Walking the Tightrope of Reason: The Precarious Life of a Rational Animal

by Robert J. Fogelin

Human beings are both supremely rational and deeply superstitious, capable of believing just about anything and of questioning just about everything. Indeed, just as our reason demands that we know the truth, our skepticism leads to doubts we can ever really do so.

In Walking the Tightrope of Reason, Robert J. Fogelin guides readers through a contradiction that lies at the very heart of philosophical inquiry. Fogelin argues that our rational faculties insist on a purely rational account of the universe, yet at the same time, the inherent limitations of these faculties ensure that we will never fully satisfy that demand. As a result of being driven to this point of paradox, we either comfort ourselves with what Kant called "metaphysical illusions" or adopt a stance of radical skepticism. No middle ground seems possible and, as Fogelin shows, skepticism, even though a healthy dose of it is essential for living a rational life, "has an inherent tendency to become unlimited in its scope, with the result that the edifice of rationality is destroyed." In much Postmodernist thought, for example, skepticism takes the extreme form of absolute relativism, denying the basis for any value distinctions and treating all truth-claims as equally groundless. How reason avoids disgracing itself, walking a fine line between dogmatic belief and self-defeating doubt, is the question Fogelin seeks to answer.

Reflecting upon the ancient Greek skeptics as well as such thinkers as Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Whitman, this book takes readers into--and through--some of philosophy's most troubling paradoxes.

Genres: Philosophy

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Tommy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The tyranny of reason. It is what leads us to take a stance much like that of an authoritarian headmaster who demands the utmost and also the rebellious skeptic who taunts and mocks. For Fogelin, the root of both these tendencies are the same: we are entranced by the demands of reason. The book walks us through the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Kant and Hume. It is not a complete survey of all three of these philosophers since Fogelin only touches on those topics that are related to his overall project which is to save us from the extremism of reason. Both Wittgenstein's ideas on logic and Kant's caution against pure reason was a helpful initiation for me into their ideas while Hume is someone I am a lot more familiar with.

Nietzsche is also mentioned by Fogelin, but only to be scolded for his perspectivism. The only problem that I have with this I don't think that Nietzsche was ranting about Transcendental perspectivism(Bernard Williams in his essay on Nietzsche points this out) but rather something akin to the different points of views from which we look at the world. This perspectivism need not be monster to be afraid of since If you affirm your perspective you will have to accept other perspectives too from there you can move onto a conversation that might help us chart out the differences and find common ground. There is no rule saying the conversation should end with, "That's just your opinion".

Fogelin towards the end accepts the limitations that reality puts over us and asks us to stick to empirical facts to ground us. This seems to me the stance that most people take, surely there are French professors who would rail against this, Fogelin himself has met many such poor souls. Towards the end I agree with Fogelin we are condemned to walk this tightrope of reason, but Fogelin seems to have found a small respite from the support that empirical facts offer him. But empirical facts do not exist in a void perfectly preserved untarnished by concepts: infact they are supported and derived from conceptual frameworks.

When Copernicus first proposed the geocentric model, it was the empiricists who first rejected it since the Ptolemiacal model although not perfect was useful and worked. The only argument that Copernicus had for supporting his theory was its simplicity and the only ones who supported Copernicus were other Mathematicians who saw the same elegance. I do not think that this is an argument against empiricism. But it remains a fact that the entirety of Tycho Brahe's observational data remained just that until Kepler came along and made sense of it all with the help of his own and Copernican theory. What is more important is that in doing this Copernicus, Kepler and later on Galileo had to overturn long accepted metaphysical structures. Still Fogelin's argument stands that theoretical fancies should not be allowed to run rampant without grounding it in empirical reality. The constraints that nature imposes upon us should be respected. But if as Kant point's out we do not have special access to these constraints, in fact the constraints that Nature puts on us might get sincerely mixed up with the constraints that our mind has placed on us so that we can make sense of Nature what do we do?

