Beyond the Logos: the possibility of synthetic reason

 After the more or less fifty essays I have published so far in this blog, a picture has been coming together which actually tries to go beyond 'reason' as it has been usually understood in the received philosophical canon. 

One of the main tools of going past this received view is conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) which in practice simply means understanding something in terms of something else. The main point of Lakoff & Johnson's work is that within the more than two millenia of philosophy, philosophers were unaware of the existence of conceptual metaphor, and thus they did not account for its internal logic and they took metaphors literally and monolithically. These aspects can be illustrated with the example of wellbeing. 

Wellbeing, as an abstract concept, can be conceptualized through multiple metaphors: Wellbeing as wealth; wellbeing as care; wellbeing as stability; wellbeing as strength, wellbeing as mental health, etc. In the philosophical tradition, from the utilitarians and specially in Adam Smith's thought (the so-called father of modern economics) the metaphor 'wellbeing as material wealth' has taken central stage as the driving metaphor of economic thought as well as shaping the mathematical notations that are so characteristic of economic algebra. Reducing wellbeing as material wealth implicitly erases all other alternative conceptualizations of wellbeing, seeing them as unimportant or unworthy of consideration.

The game-changer in conceptual metaphor theory and its application to understand philosophy is that the very concepts of reason and rationality are metaphorically structured. Rationality is supposed to be the main tool that Western culture uses in order to legitimize itself and take comfort in the idea that we are driven by 'reason'. But it is thoroughly structured by metaphor. 

One of the main metaphor in which it sustains itself is through what has been called 'faculty psychology' or the metaphor of 'mind as society', which understands the mind as a community in which different people live and interact. The 'inhabitants' of the mind are reason, imagination, passion, perception, memory and will. The ontology of this metaphor leads philosophers to think that each of these faculties are fully independent from each other (which is totally inaccurate from the perspective of cognitive science). Furthermore, the inferential structure of this metaphor leads to think that if, as philosophers, we take a preference over the faculty 'reason', then we would want reason to be 'purified' from the other faculties, which is precisely what Descartes does when speaking of reason to be purified from the 'commerce of the senses' as well as Kant's central concept of "pure reason". Both of these ideas are manifestations of the underlying metaphor of 'mind as society'. 

The second part of this inferential structure is that within this 'society of mind' there is an inherent conflict between the faculties 'reason' and 'passion' for control over 'will'. Philosophers, naturally, take the side of reason and eloquently speak of how one has to repress one's passions, repress the body in order to be freed from its lower appetites and sexual desires. This pattern of hatred towards the body has been called somatophobia, which is present in main authors such as Plato, Augustin, Descartes and Kant (Bordo, 2004).

With these two patterns (pure reason and wellbeing as wealth) we get to the mainstream rational choice models where humans are completely deprived of their emotional/affective dimensions and who are depicted as mere calculators that want to maximize individual payoffs (see Lakoff & Johnson 1999, chapter 23).

So how does the Logos -the underlying rationality of the world- fare in this description? It would certainly not be in these constructed concepts such as 'universal reason', 'universal moral law' or 'rational choice'. The Logos, as Heraclitus tried to make evident, is what is behind appearances, it is that which unites and mediates occurrences in the world. In this precise sense, conceptual metaphor seems to be the Logos, which is able to explain why philosophy is the way it is and why it has the kinds of theories that it has. 

Overcoming this received view of 'reason' can be expressed as positing a linguistic model which accounts for how linguistic models arise, a theory which accounts for why philosophical theories arise. It would be some kind of meta-theory that is produced at a more encompassing level, a higher order linguistic model insofar as it explains how prevailing (philosophical) linguistic models come to be. 

Conceptual metaphor succeeds in conforming to this requirement as it shows the underlying logic which explains why we have the concept of reason we have and how through the means of 'rational choice models' this underlying philosophy is propagated and reproduced through university education.

In fact, theorizing at the level of conceptual metaphor provides moral insights that arise because of the logic of conceptual metaphor. If conceptual metaphor is always partial because it chooses one specific kind of framing or conceptualizing and implicitly erases or hides all alternative framings, then this can amount to a moral heuristic: you cannot absolutize any kind of discourse because any discourse will leave things out of consideration which may be important for someone, or even for yourself in ways that you are not currently aware. For example, in orthodox economic theory, nature is solely conceptualized as resource, and this commitment to this framing precludes all kinds of affective and aesthetic dimensions of the human-nature relationship (as source of amazement, of inspiration, of mental health, of life meaning, etc.). 

This kind of moral heuristic arises not from some alleged 'universal moral law' but rather from the internal logic of language, concerning conceptual metaphor, salience and implicit erasure (Stibbe, 2015).

In similar lines, another moral heuristic that arises from this is the idea that one is more encompassing when one considers multiple possible conceptualizations of a certain subject-matter. For example, in our western societies, wellbeing has come to be equalized with GDP growth, when it could alternatively be framed in terms of wellbeing as mental health. As we know, this is not the case and if it were the case, then the current world prevalence of depression, PTSD and anxiety would reveal to us that even in 'developed' or 'rich' countries, wellbeing is actually quite low. 

The formula would be: the more framings of an abstract concept are simultaneously considered, the more 'objective' or 'encompassing' our evaluation of a situation will be, where naturally the worst scenario is the one where we consider only one possible framing and absolutize it as what is 'rational' or 'realistic'.

References

Bordo, S. (2004). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. Univ of California Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought (Vol. 640). New York: Basic books.

Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge.