Reason

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Reason is the mind’s capacity to move, by inference, from one thing known to another — to weigh, conclude, and give an account of why a thing is so. It is the faculty the West has most often named when asked what sets the human being apart, and also the one it has argued hardest over: how far it reaches, where it stops, and whether anything lies above it.

The Greek vocabulary still shapes the discussion. Logos carried at once the senses of word, account, ratio, and the ordering principle of the world; to have logos was to be the kind of creature who could give reasons. Plato set the rational part of the soul over the appetites and made philosophy the discipline by which it ruled. The Stoics went further, identifying the logos in a person with a fragment of the divine reason running through the whole cosmos; to live well, on their account, was to bring one’s own judgment into agreement with that order — a teaching the Discourses of Epictetus press again and again. From the Latin ratio the word descended into the European languages, and into the long quarrel over what reason can be trusted to know.

Within the Platonic tradition a distinction grew up that later thought rarely keeps clean. Reason proper — dianoia, the step-by-step movement of thought — was set below a higher seeing, nous or intellect, which grasped its objects whole and at once, without the labor of inference. Plotinus and his successors held the discursive mind to be a lower image of that immediate vision; the philosopher’s ascent ran from reasoning toward an intuition reasoning could prepare but not itself reach. Medieval writers preserved the pair as ratio and intellectus. Much of later mysticism turns on the same gap: the claim that the deepest knowing arrives where argument leaves off.

The modern career of the word narrowed it. In the rationalism of the seventeenth century reason became the tribunal before which every claim was to be tried, and in the Enlightenment a near-synonym for the authority of the human mind against inherited belief. Against it stood the empiricist counter-argument that the senses, not reason alone, are where knowledge begins — a dispute that organized European philosophy for two centuries and is not settled.

Esoteric currents have generally treated reason with respect and reservation together. They tend to honor it as a real instrument while denying it the last word, reserving that for gnosis or direct illumination — a knowing held to lie past the reach of argument. The relation is rarely simple hostility; more often it is ranking, with reason granted its office and placed below something it is said to serve. What counts as that something, and whether it exists at all, is the question the word has carried from the start.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna) · Epictetus — The Discourses and Manual (Matheson, 1916)

→ Related: Nous · Logos · Empiricism · Neoplatonism · Gnosis