Do FACTS and LOGIC Really DESTROY Anything?
The battle between rational arguments and lived experience
Post (1) of a four-post essay.
The full essay makes up Part 4 of a broader series about language. It stands alone if thatās what you want out of your reading life, but for best results read the previous installments in the seriesāāāthis, this and thisāāāfirst.
I saw an interesting thing recently. A tweet from someone I donāt follow came up in my timeline, arguing that logic wasnāt āhelpful to the complexity of lived experienceā.
I think thatās true often enough to make it a worthwhile observation. But the mysterious tweeter went further and claimed that logic is essentially flawed. They set out to show this by using apparently strict logic to justify a bad conclusion:
Reason tells you that (1) itās better not to suffer than to suffer, (2) the living suffer more than the dead, ergo (3) itās better to be dead than alive.
The point seems to be that FACTS and LOGIC arenāt the right tools for evaluating the worth and functionality of a life.
I think logic isnāt the right tool for deciding whether lifeās worth living or not, or for making basically any other important life decision, but not because itās flawed. The problem with logic is that itās flawless, and everyday life isnāt.
The chain of reasoning above is flawed not because logicās flawed, but because the chain isnāt properly logical. Logic is just a tool for taking incoming data and using it to spit out more data. The tool is perfect in itselfāāāonce youāve agreed on how many ā2ā is and how many ā4ā is you canāt argue with the statement that 2+2=4. But when youāre dealing with anything less abstract than mathematics the quality of your conclusions depends on the quality of your data. The input affects the output.
So if you went up to Carl, the Friendly Logical Robot, and said āSuffering is bad, the dead donāt suffer and living people never experience anything but meaningless, overwhelmingly agonising sufferingāāāis it better to be alive or dead?ā, then he might give you something like the chain of reasoning above. His conclusion would be wrong, but only because you gave him the wrong data. You left out all the beauty, meaning and happiness we can feel, aspire to and inspire in others, often without especially setting out to.
But say you said āSuffering is bad, living things suffer, dead ones donāt, but thereās more to life than sufferingāāānow, is it better to be alive or dead?ā
Hereās how Carl might respond:
(1) Itās better not to suffer than to suffer,
(2) The living suffer more than the dead,
(3) Therefore the dead have one advantage over the living,
(3) But thereās more to life than suffering,
(4) I havenāt been told whether any of this āmoreā stuff is good enough to outweigh the painful stuff,
(5) Therefore I canāt say whether death or life is better because my information is incomplete.
This is why no-one likes Carl.
Do we know whether any of the āmore to lifeā stuff is good enough to make up for lifeās suffering? Everyone has their own answer to this question, but the answer isnāt based on logic. Itās based on emotion, motivation, purpose, meaning, a million things that canāt be rationally argued for because they express a deeper part ourselves than rationality. By their nature, emotions and motivations are messy and vary from person to person, meaning that the world of reason is just too perfect to be of any use in sorting them out.
Some people argue that itās more reasonable to live than not to, if only to keep the species going. But you may not value life enough to consider it worth maintaining, whether on a personal or a species level. Then there are the people like me who donāt want childrenāāāweāre clearly not keeping ourselves alive for the sake of the species. Then there are the people who value life itself but not the human variety of it. If you fundamentally donāt value life or humanity, there isnāt any strictly rational argument that can force you to.
People who struggle to find reasons to keep living are guided towards the light through action, direct experience, love. Things like meaning, purpose, connection and inner peace provide you with reasons to live, making you feel itās more reasonable to live than not to, but neither of these senses of āreasonā have anything to do with 2 and 2 equalling 4.
LANGUAGE GAMES
So if FACTS and LOGIC donāt express our lived experience very well, or give anyone but mathematicians and philosophers a reason to get out of bed in the morning, are they good for anything besides 2+2=4?
