What is a Rational Animal?

The reactions against Cartesianism in analytic philosophy of mind have made possible a revival of the Aristotelian term for a human being -- the idea of a rational animal. Descartes famously (or infamously) dismisses this description in Meditation II, where he denies that the cogito can be identified with the Scholastic animale rationale, on the grounds that it is requires categories that cannot be derived from the solipsistic stance of self-consciousness.

By contrast, in the work of Donald Davidson, Alastair MacIntyre, and especially John McDowell, the idea of a rational animal has resurfaced. In doing so, we must confront two questions: (a) what makes an animal rational? and (b) why must the rational entity, so conceived, be an animal?

To be rational, on a model broadly shared between Davidson and McDowell, is to capable of making moves within what Sellars called "the space of reasons": it is to be capable of asserting, of giving reasons for ones assertions, and to be capable of asking others for the reasons for their assertions. McDowell emphasizes that this point holds not only for episodes of knowing, as in Sellars, but for all thought as such. To put the point in terms developed by Bob Brandom, to think is to make a material inference.

An animal is rational if it is not merely sentient but also sapient. "Sentience" entails consciousness, affectivity, and responsiveness to changes in its environment. An animal may be sentient and yet be extremely clever in manipulating objects in its environment, even its fellow creatures. "Sapience" differs in that sapience entails a capacity for reasoning and for recognizing that it is taking up a view on the world and not merely occupying a place in an environment. (Heidegger's distinction between Welt and Umwelt, mediated through Gadamer, is an important influence on McDowell's version of this distinction.)

But McDowell, more than his fellow Sellarsians Brandom and Rorty, insists that the bearer of rationality must be an animal. It must be something intrinsic to the way of life of a particular kind of animal, a human being -- an animal that can acquire culture, Bildung, Geist. Thinking and knowing are part of how we are as animals, as web-weaving is part of how a spider is as an animal. And it is part of McDowell's critique of "para-mechanism" in philosophy of mind -- Millikan and Dennett in particular, also fellow Sellarsians -- that they lose their grip on the fact that what is rational must be animal, and what is animal must be rational.

Haiku for Levinas

Wild yet unhidden
Open to the elements
Time grows in the mind.

A Challenge to Modern Atheism

Over the past year I've become a frequent lurker at Uncommon Descent, a website devoted to discussion of "intelligent design theory." There are sufficient criticisms of the epistemology of intelligent design theory that it would be overkill to add yet another, and in any event, there are many far more competent than I to do so. Rather, I want to direct attention to a specific feature of the sort of arguments favored by intelligent design supporters: the critique of materialism.

The argument, as I understand it, goes like this: the problem with Darwinian explanations is that they entail a materialistic metaphysics, and that is bad because materialism is incompatible with deeply-held assumptions that are necessary for social functioning and for personal fulfillment. So Darwinism, apart from being false (as it is held to be) is also extremely dangerous.

This argument finds an eloquent expression in the work of C. S. Lewis (esp. Mere Christianity) and a more sophisticated elaboration in Alvin Plantinga's "self-defeater" argument against naturalism. Here I want to present one version of the argument; in subsequent posts I'll begin to examine what I think is wrong with it.

The conundrum of modern atheism is that it is committed to two seemingly incompatible theses: materialism and rationalism. The commitment to the first consists of the premise that only entities that can figure in a physical theory (however broadly construed -- dark energy is in, pixies are out) can count as real. The commitment to the second consists of the premise that the world as encountered in everyday experience is intelligible to human reason. Historically speaking, the commitment to the second premise has required a denial of the first, for we can be assured of the intelligibility of the universe only if there is an Intelligence who was responsible for its creation.

At work here is the following line of argument, very powerful but surely in need of critical examination:

P1: Only a rational agent could produce a structure that could be comprehended by a rational agent.

P2: This structure can be comprehended by a rational agent (namely, us).

C: It was produced by a rational agent (if not us, then God).

The foremost arguments against modern atheism, as seen for example in C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, are supposed to show that materialism and rationalism are incompatible, so that if one accepts materialism, then one must reject rationalism. Conversely, if one accepts rationalism, then one must reject materialism.

Another way of putting this point is in terms of versions of naturalism. Materialism can be interpreted as metaphysical naturalism: nature, however broadly construed, is all there is. Rationalism can be interpreted as methodological naturalism: the methods of the natural science have priority in adjudicating between competing assertions. The Lewis-Plantinga strategy is to drive a wedge between metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism. Thus metaphysical naturalists such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are put to one side, and methodological naturalists such as Quine are put on another. Dembski says of Quine:

Quine, though a naturalist, was not wedded to the methodological and metaphysical naturalism of Van Till. Quine was a pragmatic naturalist. This pragmatism allowed him to entertain the following possibility: "If I saw indirect explanatory benefit in positing sensibilia, possibilia, spirits, a Creator, I would joyfully accord them scientific status too, on a par with such avowedly scientific posits as quarks and black holes. (from "Naturalism; or, Living within One's Means," Dialectica 1995, vol. 49); see Naturalism's Invincible Ignorance

The alleged incompatibility of materialism with rationalism, and so the alleged incoherence of modern atheism, is closely connected with the alleged incompatibility of materialism with morality. As rationalism is an epistemological thesis, and so is concerned with what one ought to believe, so morality concerns what one ought to do. In both cases, then, what is concern is “oughtness” or normativity.

