Most people look at reason as a tool or a method of gaining information. But what actually happens in the process?
Ideas are not made, they are found. We “stand on the shoulders of giants” with every idea we have. The origin of ideas was simply acknowledging natural phenomena and recreating them in unnatural circumstances.
With 2+2, we use our knowledge of the natural number system, and the idea of “2” and add another “2”. With red and blue, we combine the abstractions to make purple… but what if we add a little more blue? We can do that too… and that is how reason is used for problem solving.
There isn’t much there as far as an aptitude for combining abstractions, the aptitude is for juggling abstractions.
If we have a clear concept of 2, and a clear concept of 3, there are no steps we follow in order to arrive at 5; it just happens automatically. What didn’t happen automatically was our recognition of those numbers long before we were faced with the problem of adding them together. The reason 396 + 172 takes us longer is because now we have a lot more numbers to keep present in our consciousness. Once we can consciously grasp the whole problem, things fall into place on their own.
Very crude, I know, but if anyone has a nicer (clearer) way of putting it that would be good.
Reason is the answer to the questions “why” and/or “how”.
It is the rationing of causal relationships (rationale).
It is a process of recognition of association between concepts such as to reveal a contingent truth.
Reasoning is thinking; predicting, gaining understanding (underlying causality), analyzing, sub-ordering.
Reason - the abnormal desacralized form of thinking (causing of things to appear “before the mind’s eye”) which selects out of all possible thoughts only those that are likely to be exactly repeatable by others.
Reason is an attribute of our life instinct supported by sophistication of other brain hemispheres. It seems more reasonable to sit down and cook some fried potatoes with steak, than it does to throw them in the trash. Reason, good and pure, un-diseased, un-twisted reason, is always basically good for someone. Reason is utility applied to thought qualities.
It’s a matter of fact that Reason is not a brain hemisphere; if anything is to provide the suitable analogy, it is the micro-thin sliver/section, the kind you might see in a tumorous tissue pathology lab, or the bit of a piechart representing the 1% of individuals holding dominion over 99% of the world’s combined wealth.
When you write that untainted Reason is essentially good, I feel that you miss the crucial insight: in today’s use the very label - “Reason” - exists only to exclude all that is un-reason: the unmechanical, unrepeatable, unshareable. Otherwise we could always simply speak of Thought, and characterize it as cunning, profound, useful, idle, pointless, wasteful, etc. - depending on its fruits. This exclusion, the excision of un-reason, is done regardless of whether un-reason was good or bad for somebody. It is, you could say, a deliberate programmatic effort to channel thought into a certain pathway to the exclusion of any other. It’s very telling that until as late as the 15th century no one’s ever heard of any such thing as “human Reason”, and all lived happily without it, multiplying in great number, never troubling themselves with the Reasonable Usage of steak&potato, preferring perhaps to focus on good taste.
Reason can be causal–the ‘reason’ for A is B–or it can be logical–my ‘reasoning’ is as follows…–however, in my mind, ‘reason’ is higher order thinking used to extrapolate meaning and/or substance from abstractions. Iow, we observe abstractions, we use reason to arrive at a unity of those abstractions in order to derive meanings. I hope this makes sense–it’s really off the top of my head.
You might want to pick up on some of Antonio Damasio’s work on how reason is embodied in consciousness through neurological processes such as emotions.
