A Reasonable Question about Reason

Volume 2, Number 3

A second reason why I am still a Christian after all these years,¹ is that I have spent most of my adult life studying and reflecting on modern, Western, intellectual history. To be clear, I am no expert on the subject. Although I apprenticed to be a historian (I got a PhD in history from the University of Virginia) and loved the days of my apprenticeship, I never managed to land a job that would allow me to settle into a truly scholarly profession. I have, however, continued to dabble over the decades and have been blessed to know some noble souls and remarkably smart and erudite people who have taught me a lot either through their writings or in person.

One of the first of these noble souls was Dr. Katherine Lindley, my undergraduate advisor at Houghton College. Houghton is a small, Christian, liberal arts college in the Wesleyan tradition hidden away in the hills of western New York state, and I would not trade the education I got there for a degree from any university in the country. Dr. Lindley is one of the main reasons I feel this way. She ranks second only to my parents for having shaped me as I stumbled into adulthood. “Kay” left her home in upstate New York after high school, went off to college at Houghton, went on to get her PhD in French history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and eventually returned to Houghton College where she taught for several decades. She and several of her colleagues gave me and my friends a true liberal arts education.

Dr. Lindley did not teach us what to think; she taught us how to think.

I have always hoped to do for my students what Dr. Lindley did for me.

One of the first epiphanies came to me during my sophomore year at Houghton as I lay on my bed one day reading my Western Civilization textbook. While reading a description of the Enlightenment, I realized I was reading a description of myself. It brought me up short. I wasn’t sure I liked being described in such rationalistic terms, but I also knew I really wanted to be reasonable. Was it a good thing to be an enlightenment rationalist, I wondered. And, even more to the point, I wondered: was it reasonable? Is an Enlightenment view of reason a reasonable view of reason? What ought we reasonably to expect from our ability to think? Such questions have never left me, and I have Dr. Lindley to thank for planting such seeds in my nineteen-year-old mind.

It took a few years for me to make my way to graduate school, but when I did, I was blessed and thrilled to find myself working with Alex Sedgwick and Richard Rorty—the former a very legit historian of modern French thought, the latter a very legit, but rebellious, philosopher and culture critic. Through Sedgwick and my friend James Davison Hunter I began reading Blaise Pascal. Through Rorty I began reading the pragmatists and other critics of the modern mind, not the least of whom was Rorty himself.² Some of the more notable influences included William James and John Dewey in the pragmatist camp; Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Michel Foucault among Continental thinkers; and intellectual historians and critics including Alasdair MacIntyre, Jurgen Habermas, Merold Westphal, and Leszek Kolakowski. Other important voices that joined in somewhere along the way include Milan Kundera, Wendel Berry, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Simone Weil, and more recently, Terry Eagleton and Leon Kass.

While these remarkable intellectuals have influenced my thinking in numerous ways, one of the most fundamental contributions they have made has been to reveal that the modern quest for truth by way of reason alone (the sort of reason I had been reading about in my Western Civ textbook) did not turn out as it was supposed to. As Alasdair MacIntyre explains, the “Enlightenment Project” sought “an independent rational justification of morality” whose “key premises would characterize some feature or features of human nature. The rules of morality would then be explained and justified as being those rules which a being possessing just such a human nature could be expected to accept.” Succeeding at this project, however, requires the ability to identify some telos or purpose that defines human nature, and it was this telos that reason alone could not provide. As competing views multiplied, the net effect was that they cancelled each other out. By the middle of the nineteenth century, MacIntyre maintains, the handwriting was on the wall. “The sum total of the effective criticism of each position by the others,” he writes, “turned out to be the failure of all.”³

To put the whole matter simply, what John Dewey called the “quest for certainty” did not end in the certainty for which it sought but in the doubt in which it had begun. Descartes’s thinking self (“I think therefore I am”) dissolved into the doubting self, and the foundation gave way. As a result, despite Descartes’ conviction that his system demonstrated the necessary and certain existence of God, Descartes’ God turned out to be neither necessary nor certain. Over time, Descartes’ God succumbed to the dissolvents of doubt and so did the supposedly necessary immaterial self we call the soul. Reason became a totalizing self-critique that ended quite logically in doubt and disbelief, in absence and a-theism.

As numerous scholars, from scientists to sociologists and from novelists to poets, have argued, over the course of modernity reason succumbed to its own critique and ushered us into a large, open space from which God had disappeared. As the logic of the “quest for certainty” played out and the “torrents of uncertainty”⁴ did their work, it became apparent that God just “ain’t necessarily so,”⁵ and therefore, we are now told, “almost certainly does not exist.”⁶ We find ourselves, as Max Weber maintained, in a disenchanted world, “an age without prophets, far from God.”⁷ The sociologist Charles Taylor concurs. While quick to distance himself from the “master narrative” of secularization theory, Taylor nonetheless also describes ours as “a world which seems to declare everywhere the absence of God.”⁸

Poets and novelists offer a similar take. Hardy wrote eloquently of “God’s Funeral,”⁹ and Eliot observed that our modern story has brought “us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.”¹⁰ Like the poets before him, Kundera also sees the disappearance of God as what ushers in the modern. “God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning,” Kundera writes, and “thus was born the world of the modern era,”¹¹ an era burdened by an “unbearable lightness of being.”¹²

