IMPERIAL OVERREACH:

What Ever Happened to Reason? (Roger Scruton, Spring 1999, City Journal)

The Enlightenment made explicit what had long been implicit in the intellectual life of Europe: the belief that rational inquiry leads to objective truth. Even those Enlightenment thinkers who distrusted reason, like Hume, and those who tried to circumscribe its powers, like Kant, never relinquished their confidence in rational argument. Hume opposed the idea of a rational morality; but he justified the distinction between right and wrong in terms of a natural science of the emotions, taking for granted that we could discover the truth about human nature and build on that firm foundation. Kant may have dismissed "pure reason" as a tissue of illusions, but he elevated practical reason in the place of it, arguing for the absolute validity of the moral law. For the ensuing 200 years, reason retained its position as the arbiter of truth and the foundation of objective knowledge.

Reason is now on the retreat, both as an ideal and as a reality. In place of it has come the "view from outside"—which puts our entire tradition of learning in question. The appeal to reason, we are told, is merely an appeal to Western culture, which has made reason into its shibboleth and laid claim to an objectivity that no culture could possess. Moreover, by claiming reason as its foundation, Western culture has concealed its pernicious ethnocentrism; it has dressed up Western ways of thinking as though they had universal force. Reason, therefore, is a lie, and by exposing the lie we reveal the oppression at the heart of Western culture. Behind the attack on reason lurks another and more virulent hostility: the hostility to the culture and the curriculum that we have inherited from the Enlightenment.

If we examine the gurus of the new university establishment, those whose works are most often cited in the endless stream of articles devoted to debunking Western culture, we discover that they are all opponents of objective truth. Nietzsche is a favorite, since he made the point explicitly: "There are no truths," he wrote, "only interpretations." Now, either what Nietzsche said is true—in which case it is not true, since there are no truths—or it is false. Enough said, you might imagine. But no: the point can be stated less brusquely, and the paradox concealed. This explains the appeal of those later thinkers—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty—who owe their intellectual eminence not to their arguments (of which they have precious few) but to their role in giving authority to the rejection of authority, and to their absolute commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments. In each of them you find the view that truth, objectivity, value, and meaning are chimerical, and that all we can have, and all we need to have, is the warm security of our own opinion. [...]

What should be our response to this? Surely the first conclusion we should draw is that the new relativism is self-contradictory. Its absolute censoriousness is already proof of this; so too is its constant assumption of the "trans-cultural" perspective that it denies to be possible. Without such a perspective, the very idea of a plurality of cultures could not be expressed. And what is this perspective—the "point of view beyond culture"—if not the perspective of reason?

The second conclusion to draw is that, intellectually speaking, the Enlightenment project, as Alasdair MacIntyre has called it—the project of deriving an objective morality from rational argument—is as much a reality for us as it was for Kant or Hegel. The problem lies not in giving rational grounds for morality or objective principles of criticism. The problem lies in persuading people to accept them. Although there are those, like John Gray, who tell us that the project has failed, the failure lies in them and not in the project. It is possible to give a reasoned defense of traditional morality and to show just why human nature and personal relations require it. But the argument is difficult. Not everyone can follow it; nor does everyone have the time, the inclination, or the requisite sense of what is at stake. Hence reason, which stirs up easy questions while providing only difficult replies, will be more likely to destroy our pieties than to give new grounds for them.

What is wrong with the Enlightenment project is not the belief that reason can provide a trans-cultural morality. For that belief is true. What is wrong is the assumption that people have some faint interest in reason. The falsehood of this assumption is there for all to see in our academies: in the relativism of their gurus and in the misguided absolutism—absolutism about the wrong things and for the wrong reasons, absolutism that excludes all but the relativists from their doors.

Mr. Scruton is wrong, as he concedes when he acknowledges that the Enlightenment project is still as alive today as it was when men like Hume showed it impossible. The inability to admit this openly is unfortunately the source of the very problem he complains of--the turn away from reason. By claiming that Reason provides access to objective truth--and the only access to objective truth--rationalists overreached the built in limitations of Reason and made even those subjective truths which it is capable of discovering rather suspect.

The tragedy is that this need not have happened. Had rationalists simply followed the counsel of Hume they'd have been able to defend both the subjective value of Reason and the objective values of Western faith--including, significantly, faith in Reason.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 20, 2004 3:20 PM