The Responsibility of Reason
An extremely thought-provoking piece from one of the blogs at First Things.
The ruminations in the piece ask a very pertinent question for today, namely "what is reason's responsibility?"
Given that a vastly secularized world has enthroned "reason" as the ultimate arbiter of competing claims to justice (or less charitably as a "moderator of prejudice"), how is "reason" to act in this capacity?
If reason is a tool, then what is the end it is employed to bring about? The below section, I believe, shines a spotlight on this most uncomfortable of questions for those who believe that reason alone can be moral.
"What Leo Strauss had already understood in 1941, having worked through his own “German nihilist” (that is fascist or proto-fascist) temptation, is that if reason is to survive as a moderator of prejudices, it must befriend the honorable prejudices or approximate truths of non-intellectuals who are ready to stand for something. And (as too many Straussians fail to see), to accomplish this political function the philosopher must respect the provenance of goods essential to the order of his own soul that “simple reason” cannot create ex nihilo."
Reason cannot create except within a framework that has already been, at some level, predetermined by something external to the process of "reason" itself. This is its inherent limitation.
The ruminations in the piece ask a very pertinent question for today, namely "what is reason's responsibility?"
Given that a vastly secularized world has enthroned "reason" as the ultimate arbiter of competing claims to justice (or less charitably as a "moderator of prejudice"), how is "reason" to act in this capacity?
If reason is a tool, then what is the end it is employed to bring about? The below section, I believe, shines a spotlight on this most uncomfortable of questions for those who believe that reason alone can be moral.
"What Leo Strauss had already understood in 1941, having worked through his own “German nihilist” (that is fascist or proto-fascist) temptation, is that if reason is to survive as a moderator of prejudices, it must befriend the honorable prejudices or approximate truths of non-intellectuals who are ready to stand for something. And (as too many Straussians fail to see), to accomplish this political function the philosopher must respect the provenance of goods essential to the order of his own soul that “simple reason” cannot create ex nihilo."
Reason cannot create except within a framework that has already been, at some level, predetermined by something external to the process of "reason" itself. This is its inherent limitation.
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