A More Extended Conception of Reason

Below is a continuation of the Turner transciption (see Part I and Part II).

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What I [Turner] want to do now is to move on from talking about reason in this minimal sense, and to talk now about a more extended conception of reason, which seems to me to be operative within Aquinas’ position.  But in doing so, I can do very little more than to give you the [bare] bones of an argument of what seems to be an instinctive, though often unarticulated prejudice about reason which can get in the way of reading Thomas Aquinas on the subject of reason.  There are theologians who just don’t seem to like reason these days.  It seems so unfriendly to feelings and to the rich complexity of life in general.  One has to concede that reason reduced to this minimal sense that I have been describing as formal ratiocination is a dull, flat and thus far not very profitable thing.  You might be correspondingly uninspired as many are, by Thomas’ essential definition as he calls it of a human being as a “rational animal,” [for this] appears to limp so languidly behind the complex, vibrant, carnal reality of any actual human being.  [And while] it is true that Thomas is no enemy of that narrow sense of reasoning, [viz.] ratiocination, it is equally clear that you cannot get the role of reason in theology right, even in that limited employment of it, which is ratiocination, until you place [it] in a far wider understanding of what it is for a human being to be a rational animal than any which might be deduced from a rationality so minimally conceived.  Though Thomas doesn’t quite put it this way himself,  I want to suggest that you get the hang of the full-blooded thing that he means by rational animal, if you can see how it is that of all the activities in which human beings engage, it is music-making which best exemplifies how animals are rational-that is to say, human. 

Now I will first say a few things about that.  Then I will say that you can see why this should be so in his theology of the Eucharist.  There you can grasp a sort of ideal type of what rationality means to Thomas Aquinas, and how it is that reason understood in that sense in which music is typically rational has a sort of Eucharistic or perhaps more broadly sacramental shape epistemologically speaking.  Then I’ll say that a proof for the existence of God is just a case of reason in its minimal expression, as ratiocination, fulfilling itself in the same sort of epistemological shape that music and the Eucharist have-all of them, poetry, music, [proof?], belong [to] what Thomas means by reason in its most general, fundamental sense-the maximal sense, as I shall call it. 

To understand this maximal sense, the first step is to begin where Thomas does, viz., placing us humans where we belong in the big scheme of things.  That is to say, that we humans are genetically animals all the way through, not partly animals.  Therefore, whatever we humans do, we do as animals do it. When we love, we love as an animal loves.  If my cat cannot reciprocate on equal terms the affection that I bestow upon it, this is not because she is an animal and I am not.  It is because I am and she is not, a rational animal.  If I know and love God, then I know and love God as only an animal can.  If my cat cannot know and love God, this again is not because my cat is an animal and I am not.  It is because the cat is a different sort of animal than me.  So from one point of view, my animality contrasts with the brute animals in that mine is rational and the brute’s is not. As it were, rationality is the form of my animality.  For Thomas my rationality places my nature in another point of contrast, viz., with angels.  For it is only an animal that can be rational, and the rational animal is rational all the way through-not partly rational, partly angelic.  Angels know many more things than humans do but are not rational at all. God knows everything knowable but not as humans do, not rationally.  When it comes to how to know things, animals and only animals do it by the rational means of deliberation.  Angels do not know by deliberating and neither does God know things by deliberating. Only a certain kind of animal deliberates.  Only a certain kind of animal can deliberate.  And only animals have bodies to speak with.  That, as one of Thomas’ earliest followers, Dante Alighieri says, is what it is to be human, a speaking animal.  Or as he [Dante?] puts it somewhat more negatively, “all forms of failure of what it is to be human are in some way or show up in failures of language.” 

Step two. Another way of placing human beings is to say that only rational animals have meaningful bodies-bodies which bear and transact meanings; bodies which speak.  If you have a problem with my saying this, think about how a smile speaks.  Since I happened to have mentioned Dante already, think of how Beatrice’s smiles and frowns in Paradiso speak to Dante.  Or consider how a man may smile and be a villain-his smile says one thing, his villainy another. Or think of the complexity of communication contained in that other famously ironic act which speaks-the kiss of Judas-a greeting of friends whereby he betrays Jesus.  “Do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” says Jesus, protesting the rather cruel irony. If you have a problem with how a smile or a kiss or a laugh can speak, thinking them somehow to be more material than formal speech, do not be misled. For you will not find it any easier to explain how formal speech works-i.e., conveys meaning-or how less material than gestures, are written squiggles bearing meaning.  [Or] how the vibrations of the larynx [are] any less material than the rictus of the lips-either being expressive at times of the most profound thoughts.  You may have a general problem about how meanings get into matter in any case, but if that is so, [then] your problem about meaning and formal language is no more nor less a difficult solution than how it is that a smile or a kiss or a laugh could be the bearer of ironies.  All are bits of matter which say things. Explain the one if you can, but only by such means as explaining both.  Such at any rate is the view of Thomas Aquinas.  You will find it all in his Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, particularly book III and elsewhere.  A rational animal is a meaning bearing, a sign-conveying lump of organized sensuous matter.  And we call those human bits of matter “bodies” because they are matter alive with that form of life-Thomas calls it soul-which consists in the transaction of meaning.  They are alive precisely as communicating and the quality of their lives is in the quality of their communicatings.  A rational animal is speaking matter-it is a body in its character as language. 

So [let us go] back to language and to help out there, back to Judas’ kiss.  You can grasp the terrible irony of that kiss because you grasp how its two-fold meanings contradict one another-what Judas’ kiss says as conventional bodily sign, viz., the greeting of friends is subverted by what is said by his act of doing it, viz., betraying his Savior and Lord.  [As another example], think of the performance of the contradictory behavior of the parent who smacks his child in order to teach it not to solve problems by means of violence.  He smacks to correct the misbehavior, but the same smack itself unsays the correction.  So that is step two-utterances perform something you say, or of course we might add, signs effect, as to say the words, “I promise,” is to promise.  But also, performances utter.  That is to say, the very materiality of the signifier as enacted can bear its own meaning.  Which is part of what is meant to say that humans are rational in Thomas’ sense, viz., that human bodies signify or rather some matter is a human body precisely if it signifies.  You might say that brute animal bodies signal things but don’t signify.  Angels don’t have bodies [...] so if they transact meanings, it is not by means of language that they do so, which is the same as to say that they are not rational.