“...the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men.”
A rationalist has to be egalitarian in some really obvious sense, but that stance wrinkles a little if one asks whether we really are all the same in this respect. There’s some pressure to root for the negative answer (in our diversity-celebrating age) since we tend to dislike the idea that a single model of reason and reasonableness applies to us all. Yet we also want the answer to be positive, since we appreciate more than most generations the harm that comes from the idea that some are not fully rational. (Descartes actually broaches this late in the Discourse in his discussion of the ‘half-savage’ becoming ‘civilized’; as well as his famous distinction between humans and animals given their differential possession of reason and language. Descartes does not do it (I don’t think), but others have applied a non-universalness of reason argument to describe ‘Negroes’, ‘savages’, ‘barbarians’, and women. It’s tricky territory.)
One question I always have when I read Descartes is in the meaning of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’, especially when it comes to ‘reason’. It would seem on a straightforward notion of ‘nature’ that it consists of that which humans did not make; its complement class is thus ‘society’ and ‘technology’—something like that. But then how is reason natural? Whatever else humans do when they make things like societies or technologies, they employ reason, and they do so essentially. If you clarify things by making reason itself a natural (biological) process, something that only in the application to things produces society and technology, that seems a nice fix. But problems will surface for Descartes later in the story, given his view that the mental and the physical have substantially variant properties.
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Timothy Chow on the NF consistency proof and Lean
17 hours ago
3 comments:
REPOST UNDER MY NEW SCREEN NAME-I suppose that reason in man can be ascribed to nature insofar as we can say that we are endowed with reason through nature or natural processes (such as natural selection), and that what might cause some to call technology or society unnatural would be the way in which humans employ their reason, given by nature, to manipulate nature in a way that no other being can. It is a good point to make that Descartes could run into problems when it comes to the mind/body distinction, seeing as he considers the mind as distinct and independent from the body (that is, that the mind could theoretically exist by itself without a connection to anything physical), and if that is the case, then it might be hard for Descartes to explain how something which is separate from nature to be naturally endowed with anything (in this case reason). I think the best way to clear this up for Descartes is to say that by “nature” or “natural” he may mean, as the Greeks did by the word "phusis", what is most original or primal. Descartes, being a professed theist and a Christian, could say that nature is not restricted to the physical, but rather to that by which everything in existence originally sprung from, which in the case of a theist would clearly be the mind and reason of God.
I like that move to the original--D can use that, I think, and it feels like a better fit for him than my reading into the text the presumption of the natural as physical.
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