ABSTRACT
The search for reasons is not the same as finding them, for the stately progress of argument from reasons to conclusions is performed on the neutral stage of the public sphere, where an argument carries by its force, its persuasiveness, its necessity; but the search for reasons is a practice, a rehearsal conducted in private, away from the interrogatory glare of public examination. Such a search may draw on all available resources: customs, techniques, traditions, inventiveness, discipline, morality. It may express material interests, or the interests of class, gender, race and ‘creed’. It may even be conducted with piety or impiety: one positions oneself in relation to the existence of God before attempting to find one’s reasons. Leszek Kolakowski explained the implications of this choice:
Once taken, any choice imposes criteria of judgement which infallibly support it in a circular logic: if there is no God, empirical criteria alone have to guide our thinking, and empirical criteria do not lead to God; if God exists, he gives us clues about how to perceive his hand in the course of events, and with the help of those clues we recognize the divine sense of whatever happens.1
