Dogmas and Postulates 2/4

No human being can live without faith, belief or reason. Unless we are mad or completely inebriated, we all always believe in something, and we are all always trying to understand and master the principle of causality. That is a minimum. The countless actions of our day-to-day lives are permeated with both faith and reason, even if we are not always aware of that. We therefore have to stand back and look for a moment at the question of knowledge and truth. What do faith and reason teach us when we try to go beyond sense-perception or the realm of instinct? In the oldest spiritual and religious traditions, reason is integrated into a system which, as it projects meaning on to human experience, tries to exert a twofold influence: it explains the ‘why’ of things before it observes their ‘how’ (and to that extent, objective observations may be distorted), but it also attempts to determine first principles and truths that are legitimated by the system and not by analytic rationality. In the beginning, there are always truths that cannot be proven or verified: in the realm of faith, which, according to Christian ecumenicism, can be experienced as a ‘setting off’ on a journey, reason is invited to recognize its own limitations, and to include in its elaborations feelings, intuitions, spiritual discernment and, more generally, mystery, dogma or destiny. We are, to a greater or lesser extent, free to use our reason, but everything it tells us about the how of things must be integrated into what faith and belief reveal as to their why. Believing in a spiritual Way or having faith in God or a system of a priori values inevitably gives rise to a particular relationship with rationality, understanding and knowledge: our understanding of the world fuses with, and is illuminated by, the values we adopt: the science of facts is concerned with the science of ends, and knowledge aspires to serve the cause of hope. This may of course pose a threat to the autonomy of reason or the objectivity of reason. As we shall see, that has sometimes been the case in history, but the threat has not always materialized. And besides, it is possible that, as in our contemporary period, it is the absolute autonomy of the sciences that obliges us to reconsider the marriage between analytic reason and applied ethics.

Analytic reason does not recognize any dogma, or any of the a priori givens of a belief or faith in a Way, a God or a Revelation. In the absence of faith, reason does not have to come to terms with intuitions, mysteries, dogmas, hopes of revealed Texts. It observes that which exists and tries to establish its own truths for itself. Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt is an attempt to construct a body of knowledge and truth on the basis of rationally established certainties. That is why he asserts that ‘clear and distinct ideas’ are true, and establishes the substance of the cogito in stages: the ‘I think therefore I am’ of the Discourse on the Method, and then the ‘I am, I exist’, which is necessarily true, of the Meditations on First Philosophy. Kant, Nietzsche and then the phenomenologist Husserl, among others, make a critique of both the first principle and the method itself, and see in the cogito a debatable initial postulate, whereas Descartes saw it as establishing a primary truth. Rationalism had, from its very beginnings, already established the potential limitations of the faculty of reason. Could reason claim to establish an absolute order of knowledge? Few philosophers or scientists had actually argued in categorical terms that it could, and, increasingly many of them insisted that reason must at least be autonomous within the field of scientific knowledge. They therefore defended their freedom to criticize the certainties and dogmas established by spiritualities and religions when they had some direct or indirect effects of scientific analyses. Even when it is based upon hypotheses, reason has the right to ask questions of systems, religions, sacred Texts, mysteries and all dogmas. Whilst there is a danger that faith will bind reason to an order that is imposed by a system of thought or a religion, it is clear that, a contario, a free reason that has been liberated from questions about the ‘whys’ and ends must be able to extend its powers of observation and its scientific and technical mastery to the whole of the real and to all human beings, without any limits and without any ethics. The contemporary period teaches us not only that the danger is real, but that the excesses are always apparent. ‘Knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul’, remarks Rabelais in Chapter VIII of Pantagruel, as though to warn us against such divorces and potential acts of negligence.

We can see that the dualistic thought developed by the Greek philosophers has sometimes clarified the nature of these different realms, but that it has also caused the very rifts it wanted to prevent. For Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the order of knowledge necessarily found its coherence in the realm of action. Philosophers, like practising believers, must know in order to be able to act and must act in the light of their knowledge. Such was the meaning of Greek wisdom. The paradox was, however, that it was indeed a dualist thought: the two realms of knowledge were linked together by the reason of the philosopher, and only his dialectical intellect could establish correspondences between the two. We are a long way from the spiritual traditions of Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism. According to their inner logic, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, and they have never given rise to an intellectual dualism. The important thing is not to consider the tension between body and soul, but to find within ourselves the correspondence between them and the Whole of the universe. Greek rationalism, on which Western philosophy is still so reliant, believes in individuation and a multiplicity of dualist relations (the world of ideas and the world of the senses, body and soul, mind and instinct, wisdom and passion, and so on), whereas the ancient spiritualities hold that freedom consists in escaping from the individuated ego and in seeing ourselves as part of the interdependence of intimate and multidimensional relationships that have to be harmonized (but never only in intellectual terms). The monotheistic religions have not been subjected to the same Greek influence. It is probably Christianity that has borrowed most from Hellenistic logic (in the very exposition of its theology and humanism), whereas Judaism and Islam do not necessarily accept its basic dualism.

Christianity itself, with its central assertion of ‘the faith is love’, has succeeded in distancing itself from its own dualist theology: its paradoxical rationality about the being of God and the mystery of the Trinity is shot through with outbursts of the love of God, in God and through Jesus that enfolds spiritual experience within an aspiration similar to that of the ancient spiritualities. We find in the French philosopher Henry Bergson (twentieth century) the same desire to escape dualism, to be free of the contradictions of the intellect and language (which spatialize movement, and codify and relativize what they claim to be transcending) by relying on the faculty of intuition, which penetrates its object from within. We can understand that this concerns not only the object of knowledge and the sum of knowledge that I can acquire but also the faculties and their hierarchy: what do my senses, my mind and my heart transmit to me even before I concern myself with the order and meaning of the world?
The basic difference between faith, belief and reason is what these modes of knowledge have to say, individually or collectively, about the subject, before they turn to the question of the object. As we can see, both the faith that enlightens and the reason that criticizes make demands and express hopes, but there is also a danger that dogma will become suffocating and that technical reason will come to be dominant. Basically, once the relationship between faith and reason is seen as a dualism (a clash between the two, the integration of one into the other, or the reconciliation of the heart and reason), it is only natural that we should observe tensions, struggles and a balance of power. Once again, it is a question of power.