In the same vein, Leszek Kolakowski writes, “The God who once guaranteed a stable order of values and social relations, rules of reasoning and mechanisms of the physical world, and who functioned as the culmination of that order, no longer exists, for that order no longer exists. […] The absence of God,” Kolakowski observes, “became a permanently festering wound in the European spirit” leaving “a disquieting void.”¹³ We may struggle to live consistently in this absence without erecting idols and surrogates, but the absence frames us still. It may be a God-haunted absence, and God may be “present even in our rejection of Him,” but godlessness is, nonetheless, our modern inheritance. “We begged God to leave the world, and He has, at our request,” Kolakowski concludes. “A gaping hole remains.”¹⁴ As the historian Robert L. Wilken has noted, at this point in our story, “The ‘presumption of atheism’ must be the starting point of all our thinking, even about God.”¹⁵

Nietzsche, of course, captured the significance of this story as dramatically and clearly as anyone ever has, but Nietzsche also understood that with God out of the picture, any notion of deep meaning or purpose given to human existence disappears as well. Nietzsche argued at the end of modernity that there is no larger story that gives purpose to life or instills meaning in it, and he urged his contemporaries to accept this reality. “What alone can our teaching be?” he asks. To which his answer is, “That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself [...]. No one is accountable for existing at all [...]. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain to an ‘ideal of man’ or an ‘ideal of happiness’ or an ‘ideal of morality’—it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality purpose is lacking.”¹⁶ Purpose, as Nietzsche understands it, is a human invention, not something that is rooted in some meaning-giving reality—not in God or in nature, not in humanity or in society, not in happiness or in some notion of the good, not in religion, philosophy, or science.

The modern hope had been that by way of reason alone, we could identify the essence of our humanity, and that reason alone could identify the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. This hope did not pan out. As God gradually dissolved and disappeared, so did all that had always depended on him. As a result, instead of identifying the human essence or meaning for which the quest sought, reason led to the rejection of the very idea of a human essence and eventually ushered us into our current post-humanist malaise. There is no way we are meant to be. There are only ways we might imagine ourselves becoming. There is no Meaning (given to us), only meanings (we might create for ourselves). There is no (inherent) Good, only (utilitarian and preferential) goods. There is no (binding) Truth to be discovered, only (felt) truths to be created. At “the end of modernity,” we now deal in meanings, goods, and truths that come and go with those of us who create them.

Over the past several decades I have become convinced that doubt and disbelief, absence and atheism are the logical outcome of the modern story. To find oneself in a place of doubt and disbelief, and embracing the absence and atheism, is to come out at the logical end to which the modern quest for certainty leads. I have a great respect for my friends and associates who seek to live consistently in this space. It is not easy to do.

To say that this is the logical outcome of the modern story, however, is not the same as saying that the outcome is reasonable. Behind the story of the modern quest for truth by way of reason alone lies the view of reason that I had questions about all the way back in college. As the years passed, my questions did not go away. In fact, the more I studied the history of the quest, the more questions I had about the notion of reason that drove the modern project and the more doubts I had about the doubt and disbelief to which reason led.

Two days ago, I somewhat randomly pulled G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy off the shelf and paged through it. My eyes paused on the following. As Chesterton reflects on his path to faith in Christ, he admits, “I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt.”¹⁷

I think something like this has happened to me as well. Rather than Huxley and Spencer (although they played a role), it has been Nietzsche and Rorty, et al., but please do not miss the fact that it has not been what these critics got wrong that has impacted me. To the contrary, it was what they got right. Their insight and honesty about the outcome to which our modern story has led is what has pushed me to keep thinking. Certainly, thoughtful Christians have played a significant role in why I am still a Christian, but so has Nietzsche.

I do admit that nothing of what I’ve written here actually constitutes an argument for Christianity. It does, however, help explain why I did not slide into the doubt and disbelief to which so many of my peers and students have moved. While logic does lead to such conclusions, my lingering doubts about whether the view of reason that stands behind the story is reasonable have kept me from going there. My lingering doubts have left me with reason enough to disbelieve the doubt and doubt the disbelief—and to keep pondering what a reasonable view of reason might be.

The old question just won’t go away: Is an enlightenment view of reason a reasonable view of reason? “And if the Enlightenment view was not correct,” (to quote Leon Kass), “what should I think instead?”¹⁸

---

1. For reason number one, see “Still Christian after All These Years,” The Yellow Pad, Volume 2, Number 2.

2. For more on Richard Rorty, see The Yellow Pad, “Stumbling into Rorty at the ‘End of Modernity’” Volume 1, Number 7.

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 38, 50.

4. Blaise Pascal, “Conversation on Epictetus and Montaigne” in Blaise Pascal: Thoughts trans. W. F. Trotter, The Harvard Classics (New York: P. F. Collier & Sons, 1920), 396. Actually, this is not a good translation of Pascal, but it is a lovely phrase that I cannot resist.

5. Thanks to Ira and George Gershwin for this memorable phrase that reveals our modern condition more profoundly than could have been imagined when Sportin’ Life first sang this song in the musical “Porgy and Bess.”

6. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), 158.

7. Cited in Dawkins, The God Delusion, 37.

8. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 376.

9. Thomas Hardy, “God’s Funeral” in James Gibson, editor, Thomas Hardy: The Compete Poems (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 326.

10. T. S. Eliot, “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” in Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1963), 147.

11. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 6.

12. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper Collins, 1984).

13. Leszek Kolakowski, “Anxiety About God in an Ostensibly Godless Age” in Is God Happy? Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 184-85.

14. Kolakowski, “Anxiety About God,” 192, 195.

15. Robert L. Wilken, Remembering the Christian Past. quoted in Mars Hill Audio (Feb 17, 2024). See also “A Word of Comfort for Jimmy” in The Yellow Pad, Volume 1, Number 3.

16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 65.

17. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 1908, 1995), 90.

18. This question comes from “Looking for an Honest Man” by Leon Kass that appeared in National Affairs, Fall 2009. It is an extraordinary autobiographical essay that I found only recently. It had me in tears more than once.