Meditation 44: Madness and Reason

Obsession and compulsion are compatible with reason.  Sadly, from its modern birth, the partisans of the cause of reason have played down the thought that reason might have a dark side.  As in all political or cultural causes, an element of distortion can start the engine of change.  The cost of seeing deeply in one direction is to ignore, through lack of time, if nothing else, anything that is not directly in the spotlight. The partisans of reason thought education and enlightenment would lead to general progress and the overall good of the peoples of the world. The report card for the Cause of Reason in the last three hundred years is decidedly mixed.

On the one hand, obvious goods have flowed to many people from the technological make over of the world.  The rich countries are richer far than the dreams of King Midas.  The Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt experienced more pain and discomfort from treatable illnesses than millions do today.  Slaves are not necessary for commodious living, as Aristotle once thought.  Food, again in the rich countries, is plentiful.  Diet and medicine keep people alive much longer than ever before.  Education has become universal in some lands, and does indeed create the conditions for the existence of a civil society and its institutions.  The notion of equality before the law comes from the idea of Reason, transposing the old religious idea of equality before God.

Suspicion of reason and its program of enlightenment arose early.  People of more romantic temperament saw the strictures of Reason as dry and unyielding.  Blake drew a picture of the scientist, Newton, as he hunches over a geometric diagram with a compass in his hand.  Full of schemes and calculations, he renounces his humanity. An abstraction rules his mind, and his science was indifferent to the suffering of human beings.  Those "infernal mills" of early industrialization saw the marks of "progress" stamped onto the backs of the workers. Is this reason?

Reason rides rough shod over the differences between things.  It absorbs differences into an overall identity to which everything must, perforce, conform. Hegel, who still believed in reason, saw the abstraction of freedom, equality and cooperative coexistence leading to the terror of the French revolution.  Social practices must mediate between daily life and the great ideals of the revolution, or they will remain abstract and lead to one-sidedness and violence.

Of course, commitment to reason and the rational life does not, by itself, make a person mad.  It is mad, however, to be committed to a program of reason to the exclusion of all else, including unreason.  The rational and the non-rational are bound together in the human condition, and they can easily slide into their opposites.  Reason loses its grip on reality when it mistakes a generalization for the absolute truth, and commits itself to the suppression of differences, rather than working for their mutually beneficial coordination.