.

Contemporary normative political philosophy is rationalist in its concern to analyze some basic norm of current liberal societies, commonly with an eye to improving practice. In the analysis of a just society advanced by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, the future members of the society guarantee the rationality of the rules of justice because the rules have been agreed behind the famous ‘veil of ignorance’ in order to avoid the contamination of any particular knowledge. The equality of the Rawlesian citizens is thus matched by their vacuity.

The practical aspects of this form of rationalism are driven by instrumental reason in the sense that thinking takes off from whatever is construed as a problem (usually, indeed, a ‘social problem’) and the aim is to achieve a solution. Rationalism is sometimes criticized as assuming that all human beings are basically good, and only made bad by bad institutions, but the more fundamental assumption is that human beings are plastic entities who can be made into whatever type of social being is desired through the power of ideas. Politics thus becomes not so much social as attitudinal engineering; it requires removing the wrong ideas (racism, sexism, etc.) from society and restocking it with the right ideas. The general project of improving the world by ‘modernizing’ it is one of the most powerful of current rationalist projects.

In the second half of the twentieth century, rationalism as the search for the right foundations of society was challenged by people who said that the search was futile. There were no rational foundations, merely the changing responses of different sets of people. The derivation of this form of rationalism was from Heidegger (1889–1976) and Wittgenstein (1889–1951) but it was popularized in the United States by disciples of John Dewey such as Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980). Radical critics charged that the whole rationalist project was designed to establish the hegemony of some specific group— capitalists, white males, commissars, and the like. Ethical opinions such as ‘political correctness’ and political projects such as multiculturalism were juxtaposed against rationalism. These revived forms of scepticism look like what rationalists would see as an irrationalist challenge to Western life, but, as is common in forms of scepticism, there are discernible traces of rationalist dogmatism in the egalitarian morality and communitarian politics taken for granted in the practices of the challengers.

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