Chapter 4                                   

Foundations For A Moral Code: Rationalism And Its Flaws  

Part A

       In Western Philosophy, the main alternative to Empiricism, for describing the human mind and understanding what knowing is, is called "Rationalism". It is the way of Plato in Classical Greek times and of Descartes in the Enlightenment. What they say is that the human mind can only build a system for knowing and understanding itself, and how it knows its universe, if that system is, first of all, grounded in the human mind by itself, before any sensory experiences or memories of them enter the system.

       Descartes, for example, points out that our senses tell us information that can easily be faulty. As was noted above, the stick in the pond looks bent at the water line; if we remove it, then we see it is straight; the hand that was on the pocket warmer and the hand that was in the snow are both immersed in the water in the sink; to one hand, the sink water is cold and to the other, it is warm. And these are the simple examples. Life contains many much more difficult ones. Therefore, the rationalists say, we must try to construct a system for modeling human thinking by beginning from some concepts that are built into the mind itself before any sensory information even enters.

               

         Plato says we come into the world at birth already dimly knowing some perfect "forms" that we then use to organize our thoughts, and the only conclusion to draw is that these very useful forms, that enable us to make sense of our world, are imperfect copies of the perfect forms which exist in a perfect dimension of pure thought, before birth, beyond matter, space, and time – a dimension of pure ideas. The material world and the things in it are only poor copies of that other world of pure forms ultimately derived from the pure "Good". The whole point of our existence, for Plato, is to discipline the mind by study, until we learn to more and more clearly recall, understand, and live by, the perfect forms. 

               

        Descartes has a similar kind of system of thought which begins from the truth that the mind finds inside itself when it carefully and quietly contemplates just itself. During this quiet and totally concentrated self-contemplation, the thing that is most deeply you, namely your mind, realizes that whatever else you may be mistaken about, you can't be mistaken about the fact that you exist; you'd have to exist in some way in some dimension in order for you even to be thinking about whether you exist. For Descartes, this is enough of a starting point to enable him to build a whole system of thinking and knowing that sets up two realms: a realm of things that the mind deals with through the physical body that it is attached to, and another realm that the mind can deal with by pure thinking, a realm built on the "clear and distinct ideas" that the mind knows before it ever takes in, in any way, the impressions that the senses see, hear, touch, smell, or taste.

               

         These two rationalists have had millions of followers, in Descartes' case for four hundred years and in Plato's case for well over two thousand. They have attacked Empiricism for as long as Empiricism has been around (since the 1700's, or in a simpler form, some argue, since the time of Aristotle, who was Plato's pupil, but who disagreed diametrically with Plato on several matters). Rationalists, as was said above, criticize Empiricism's inability to specify what that human mind that does the perceiving of sensory impressions is, and how it could possibly build up a system for thinking and knowing beginning from things as unreliable as sensory impressions.

               

         The debate between the Rationalists and the Empiricists has not let up, even in our own time, but in our quest to find a universal moral code, we are going to find that we have to write Rationalism off as fully as we did Empiricism. Rationalism contains a flaw worse than any of Empiricism’s flaws.  

               

        The Empiricists do not provide an epistemological base solid enough to support a moral system. Their system of reasoning (based on categorical logic backed up by material evidence), when applied to itself, indicates that Empiricism will probably never be able to establish a base for itself. Empiricism has been our route to many effective scientific theories and laws in all branches of Science, but so far it has been unable to provide a compelling case for Empiricism. Both theoretical considerations and practical evidence, in fact, seem to indicate that a sound, empiricist model of how we should think about our own thinking can’t be made. 

    

        On the other hand, it turns out that Rationalism has major problems as well. The science of Psychology, in particular, has cast a harsh spotlight on the inconsistencies of Rationalism.

         The moral philosophers’ hope of finding an Empiricist foundation for a moral system was broken by thinkers like Quine and Godel.  However, Rationalism’s flaws were just as clearly shown up by social psychologists such as Aronson and Festinger.

                                     Leon Feistinger 

                 Elliot Aronson