An Appeal to Reason

An Appeal to Reason

    
I saw a rock band had an album entitled: "An Appeal to Reason."  It struck me as a rather pretentious name, but I can't say as I blame them, it is a good album.  The question is: is it even possible to appeal to reason?  What does it mean to appeal to reason, to appeal to good faith, to appeal to really any of the human qualities?  However, the question I would like to explore is this one: What does it mean to "appeal to reason"?  It seems whenever one says this, there is a fervent hope that our views will be taken seriously, not necessarily thoughtfully, but seriously.¹ 

    However, no one really wants to appeal to reason.  There are two reasons²  for this, and they stem from our actual definitions of reason.  Firstly, it is quite impossible.  Reason is a tool of our thought process.  Reason, according to the Oxford Dictionary's first definition is: a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event.  It is the color inside a "fact," I would say, but lacks form.  Put another way, at my job I am sometimes doing rather circuitous work to accomplish what appears to be a rather simple and straightforward task.  When asked to provide my reasons, they are rejected or accepted not on the virtue of an "appeal to reason," but rather on an appeal to something else in the other person.  My reasoning is apparently flawed, but I have listed reasons for my activities.³  Therefore, there must be something else besides reasoning with which my flawed reasoning came into contact.

    A second problem comes into play when we ask ourselves: who is to say that the person pronouncing judgment is working through "reason"?⁴  Surely this is a mammoth problem.  The Nazis "appealed to reason" with their devilish work.  Atheists and Christians both say they are "appealing to reason," though that cannot be the case since one side is obviously right and the other side wrong.  We then will often dismiss the other side for being "unreasonable."  Reason cannot be that which we base our world.  Reason is only an aspect of our understanding.

    So, when we appeal to reason, we are asking the impossible, and, I believe, subconsciously know it.  It is a circular argument and follows like this:

1.    I am appealing to your reason.

2.    Your reason should be like my reasoning.

3.    If you cannot be appealed to by reasoning like I have, you are unreasonable.

However, the problem is that that which you are trying to appeal to is also that which you are trying to convince.  In other words, when we ask to appeal to reason, we are really handing people a blank sheet and calling it a test; expecting them to know the answers to questions of which they were not provided.

    Life is a mystery in a larger part than we would like to acknowledge.  It is built on a faith that the world will not kills us.  Even ignoring some Hume-based problem with causality,⁵ we cannot know if our universe is a ticking-time bomb and that we may have only moments left.  In the end we rely on inductive reasoning⁶ and blind faith to carry us through to the end of the day; an "appeal to reason" boils down to pride and nonsense; but I am willing to be proven wrong.  If you wish to do otherwise, please, appeal to my reason.

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1. Perhaps we would be better off saying "an appeal to seriousness"?
2. No pun intended.
3. Some may argue that my appeal to reason fell short, but then that begs two very important questions: First, what did I follow that was not reasoning?  Secondly, how was the other person to pronounced judgment that my reasoning was flawed?
4. Here I will assume we are working with a second connotation that reason is a judgment based on intellectual thought processes.
5. David Hume (26 April 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a British philosopher who believed that we could not be certain of the causality of anything.  We can only believe that a certain event caused another one, but it is not possible for humans to state this with full certitude.
6. This is when we take our observations and blow them up to encompass the whole.  It is not perfect, I would argue, but in the end it is all we really have.