The most plausible, cautious, and responsible reasoning I can apply to myself leads me to conclude that the ability to reason skilfully in abstract, formal terms guarantees nothing in the realm of practical affairs. Brilliance with formal thinking systems has been just as quick to advocate for totalitarianism and tyranny as it has for pluralism and democracy. If we want to survive, we need to work out a moral code that counters at least the worst excesses of the human flaw called rationalization, especially the forms found in the most intelligent of humans.

Rationalism appears to be a regular precursor to intolerance. Rationalism in one stealthy form or another has too often been a dangerous and even pathological affliction of human minds. The whole design of democracy is intended to remedy, or at least attenuate, this flaw in human thinking. 

In a democracy, decisions for the whole community are arrived at by a process that combines the carefully sifted wisdom and experience of all, backed up by references to observable evidence and a process of deliberate, open, cooperative decision making. One of the main intentions of the democratic model is to handle secret groups. For example, in the subculture of democracy called science, no theory gets accepted until it has been tested repeatedly and the results have been peer-reviewed.

While some of my argument against rationalism may not be familiar to all readers, its main conclusion is familiar to Philosophy students. It is Hume’s conclusion. The famous empiricist stated long ago that merely verbal arguments that do not begin from material evidence but later claim to arrive at conclusions that may be applied in the material world should be “consigned to the flames.”⁵ Cognitive dissonance theory only gives modern credence to Hume’s famous conclusion.

Rationalism’s failures lead to the conclusion that its way of ignoring the material world, or trying to impose some preconceived model on it, doesn’t work. Rationalism cannot serve as a firm and reliable base for a full philosophical system; its method of progressing from idea to idea, without reference to physical evidence, is at least as likely to end in rationalization as it is in rationality. Finding a complete, life-regulating system of ideas—a moral philosophy—is far too important to our well-being to risk our lives on a beginning point that so much historical evidence says is deeply flawed. In order to build a universal moral code, we need to begin from a better base model of the human mind.

But a beginning based on sensory data gathered from experience in the material world, which is empiricism’s method, doesn’t work either. It can’t adequately describe the thing doing the gathering. Besides, if we lived by pure empiricism—that is, if we just gathered experiences—we would become transfixed by what was happening around us. At best, we would become collectors of sense data, recording and storing bits of experience, but with no idea of what to do with these memories, how to do it, or why we would even bother. 

We would have no larger model or vision to work under and therefore no strategies for avoiding the same catastrophes our ancestors had to learn – by trial and pain – to avoid.

So where are we now in our larger argument? Each of us must have a comprehensive system that gives coherence to all her or his ideas and so to the patterns of behavior we design and implement by basing them on those ideas. But if both the big models of human thinking and knowing that traditional Western philosophy offers—namely, rationalism and empiricism—seem unreliable, then what model of human knowing can we begin from? The answer is complex enough to deserve a chapter of its own.

Notes

1. Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal (New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company: 1980), pp. 99–106.

2. Virginia Stark-Vance and Mary Louise Dubay, 100 Questions & Answers about Brain Tumors (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2nd edition, 2011).

3. “G.E. Moore,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 5, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.e._Moore.

4. “Herbert Spencer,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 6, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer.

5. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, cited in Wikipedia article “Metaphysics.” Accessed April 6, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics#British_empiricism.