Can reason be humanized and remain reasonable?

Can reason be humanized and remain reasonable?

The pre-Socratic, which became the traditional view of rationality, was that thinking was essentially contemplative action; thinking was regarded as an unmediated interfacing between the thinker and the object of thought. This tradition also drew a distinct line between theoretical and practical thinking.

Aristotle considered practical thinking was human action whereas theory was a communion with the divine. Man was considered to be essentially a theoretical being guided by a search for truth. Only when practical concerns were bracketed could this communion take place.

'It is worth noting that for Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and even Spinoza, desires and passions were not original properties of the human soul but the 'disturbances' it suffered as a result of its union with the body and which it could and should constantly endeavor to transcend.'

The first attack on this traditional view was via Hobbes, refined by Locke and the French Enlightenment. They argued that man was essentially a practical creature constantly in search for happiness. As Voltaire said 'the passions are the wheels which make all these machines go'.

The second line of attack came from Hegel and Kant. Kant said that it was the perceiver that placed order upon the universe and that the knower could not know the thing-in-itself, i.e. reality is out there but we can not know it in any absolute fashion. Reality for us is the reality we create in response to our inner cognitive process driven by the sensations from the world out there.

Hegel argued that human thought was 'culturally and historically conditioned and could not transcend the categories and assumptions of its time.'

'Marx married liberal psychology to Hegel's historicism...Human thought was determined by interest...not in individual but in socio-historical terms...Each individual thought, he believed, in terms of the categories characteristic of his class...Such limited and distorted thought Marx called ideology.'

Ideology is the BIG problem of our times and the BIG question is 'can the historically naïve traditional theory of the rational model be revised without destroying rationality completely?' In other words can rationality be recovered from its heavenly haunts and be placed securely and solely within the human world without losing the positive aspect of reason.

Many humans express this common sense view of belonging to a supernatural world through their religious belief; however, even those who are not religious are often captives of the mind/body dichotomy that is so prevalent in Western philosophy.

I think that to deal effectively with this paradox we must become sophisticated enough to comprehend its source and to modify it at that point or not at all.

Cognitive science has introduced a new way of viewing the world and our self by declaring a new paradigm which is called the embodied mind. The primary focus is upon the fact that there is no mind/body duality but that there is indeed an integrated mind and body. The mind and body are as integrated as is the heart and the cardiovascular system. Mind and body form a gestalt (a structure so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts).

The human thought process is dominated by the characteristic of our integrated body. The sensorimotor neural network is an integral part of mind. The neural network that makes movement and perception possible is the same network that processes our thinking.

Quotes from Knowledge and Belief in Politics: The Problem of Ideology edited by Robert Benewick, R. N. Berki, and Bhikhu Parekh

Reason comes from understanding.
Rationalization comes from comparison, and brings irrationality with it.
No theory or philosophy will ever be able to describe what is.
There is only one answer to end all questions-I don't know.
Life is a mystery to be lived, solve the mystery and what is left?

What do we do when we reason? I would say as a minimum that to reason is to conceptualize and to draw inferences from that conceptualization. All creatures the tadpole and the human must have this minimum capacity to reason. The tadpole must categorize 'eat no eat' and 'friend no friend'. Categorizing is the first step in conceptualizing and inferring and thus reasoning.

I think that it might be worth while to think of how the most primitive creature might conceptualize. Take a primitive sea creature that has only the ability to perceive light and shadow. That creature has a zone of shadow detection let us say of 5 feet. In this detection zone it can distinguish too big or not too big for eating and decide to get away from the shadow. Perhaps it has another zone of one foot that it can decide friend or foe or eat and not eat. In this zone it must infer to get away or to chase after.

From this we might decide that conception is a structuring process where containers are an important element in conceptualization. A container might be an important element in the imagination of the creature. The creature has the ability to infer based upon a container schema. There is an inner and outer and a border between in and out. The creatures must be able to deal with container schemas and make inferences within this schema.

Also the creature must have some sort of schema for following or predicting the path of something perceived. The creature must be able to infer is the shadow going this way or that way.

So conceptualizing consists of a number of standard forms for organizing the elements of a perception so that the creature can draw inferences. The human has this same capability only greatly more sophisticated. This conception and inference process is the foundation of reasoning.

There are 3 states of Mind in which we may exist.
One is below Mind,one is in Mind,and one above.
Similar to water in that they are all the same but take on different forms. Man is in Mind, all other life is below Mind.
Man can go below Mind and be like an animal.
Man can go above Mind and be divine.
The process of transcending the Mind is to be human.
To understand is to surrender the idea that you know and accept whatsoever may be. Reason comes as a symptom of understanding, we cannot reason,it happens as a result of understanding.