The thesis is that the 20th-century philosophers T. Adorno and Max Horkheimer were basically correct when they argued that the Enlightenment world has an innate tendency to degenerate into myth, reason into unreason. And that this tendency of reason toward unreason is exacerbated by overly ambitious efforts to suppress or eliminate unreason.
We have this idea, which goes all the way back to Aristotle, that human beings are distinguished from other animals by their capacity for reason. Is this a misleading picture? Should we not think of humans as uniquely rational creatures? This is the traditional view. There is a counter-tradition, however, which says that human beings are the uniquely irrational animal.
On this view, animals are rational to the extent that they do not get mired in deliberation and hesitation, but always just cut right to the chase and execute those actions that are perfectly suited to the sort of creatures they are, while we human beings stand there paralyzed by doubt and worry.
I am sympathetic to this view, though it can be carried too far. Obviously, we have been able to choose the correct course of action enough of the time to survive long enough to reproduce. We are a successful species, but not exceptionally so, and as far as I can tell not in virtue of being exceptionally well-endowed with reason.
By that standard, you might say that human beings are cursed with too much consciousness, that our obsession with thinking creates more problems than it solves. You might say that. Presumably, we human beings, as well as our hominid and pre-hominid ancestors, thought for a very long time before we began thinking about how this is possible and how it can go wrong.
The clearest instance in the book, which I set up as a sort of foundational myth, is the Pythagorean cult in the fifth century BC, which becomes so devoted to the perfect rationality of mathematics that it has trouble dealing with the discovery of the existence of irrational numbers. The 18th-century French playwright and activist Olympe de Gouges is another example.
In the spirit of reason, she famously argued that whatever the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man — the civil rights document produced by the French Revolution in — said about men must also apply to women. And for that, the Jacobins cut her head off.
So the response to her perfect rationality was extreme, murderous irrationality. Something similar has followed countless revolutions since , and many of these revolutions, notably the Marxist ones, have been at least nominally committed to the rational restructuring of society. I gather some Marxists are perfectly fine with seeing heads roll, and assume that it will only be the right heads that roll next time around and all present-day descendants of Olympe de Gouges will be spared.
Or maybe they think it will never actually come to that. Why are we so desperate to impose order on the world and society in the first place? I think we just got a bit carried away. In the modern period, anyway, rationality became a value first in science and technology, where it plainly had its place. Making the correct inferences and following the correct method meant more scientific breakthroughs, which meant faster and more powerful machines.
But then the idea caught on that society itself is a big machine, and that the human being is a small sub-machine within the big machine of society, and that these two kinds of machine can be perfected in the same way that we have managed to perfect the steam engine, the telegraph, and so on.
But this has always been a misguided approach to psychology and politics, based on a weak metaphor drawn from a narrow domain of human life — mechanical engineering — in which we actually do have a pretty good understanding of how things work and of how problems are fixed. I wonder where all this leaves us. There are obviously limits to reason, and we can only do so much to curb our worst impulses.
At the same time, we want a world that is more intelligent, more wise, more compassionate. But we also have to base our social and political systems on a realistic model of human nature. Caution, pragmatism, case-by-case consideration of questions of justice, all seem advisable to me. Others can be found in the answer of MauroAllegranza. He did not explicitly use it, though! Another more scholarly source for Aristotle not using it as a definition is found in Being Human , Ed. Neil Roughley, , DeGruyter.
Mary Midgley writes in her contribution on the human as rational animal:. Aristotle himself does not give this definition , though his argument in the Nicomachean Ethics 1. Nor certainly did he ever proclaim that everything should be defined in the way described.
He disliked such sweeping schemes and, if asked how things should be defined, would probably have answered that "it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits" NE b 24f. Reason, ratio, as the capacity to see the light of God or knowledge, for that matter is a typical connotation transported straight into the modern age.
But these deep insights are understood as something they were able to write down in books and language. The capacity for deep insight into the fabric of the universe in Aristotle, nous , though, is essentially not explicable in language, therefore distinct from logos. Regarding a good analysis of the equivocations caused by this tradition of translation in general, see e.
There, she argues:. Aristotle meant neither to define man in general nor to indicate man's highest capacity, which to him was not logos , that is, not speech or reason, but nous , the capacity of contemplation, whose chief characteristics is that its content cannot be rendered in speech. The Scholastics therefore arguably conflated insight through reason and language in general, essentially allowing only for knowledge that is explicable in language.
It appears that the idea of defining man as a rational being is more properly attributed to the Chrysippus and the Stoics; whereas Aristotle is more properly recognized as holding that man is a political being:. Daniel S. Richter, Cosmopolis. Richter goes on to point out that, although man has reason, the idea of defining him as such is not found in Aristotle as such:.
Renehan is surely correct to point out that the idea that reason makes humans different from animals, 'whatever its origins, was the private property of no philosophical school. In other words, according to the Stoics, all of our desires are dependent on our understanding, in some sense or other. This is a view that sets the Stoics apart from both Plato and Aristotle, who had a notion of non-rational desires, but Socrates suggests something like it in many of Plato's dialogues, especially the Meno and the Protagoras.
See De Anima , a That is why the soul is an actuality of the first kind of a natural body having life potentially in it. We have now given a general answer to the question, What is soul? It is substance in the sense which corresponds to the account of a thing. Of the psychic powers above enumerated some kinds of living things, as we have said, possess all, some less than all, others one only.
Those we have mentioned are the nutritive, the appetitive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the power of thinking. Plants have none but the first, the nutritive, while another order of living things has this plus the sensory. Certain kinds of animals possess in addition the power of locomotion, and still others, i. See also Met , b : there is one part of the soul that is rational has logos. In Ethics , which you mention in the question, although Aristotle does not use the phrase "rational animal", in effect he does define Man i.
What Aristotle is asking there is what is Man's characteristic "work" action, activity as Man. It is not nutrition or growth, because these are common to all plants. It is not perception or movement, because these are common to all animals.
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By Olivia Goldhill Science reporter. Published March 4, Last updated on March 12, This article is more than 2 years old.
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