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"Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze takes on one of the most difficult challenges of the day: the possibility that reason, and therefore philosophy, transcends culture and history and does not simply reflect the hegemony of one culture. I like his attempts to 'ground' reason in experience while still maintaining reason's authority. This is a difficult trick given our habits of thought, but he makes a plausible and important case especially to be prized by cultural theorists who want to think 'diversity' without having to fend off endless arguments about 'relativism.'"--William Rasch, author of "Sovereignty and Its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political"

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On Reason

Duke University Press

Contents

PREFACE: What Is Rationality?..................................................xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................xixINTRODUCTION: Diversity and the Social Questions of Reason.....................11 Varieties of Rational Experience.............................................242 Ordinary Historical Reason...................................................903 Science, Culture, and Principles of Rationality..............................1304 Languages of Time in Postcolonial Memory.....................................1815 Reason and Unreason in Politics..............................................227NOTES..........................................................................269BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................297INDEX..........................................................................319

Chapter One

In this chapter I discuss six varieties of theories of reason. These theories implicitly or explicitly advocate different ideals-models-of rationality. When I speak about the theories of reason and their corresponding rational ideals I call them conceptions of rationality. It will be obvious that whereas some of the conceptions of rationality are internally consistent as well as compatible with other conceptions of rationality, others are not. That is why I have preferred to speak about all of them as varieties of conceptions of rational experience. From my point of view, reason-on account of these theories and the forms of rationalities they collectively advocate-can be accurately characterized as internally diverse and externally pluralistic. Without arguing for a particular hierarchical ranking-only for their diversity and their compatibility or incompatibility-I will explain and critique the calculative, formal, hermeneutical, empiricist, phenomenological, and ordinary conceptions of rationality.

CALCULATIVE REASON

Calculative rationality is the model most familiar in the periods and places we characterize as modern. The historical identification of this form of rationality with modernity is due largely to the dominance of empirical science and its technologies in the modern processes of acquisition, organization and archiving, and practical uses of experimental knowledge. A modern culture's idea of knowledge is inescapably embedded in the rational self-image and in the historical teleology of the natural and the social sciences. This historical teleology is most explicit in the philosophical thought emerging out of the European Enlightenment, notably in the works of Thomas Hobbes, Ren Descartes, and Francis Bacon.

Hobbes gave the modern idea of rationality its clearest formulation. It is his terminology that justifies describing this theory of reason as calculative. Hobbes thinks that when we "reasoneth," all we do is calculation. Thinking is the act in which we conceive "a sum total from addition of parcels; or conceive a remainder, from subtraction of one sum from another: which, if it be done by words, is conceiving of the consequence of the names of all the parts, to the name of the whole; or from the names of the whole and one part, to the name of the other part. And though in some things, as in numbers, besides adding and subtracting, men name other operations, as multiplying and dividing; yet they are the same: for multiplication is but adding together of things equal; and division, but subtracting of one thing, as often as we can." If all reasoning is reducible to calculation-specifically addition and subtraction-then the best model of acts of reasoning may be found in the mathematical sciences.

But beyond the field of mathematics, one could also translate the basic mathematical requirements of Hobbes's model of rationality into the metaphorical languages of positivity (addition or multiplication) and negativity (subtraction or division). In this translation, any domain of experience, including the realm of language, could be subjected to the mathematically and instrumentally quantifiable. By the same token, the task of any valid philosophy or science must consist in discovering, through verifiable and replicable experimental procedures, the rationality of nature and of the world in just this way that rationality has been defined. In modeling rationality on this logical and technical presupposition, this notion of reason and the underlying rationality of the world are considered directly or indirectly regulated by logical processes represented, or potentially representable, as usable information. All information would be, in turn, actually or potentially numerically quantifiable.

An intuitive appreciation of Hobbes's picture of thinking, however, reveals a number of problems-notably, its reductionism. After all, one could easily think of occasions when reasoning has little or nothing to do with addition and subtraction. When we take pleasures or displeasures (e.g., in poetry), or speak in order to rationally stipulate the permissible and impermissible in morality, it is difficult to see exactly how the thought in this kind of experience is merely a process of addition or subtraction. How is it possible to reduce aesthetic experience or moral feelings to a mathematical calculation? Hobbes, however, insisted that just as we learn in mathematics to add and subtract numbers, or in geometry to add and subtract angles and proportions, we also add and subtract "in consequences of words" when we make aesthetic and moral judgments. In logic, Hobbes believed, we generally learn to "add ... together two names to make an affirmation, and two affirmations to make a syllogism, and many syllogisms to make a demonstration." This logical principle, he believed, is the same in acts of linguistic reasoning, such as poetic grammar and moral rhetoric, as in mathematical or geometric demonstrations. Similarly, in domains such as politics and law, the logic of addition and subtraction is also the rule. For example, politicians follow the principle of calculation because they "add together pactions to find men's duties." Lawyers, too, merely add and subtract "laws and facts to find what is right and wrong in the actions of private men."

In its strongest terms, Hobbes's claim means that any natural facts or human actions that can be quantified are rational, whereas those facts or actions that are not quantifiable, not calculable, cannot be deemed rational. This is a quantitative-formalistic conception of reason, in which quantifiability and calculability are isomorphic with rationality. An intended consequence of this doctrine is new conceptions of science and philosophy: whatever is not intelligible through calculation is simply unscientific, and a philosophical proposition is practically irrelevant as well as meaningless if it does not conform to the principle of addition and subtraction. Reason, under this theory of science and philosophy, is nothing more than a natural logical machine good only for material computation. This model of rationality simultaneously bears on what may be considered meaningful and meaningless, true and false, and useful and useless. That is why, for Hobbes, all meaningful, truthful, and useful words are proper names. For example, a truthful statement "consisteth in the right...