In both science and in morality, in our theoretical and practical lives, we are rational beings; we occupy what Wilfrid Sellars called, “the space of giving and asking for reasons.” So one way of seeing the Lewis-Plantinga objection to modern atheism is to see it as raising a skeptical challenge as to how anything merely material, and so fully describable in terms of deterministic laws, could nevertheless also be capable of normative guidance, whether epistemic or moral.

The prevalence of normativity in human life is so obvious as to seem undeniable. (And even philosophers who seem to deny it, such as Spinoza and Nietzsche, may seem to sneak it in the back door having kicked it out the front.) In any event, I shall simply take for granted the basic distinction between "the realm of law" (what is material/physical) and "the space of reasons" (what is normatively oriented, i.e. science and morality). What I shall deny is that accepting this distinction requires that one reject materialism/metaphysical naturalism. Instead I shall show, in the course of working through some thoughts of John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, just how one can have one's cake and eat it, too.

Darwin, Freud, Hitler

The discoveries made by Darwin, innovations made by Freud, and atrocities committed by Hitler have exploded any hope one may have had for the Platonic fantasy that the soul is immortal, neither created nor destructible. Darwin's work shows how beings without souls could have gradually, by incremental changes, given rise to ensouled beings. Freud's work shows how the human soul emerges and changes over the course of a lifetime. Hitler's work shows how human beings can destroy both their own souls and the souls of others.

How Do We Believe?

If, like me, you're one of those "secular-progressives" that Bill O'Reilly is warning us about, you may be slightly alarmed about recent surveys which indicate that, not only do 95% of your fellow Americans believe in a God ("of some kind"), but that 55% accept a literal interpretation of the Bible, just under half believe that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, usw.

Is this cause for alarm? Depends, I think, not just on what believe, but on how they believe it -- and also, and more importantly, on whether our fellow citizens really believe these things -- or just think they do.

Can one be mistaken about one's own beliefs?

Anti-Anti-Americanism

In today's cultural-political climate -- and that which has prevailed for most of my entire life -- there is a certain strain among the residues of "the left" which takes pride in a cynical and generalized anti-Americanism. America, it is sometimes thought -- not entirely without justification -- has a massively destructive foreign policy, consumes a massively disproportionate share of the world's resources, and has citizens that are not only apathetic and ignorant, but apathetic and ignorant about their apathy and ignorance.

To combat the dangers of cynicism in myself, and perhaps also a few friends who stumble across Impure Reason from time to time, I want to begin a list of all the things about America that I love and that are worth loving, in no particular order:

1) Bob Dylan
2) Transcendentalism (Thoreau, Emerson)
3) Jazz (Davis, Coltrane, Brubeck)
4) Pragmatism (esp. James and Dewey)
5) the liberal-arts college curriculum
6) the Constitution
7) Walt Whitman
8) Yellowstone National Park
9) Manhattan
10) hip-hop
11) baseball

Add your own in the comments below; I'll update the list as it grows.

Pragmatism, Realism, Etc.

I've begun reading Putnam's Realism with a Human Face. It's a difficult book, a collection of essays on epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and history of philosophy, and it interweaves both highly technical discussions about quantum mechanics and logic with a sensitivity to broad cultural and social concerns. It's not that one cannot see the forest for the trees -- one can! -- but that there are so many trees.

In the first section, Putnam provides a quick sketch of two recent developments in quantum mechanics and in the logic of semantic paradoxes. In both cases he examines the temptation of providing a "God's-Eye View," a theory of the totality. In quantum mechanics this temptation expresses itself in the desire for a theory that includes the observer within the system under examination, even at what Putnam considers to be extravagant metaphysical cost (many world interpretation, Bohmian mechanics). In logic this temptation expresses itself in the desire for a resolution of the paradoxes of self-referential sentences.

Putnam concludes that both temptations stem from an evasion of the Kantian lesson: one cannot include oneself within the system, because -- to rephrase the Kantian point in Wittgenstein-esque terms -- the norms of representation are not themselves among the objects represented. Putnam builds on Kant and on Wittgenstein in developing further the failures of metaphysical realism and the turn towards the life of the agent, towards practice or praxis. But, also like Kant and Wittgenstein, Putnam is mindful of the allure of metaphysics.

What is metaphysics? Is metaphysics possible in any sense "after" Kant and Wittgenstein? If so, how?

Next: Hegel and Deleuze as rival versions of self-consciously post-Kantian metaphysics!

And: the secret affinity between Nietzsche, Carnap, and Rorty!