Personally, I think of cold logic as a language game. It works very well in some life situations and very badly in others. If you try to dribble a football along a skating rink you wonāt get very far. But if you and ten other people pass it around to each other on a football pitch you can have a good time.
The philosopher Wittgenstein coined the term ālanguage gameā to get across the sense that there are multiple ways in which we use language. Wordsā meanings change depending on the contexts in which theyāre used, the actions theyāre embedded in, the intention of the speaker, the shared reference points between the speaker and the listener, and so on and so on. Words arenāt static concepts that exist in a universe of their own, theyāre actions that slot into webs of activity, forms of life. They command, entreat, denote, instruct, demarcate, warn, prohibit, enlarge, open up possibilities. Theyāre communal. They imply worldviews.
For most of our history the language games weāve used to describe reality have been strangely indirect. Go back thousands and thousands of years, and you find people saying not āThereās a treeā or āHereās some food, letās eat itā but āThereās the home of the tree spiritā and āLetās offer this food to the gods so theyāll protect us against stormsā. A deep instinct pushed our ancestors not to simply describe things as they found them but to give them mystical roles, enliven them, populate them with ghosts, tell stories about them, explain what cosmic events caused them to come about, ascribe all kinds of communal significance to them.
Not very FACTS and LOGIC friendly, those people.
Philosophers call language games that are full of significance, colour and resonance āthickā. A thick worldview or ethical code is full of shades of meaning and feeling that go beyond mere logic, mere functionality, the bare moral minimum. There are lots of cultural specifics in there. Youāre not just told āThou shalt not killā, youāre also told āDonāt sleep outside under a full moon, itās bad luckā. Itās not just āDo what you want as long as you donāt hurt anyoneā, itās āBetter to be courageous, gracious and open-minded than notā. Not just rules but virtue, not just facts but story.
Maybe indirect is the wrong word for thick language gamesāāāhow about full? For ye olden people, everything in the world was āmore-thanā. They apprehended reality with more than their five senses, their isolated individual perspectives. They didnāt feel the need to limit themselves.
A GENEALOGY OF REASON
The major linguistic innovations during the Renaissance-Reformation-Enlightenment-Industrial Revolution sequence were directness, simplicity and isolation. Suddenly people looked at things and simply described what they saw, which weakened both the mystical and the communal elements of language: never mind what the religious community says this thing in front of me is, thatās not what I see.
Da Vinci: āHereās what the Church says about the physical worldāāāwhat do I see there?ā Descartes: āHereās what the Church says about my mindāāāwhat do I say about it?ā Luther: āHereās what the Church says the Bible saysāāāwhat do I read in it?ā Galileo: āHereās what the Church teaches about the universeāāāwhat do I see there?ā Darwin: āHereās what the Church says about our pastāāāwhat can I discover in it?ā Marx: āHereās what the Church says about our futureāāāwhat do I say about it?ā Freud: āHereās what the Church says about the nature of religious beliefāāāwhat do I say about it?ā
The Enlightenment thinkers declared that sense experience was the only proper means of gathering data, and reason was the only proper language to discuss the data with. Rather than faith, community, tradition, authority, myth and story being the lenses through which people viewed reality and formed beliefs about it, FACTS and LOGIC were the new kings. Where St. Paul once told believers to give reasons for what they believed and Aquinas promoted a āfaith seeking understandingā, philosophers now declared that reason came before belief and understanding before faith. God was now in the dock, and if He couldnāt defend His existence then it wouldnāt be accepted.
What was it that Enlightenment thinkers valued so much about reason? Two things: (1) you can test its claims using methods that everyone has access to in principle, and (2) if the claims hold up they hold up for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Emotions are personal to you. Traditions are arbitrary because different cultures have different ones. Authority confuses having power with being right. Religious beliefs are based on extra-sensory criteria and cause unending and often violent disagreements. Only reason can claim universal authority, which means only reason can unlock the fundamental truths of existence.
