(credit: Sumita Dutta via Wikimedia Commons) 


Rationalism appears to be a regular precursor to intolerance. Rationalism in one stealthy form or another has too often turned into rationalization, a dangerous, 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 subversive, secret groups. In this way, democracy simply mirrors Science: no theory gets accepted until it has been tested repeatedly and the results have been peer-reviewed. There are no elites who dictate what the rest must conclude. Focus on observable evidence that all can see and then discuss what it means. 

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 said 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, 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 impressions gathered from 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 need our theories and models in order to make decisions and just do things. Without mental models to guide us, we would have no way to form plans for avoiding the same catastrophes our ancestors spent so long learning – 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 behaviour 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.