It is high adventure to walk this tightrope and it can be more exciting if we are crazy enough to once in a while let go of certain supports.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book, quite an easy read for a technical subject. For the most part what he states is very reasonable, but funnily enough Fogelin is less convincing when he strays from Hume and Wittgenstein. For example, he misinterprets Feyerabend. The rebuttal of "muh tech" doesn't cut it - Feyerabend could just reply saying he wasn't talking about engineering, but the role of theory in science.

I also found his staunch "atheism" to be silly, as he basically provides no reason for it beyond personal preference, thus failing to address the role of divinity and metaphysics play in our lives as rational animals. There is nothing in this book that denies Kierkegaard's "Knight of faith" - if anything the Dane is vindicated and provides a richer, fuller philosophy for having the guts to try and relate to God. Fogelin seems too wimpy to do that.

But the guy is sadly dead so I can't be too harsh, and the book is short and worth the read. Just don't expect it to be life changing. For that, actually read Feyerabend and Kierkegaard...

[Al Bità · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short, succinct book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the limitations of reason.

Now don’t get me wrong: this is not an attack on reason by any stretch of the imagination! Reason and reasoning remains the only valid way that claims and assertions about our world can be examined and tested. What Fogelin is on about here are the bases on which we rest our reason and our thinking, and covers these in four chapters: Why Obey the Laws of Logic? (deals specifically with the Law of Noncontradiction); Dilemmas and Paradoxes; Pure Reason and its Illusions; and Skepticism. Fogelin examines each of these problems, providing summaries of what philosophers have written about them (so the reading can sometimes get “difficult” — in the sense that readers must get their minds about the subject in complex and possibly confusing intricacies). But Fogelin is not himself a difficult writer. He writes competently and clearly. He is not afraid of stating his particular position on individual aspects, and appears to be a safe and reliable guide to the journey.

The titles of the four chapters mentioned above provide the major concerns Fogelin is writing about: they are basically suggesting that Pure Reason seems to be attracted to the extremes of reality (where all the more “interesting” areas lie) and Fogelin pinpoints where and when the problems occur, what philosophers have written about them, and whether they succeed or not in providing some reasonable explanation of them.

The last three chapters (Modest Responses to these Challenges; Matters of Taste; and Last Words) summarise his thoughts on the matters raised in the first three. He is concerned with a common problem he sees, especially with more contemporary philosophers, who seem to follow willy-nilly wherever their reason takes them, leading them to ultimate contradictions, infinite regressions, paradoxes and dilemmas, and finally to the absolutist realms either of complete relativism, or of destructive skepticism. Fogelin suggests that these are signposts of the excesses of reason. If I am reading him right, he is saying that when our reason does lead us into these murky waters, then perhaps we need to understand that it is precisely at those points that we need to know that further reasoning along these lines will lead us astray, to the extent that further speculations will result in losing the subject of the original inquiry…

Fogelin’s modest suggestion that philosophers need to keep their reason ‘entangled’ with the specific subject matter of the initial inquiry for their comments to be of any real positive value strikes me as being a very beautiful and encouraging sign for the further maintenance of our most powerful analytical tool: our mind.

[Haseop Shin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this book at a library book sale thinking it was Eric Voegelin, not Robert Fogelin. I only learned, never to judge a book by the last name.

The thesis of the book rests on Kant's famous preface to his Critique of Pure Reason. It deserves to be quoted at length, really anywhere.

"Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

The perplexity into which it thus falls is not due to any fault of its own. It begins with principles which it has no option save to employ in the course of experience, and which this experience at the same time abundantly justifies it in using. Rising with their aid (since it is determined to this also by its own nature) to ever higher, ever more remote, conditions, it soon becomes aware that in this way—the questions never ceasing—its work must always remain incomplete; and it therefore finds itself compelled to resort to principles which overstep all possible empirical employment, and which yet seem so unobjectionable that even ordinary consciousness readily accepts them. But by this procedure human reason precipitates itself into darkness and contradictions."

