Julian Baggini Quotes

If the house on the lake can become a new iteration of a philosophical retreat, that would pay homage to its first owner much more than any number of selfie-snapping visitors could.

If it seems shocking to some that scientists are not cold computers but human beings with different preferences, dispositions, skills and temperaments then they must have a very strange idea of how people think. Science is indeed a rational pursuit par excellence. But it does violence to the notion of rationality if we pretend that it is not a complicated, somewhat messy capacity.

In this way we can see that political reason is as much – if not more – bottom-up than top-down. Rationality requires attending to objective reasons for belief and many of the most important such reasons are provided by what we observe in the world. Indeed, what we observe is of primary importance: there is no hope of understanding justice, for example, if we attempt to do so purely by examining the concept without any reference at all to what we perceive to be just or unjust in the world.

Philosophical autobiographies do much more than simply reveal the personalities and prejudices of their authors, however. They provide striking examples of just why such factors inevitably colour our thinking beyond the biographical.

Our obsession with our differences has created the impression that there is no common domain of rationality within which disagreements can be thrashed out. We just have a multiplicity of discourses and rationalisations to legitimise different interest groups. This is not just a criticism of those currents of thought broadly and loosely labelled postmodern. The enemies of postmodernism have set themselves up as the sole champions of reason – something made easier by their opponents’ willingness to relinquish the labels of rationality and reason. In so doing they too have contributed to the sense in which the intellectual sphere is too fragmented and divided along factional lines for any general dialogue to be possible. By dismissing large sections of the intellectual community as anti-rational, the anti-postmodernists have also contributed to the sense that it is pointless to seek to argue one’s case in the widest possible forum.

The rehabilitation of reason is urgent because it is only through the proper use of reason that we can find our way out of the quagmires in which many big issues of our time have become stuck. Without a clear sense of what it means for one point of view to be more reasonable than another, it seems that the position one adopts is ultimately based on nothing more than personal opinion or preference.

Disenchantment with politics is therefore toxic, and populism can only increase such disenchantment, since it leads to the promise of simple solutions that cannot be delivered, while removing from the public square the more nuanced kind of discourse that is needed to explain why it can’t work.

Philosophers understandably focus on the nature of reason itself. However, in order for reason to flourish, it needs to be practised in the right environment. And that is sadly often lacking in the very places where reason is held in the highest esteem.

Even if we are pessimistic about the chances of changing our political culture to make it more reasoned, we have little choice but to try. In politics, the waters beneath the thin ice of reason are especially rough and icy. The predators that swim in them are opportunistic populists and divisive nationalists, destined to devour the few naïve idealists who are equally blind to the complexities of real politics. Reason might seem to be a meagre defence against such dangers, but it is the only one we’ve got.

This point is critical. Reason is often assumed to be by definition disinterested. Disinterested reason has its place, of course, in mathematics and science, but sometimes it can legitimately be very interested indeed. Reason needs to be objective, not disinterested, and this means it can recognise the objective existence of needs and desires, good and bad states.

As I suggested at the opening of this part of the book, to avoid hubris we ought to think of this beast as more like a mule than a thoroughbred. Our rationality is a somewhat messy thing that cannot be captured only in the formal processes of logic. But in many ways we mules are superior to Plato’s pedigrees, because whereas his cannot bring reason and emotion together, we can. Better to be a many-skilled mule than one-trick pony.

To be truly rational we need to acknowledge the limits of our rationality: nothing is more irrational than an unwarranted faith in reason.

This point is, in essence, the most important and overlooked one regarding the rationality of ethics. The traditional dispute between Kantians and sentimentalists rests on an assumption that to be rational, morality must be grounded on a priori principles of disinterested reason. This is false. If we understand what rationality means in an appropriately catholic way, we see that it it is a matter of providing reasons for belief and that the sources of these reasons are not confined to a priori principles of logical or scientific facts. Once we accept that, we can see that although the Kantian project of founding ethics on pure reason is doomed, reason is still at the very heart of morality.

Really good philosophising requires something more than a razor-sharp brain, something that is sometimes called subtlety of mind, a philosophical sensibility or insight. I call it judgement, which I define somewhat cumbersomely as as a cognitive faculty required to reach conclusions or form theories, the truth or falsity of which cannot be determined by an appeal to facts and/or logic alone. There are numerous examples of this, but perhaps the clearest comes from moral philosophy.

Many are now skeptical of Freud’s theory – and of psychoanalysis in general – but the broad idea that the unconscious is in the driving seat has become widely accepted and has been given empirical support by contemporary research in psychology. Experimental psychologists might be less convinced by the primacy of Freud’s eros and thanatos – the sex and death drives – but they have catalogued a large number of biases and distortions of thought that affect each and every one of us. They may have abandoned Freud’s specific ideas but they have only added to the general picture of human nature he painted in which we are not so much rational as rationalisers, using reason to make sense of our beliefs and actions after the event. Must we therefore accept that reason is a mere veneer for irrational impulses, or can can psychology justify giving rationality an important role in human thought and judgement?