And hereās where the Enlightenment thinkersā isolation turned to connection. By isolating themselves from their own traditions, these innovators invented a language that could speak to people from any tradition. Yes, the language of science and reason is cold. Itās thin. Its vocabulary isnāt very rich, very large or very motivating. But everyone speaks it. Any two people in the world can debate a logical proposition. Any nation with the resources and knowhow can make a car or design a robot. And in theory, any group of religious or cultural traditions can peacefully coexist as long as they agree to a few ground rules.
HEREāS THE THING ABOUT āIN THEORYā THOUGHā¦
The Enlightenmentās love for science and democracy has survived, but it didnāt take people too long to knock some holes in its rosy view of rationality. Hume said as early as 1740 that āReason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey themā. (Emphasis mine: people sometimes leave the middle bit of the sentence out.) Freud later backed this up by emphasising just how much seemingly rational justifications for our beliefs and actions often obscure our real motivations.
Meanwhile, Europeansā ongoing discovery of other parts of the world showed them that cultures vary profoundly, causing some to question whether even logic could guide everyone towards the same āself-evident truthsā. And when the theory of evolution came along it challenged religious certainties, but it also threatened the deist view that reason dropped out of the sky and landed fully formed in the human brain, giving us some sort of infallible Key to the Universe.
For well over a hundred years now, mainstream philosophy hasnāt been friendly towards religion but a lot of it hasnāt been especially friendly towards Facts and Logic either (the analytic tradition being the major exception to the rule). Popper argued that you canāt ever prove a scientific proposition, only disprove it. Nietzsche, Marx and Schopenhauer were more interested in action and willpower than in rationality, and existentialists and phenomenologists were more interested in subjective experience. Some of the Continentals got so bored with rigorous analysis theyād occasionally ditch it for the novel format.
From the ā60s on postmodernists took Nietzscheās āno facts, only interpretationsā ball and ran with it, declaring the Death of NaĆÆve Rationalism just like their ancestor once proclaimed the ādeath of Godā. Drawing on Marx as heavily as Nietzsche, these philosophers preferred not to ask āIs this claim true?ā but āWhoās making the claim and why? What purpose does it serve? Who does it protect? What context gave rise to it? What historical and traditional baggage does it carry around? Who is it true for?ā So where the medieval theologian would say āGod wrote the Bibleā and the Enlightenment philosopher would say āNo, people didā, the postmodernist says āWhy did those people write the Bible? What power structures were they propping up?ā
Today weāre living in an uneasy equilibrium between the Doctrine of Universal Reason, which keeps science, maths, universal human rights and the secular nation-state going, and the Doctrine of Lived Experience, which argues that your truths are your own and you canāt understand someone elseās way of life by reasoning about it. You have to experience it from the inside, speak its language game as your native tongue, experience the full āthicknessā of it.
Reason is the ultimate SHALOL, reducing everything to the lowest common denominator so that everyone can discuss it precisely and reasonably. And lived experience represents all the thick layers of language that some people would rather werenāt hacked away.
The problemāāāif cold logic is too perfect to describe the specific messiness of reality, then talking about an infinity of lived experiences makes our analysis too specific to bind everyone together. A world with only FACTS and LOGIC erases the complexity of different peopleās problems and reduces them to statistics. But a world with only lived experience (that is, the slices of it that people choose to emphasise) walls us all off into little pocketsāāāwhether individual-sized (solipsism) or group-sized (tribalism)āāāthat canāt understand each other on any level.
I have two problems with this: (a) I believe members of different groups can understand each other on the levels that matter most, because we share a species before we share the identities. Beliefs vary widely, but patterns of reasoning, emoting and speaking vary less than some people think. And (b) members of shared identity groups do frequently share certain experiences in common, but not all members of a group experience the same things, and those who do process them slightly differently to one another.
So if FACTS and LOGIC donāt cut it and neither does lived experience, where does that leave us?
Read on for my compromise candidate.