In short, although the quote above is already Kant's 800 pages of epistemology in short, the basic thought is that our concepts and thoughts often go on a logical journey of their own unrestricted by any concrete experience that puts us in a very depressed mood. "Percepts without concepts are blind"—mere experience without any preconceptions to categorize and bind experiences into a coherent representation is blind. "Concepts without percepts are empty"—mere thoughts without experience to limit and restrict endless chains of thoughts that lead to abyss of absurdity are personally meaningless. So the enterprise of knowing is far from a mere passive phenomena of preordained stimuli impressing themselves upon the "tabula rasa" of the human mind, but it is rather an active intuitive process of conscious selection and organization of the scattered phenomena of the world.

Fogelin, relating to his expertise in philosophical skepticism and especially Wittgenstein, explains the very obvious tension that the lengthy quote above prefaces. The human project called knowledge inevitably appears more and more arbitrary the more we admit human intuitive categories of perceptions or whatnot into our realm of facts. How do we justify the increasingly arbitrary nature of knowledge with our inherent hunger for pure facts? This is not just an abstractly esoteric dilemma. It is a “human dilemma.”

Fogelin offers examples. Recall the famous liar paradox, one of whose many versions go something like “I always lie.” Let’s call this statement “X.” The problem is apparent. If I am in fact lying while stating X, then I am in fact telling the truth by virtue of the meaning of X. So X is false. Then, if I am not lying while stating X, then I am in fact telling the truth by virtue of the meaning of X. So X is false in both cases. This is an inherently linguistic paradox that arises as a product of our attempt to rationalize the world by imposing our linguistic structures upon hypothetical situations. Does this mean, because we’ve found an error in our system that seems logically permanent and permanently logical, we should abandon our language? How can we expect to have meaningful discussions about truth when the very linguistic vehicle of thought itself is flawed?

Another example of dilemma by Fogelin. We all know moral situations in which we cannot not possibly choose one situation over another simply by innate laws of human reason. Fogelin give Satre’s well-known example of the son who is torn between staying with his aging mother and going to battle to fight for his country. So, again, the question rises: what are we to do with this moral system (putting aside any inputs from divinity, of course) that innately presents us with illogical qualms?

Okay, one more example. Are you certain that you are biologically related to your mother? Because your relatives have told you? Because you have photos or your birth certificate? But since when has your criteria for certainty dropped so low as to believe second-hand experience! However, you know it is simply impossible to empirically find out the truth of this situation. To be perfectly consistent with your skepticism, you must be suspicious of your mother’s embrace and never really trust her. However, no one is willing to do this. It makes sense, but also absurd.

Fogelin’s answer is balance. “It is essential to see that an irreconcilable moral conflict can exist without bringing all morality down around it” (61). Because human rationality pivots around our categories of understanding which our mind imposes on the world of scattered phenomena, not everything will be perfect as long as mankind is imperfect. So as we run into components of the world that we find incompatible with our developed faculties of reason, such as Kant’s antinomies or irreducible moral dilemmas, questions of free will versus naturalism, etc., we must remember that the goal in life is not to test our reason with further abstract concepts for the sake of empty certainty in valiant skepticism but simply to use reason as a torch with which we journey through our labyrinth of raw experience. Not to fear the imminent fragility of reason, “because the moves that lead to it, though… [logical], are wholly unmotivated” (46). If we are motivated for the right reasons of living, we cannot let the empty ghosts of reason frighten us to forever turn our eyes inward away from the world into a dark solipsistic universe.

