Reason, Faith, and Meaning

"Reason, Faith, and Meaning" is the essay of Charles Taylor (McGill University) in Faith and Philosophy, Vol 28, No. 1, January, 2011. The piece begins

There are two connected illusions, it seems to me, which have become very common today. The first consists in marking a very sharp distinction between reason and faith -- even to the point of defining faith as believing without good reason! The second is to take as a model what I want to call "disengaged" reason. And these two are tightly linked.

With this Dr. McGill begins his analysis of the post-Enlightenment separation of faith and reason. First is that reason may only sometimes provide a univocal response as it does in mathematics. But not always despite positivist assertions. Matters of theory and conceptualization escape the grasp of the positivist. And when it does accomplish this it requires specific and restricted language (Lash, 2008). This limits the scope that reason might claim.

Even in the area of reasoned evaluation comes, he states, the influence of culture and heritage. This leaves the observers of facts in disagreement, which might lead some to resign themselves to relativism. But such is not necessary for the perspectives are open to debate and analysis may still proceed. As such the faculties of reason remain at work even though we are not beginning to escape the trap of "reason alone" as any sort of guide.

The next step in this is to see what damage has been done to our understanding of reason. For Descarte the separation came between the reason and the reasoning. The formula was separated from the process. This allows a criticism of the post-Enlightenment ideas of reason. It is

... problematic to say the least. If reason alone is defined in opposition to faith, then it threatens to collapse as a category when we see the role that faith in our inchoate insights must play. If it is opposed to revelation ,then the problem is that "revelation" is a category which we come to articulate in order to make sense of our most fundamental insights. It is itself the fruit of reason-as-articulation.

Now the post-Enlightenment idea of disengaged reason disintegrates. Yet we are also able to judge without being entirely driven by passion or emotion. A contrary example is provided with Cabaret as a working model. Being driven by passions (more than feelings) might have led a 1932 German to his imagined better future, though our hindsight says otherwise.

One result of this has been to assign passion to mere emotion and response.

One of the distortions introduced by the modern objectified philosophical anthropology was to split emotion from its constituent perception, and thus assimilate it to sensation. On this view, the fact that a given emotion attends a certain kind of event -- despondency in face of a disaster, for instance -- can be judged neither appropriate or inappropriate; it is just a brute fact about us, like that fact that pain attends some kinds of change i our bodies, and not others, or that some substances cause nausea and not others. The relation between event and affect is purely causal, and as such contingent.

This is in some contrast even to the ancients who, in one noted measure, linked passion and emotion to perception. Emotions were as related to analysis of a situation as they were to brute response which we treat as a mere trigger action.

But in contrast to this (which I will note was during the "Romantic" era) David Hume posited that morality came not from reason but from sentiment. This also, to Hume, was a brute reaction. Though it may be dealt with through reason it is nevertheless founded in sentiment. Now the sensibilities of the past have been supplanted with a purportedly independent sense of reason.

Now we can discern that our captivity to the picture of such a sense of enlightened reason can be broken. Faith and revelation may still inform knowledge and even science.