REASON

The question of the nature of reason is at least as old as philosophy. Plato (c. 428-348 BC), for example, held that rationality is an intrinsic feature of reality. According to Plato (1998), there are two distinct realms, the intelligible and the sensible. The realm of the senses corresponds towhat would now be more usually called empirical experience. It is a realm in which things come to be, decay and pass away, and is dominated by appearances and opinions. The intelligible, in contrast, is a realm of ideas. As opposed to the mere opinion which experience affords, the realm of the intelligible yields true knowledge. In other words, the realm of thought points towards a reality that exists apart from the world of the senses. In turn, Plato argues that the world of experience gains what reality it has from the realm of the intelligible. This contention relates to Plato’s ‘Theory of Ideas’, which states that all experiential particulars that share the same identity do so because they are particular instances of a universal idea that precedes them logically. Thus, if we take three different individual cats, each one having specific differences separating it from the other two cats, what they have in common is that they are in each case an instance of the universal idea ‘cat’. What conjoins each one with the other is the common property of ‘cat-ness’. The same goes, Plato argues, for more abstract notions, such as beauty, goodness and justice. Every instance of these things presupposes a universal. All universals exist in themselves: the ‘good in-itself ’, ‘justice in-itself ’, etc. It follows for Plato that the kind of knowledge that we can have of the world of experience merely amounts to obtaining opinions about it that are correct (i.e. it appears that such-and-such is the case). In contrast, true knowledge (such-and-such is the case) concerns the highest reality, i.e. the forms and, in turn, these gain their reality from the Idea of the Good. The Idea of the Good is what bestows upon life the standard of measurement whereby actions, beliefs and the like can be judged good, true, etc. In other words, there is a reality independent of an individual’s inclinations or psychology that endows what he or she does and is capable of doing with meaning. Since the Idea of the Good occupies and constitutes the basis of intelligibility, it does not change (as the realm of experience does relentlessly) but remains eternally consistent. The knowledge of this is the highest form of knowledge (‘dialectic’) and finds its highest expression in human reason. Goodness, rationality and happiness are, for Plato, all necessarily linked to one another. Thus, he holds reality to be determined by objective rational conditions. In short, for Plato, reality is intrinsically rational.