“We seem to live our intellectual lives on the edge of absurdity” (95). If we truly embrace our heritage of reason which comes down to us through the radical skepticisms of Berkeley, Hume, and others, we realize that “scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical” (107). At the end, our own will play a larger role in maintaining our sanity than we would like to admit in this intellectual sphere so dominated by western absolutist thinking. Although Fogelin does not seem to be so fond of the “over-reactions” of postmodernist thinkers such as Kuhn or some critical theorists, he poses a much needed question. That is, how will we react individually. I revere Schopenhauer’s confession that the world is his will. We all are walking this tightrope of reason. Beneath us awaits an ocean of certainty into which our unrestrained reason calls us to plunge into. We can free ourselves of these shackles of doubts, but only to swim helplessly in freedom without a sense of direction, for we will have lost the capacity to love, to desire, to strive for anything, for living requires a commitment called faith. Or we continue to walk the tightrope of reason, living on the edge of absurdity, where the only guard-rail is our will to live, love for life.

There are many quotes from Hume in this book. I will end with this one.

“In general, there is a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner.”

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

My advisor lent this book to me earlier this past semester when I was stressed out and concerned that I needed to transform my hodgepodge religiosity into a systematic and recognizable faith. This book gave me the courage and conviction to go on my own spiritual path that is neither at home in a world religion nor in atheism or agnosticism. Is this a book of all time? No, but I value it deeply.

[Jacob J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fabulous little book about the problems of logic and epistemology. It makes a compelling case for the idea that logic inevitably turns on itself when pursued without limits and offers some cogent thoughts on how we should react to that problem. I've read this book multiple times and I love it each time.

[Dario Vaccaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Walking the Tightrope of Reason" looks a lot like an educational for newbies of philosophy, but it actually isn't. American works of philosophy often leave me strongly displeased with them: they tend to blend informal with highly technical speech, complete ignorance of the history of philosophy with adoration for the "big names" and so on. Fogelin is, unfortunately, not an exception: with a few good points here and there, the rest of the book illustrates a classic problem (THE classic problem, if you ask me) without any interesting solution. Actually, the "solutions" he brings forth are at best commonplace observations that add nothing at all to the overall debate on skepticism.
So, this is a great manual for an extensive look on the greatest problem a philosopher can work with (or, rather, against), but the original aspects of the work are totally forgettable.

[Michael Holm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The focus of this book is to consider how far we can trust reason in our everyday living. Unrestrained reasoning leads to profound skepticism or to insoluble dilemmas in metaphysics, theology and morals. Professor Fogelin argues that our reasoning has to be about things in the world or it begins to generate paradoxes and conundrums or severe skepticism. In the first four chapters, he considers logic's law of noncontradiction, dilemmas, illusions, skepticism and the teachings of Wittgenstein, Kant and Hume. Philosophers should give up trying to obtain absolute certainty and reason within the limits of our observable world. That means not talking about abstract concepts like the First Cause. He also disputes the idea that excellence, truth and beauty are simply individual tastes. There are universal values common to members of society and even to societies. These values are accessible to persons such as critics who become very familiar with a subject and its exemplifications, such as oil paintings, scientific experiments, movies, musical productions, automobiles, horses, etc.

It is well-written and very accessible. Fogelin keeps the reader informed about what he is trying to convey and gracefully summarizes each chapter. The Introduction outlines the contents and presents his objective which is repeated throughout the book. He credits his sources who are primarily Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant and David Hume. Footnotes are provided in an appendix along with a bibliography and an index. It is 170 pages, excluding the appendices, so I read it twice.

I recommend this work to philosophers, both professional and amateur, and anyone who has done a lot of thinking about religious and scientific ideas. Do not despair if you cannot comprehend string theory and quantum physics. There are limits to what my reasoning can achieve but that doesn't mean that I can't reason effectively at all. Fogelin rejects all-or-nothing and advocates that meaningful reasoning is possible if we just do not stray into purely abstract topics. The search for Beauty is feasible as long as we refer to things and persons that exhibit Beauty. I rated it a five because it is such a wise and balanced book about a difficult subject. Robert Fogelin was a professor of philosophy at Dartmouth.