Rationalism

Modern rationalism

The intellectual attitude aiming at placing the rational reason and procedures as sources of the Connaissance goes up with the ancient Greece, when under the name of Logos (which means in the beginning Discours), it is detached from the mythical thought and, starting from sciences, gives rise to the Philosophie. Plato sees in the sensitivity only one pseudo knowledge giving access only to significant, material reality and changing world. To trust with the significant experiment, it is to be as prisoners locked up in a cave who even take the shades which ravel on the wall slightly enlightened, for reality. That no one does not enter here if he is not geometrician , makes it engrave with the pediment of its school: the exercise of mathematics learns how to us to be detached from our feel and to exert our only reason, precondition necessary to the philosophical Dialectique. The knowledge of reality is knowledge of the Idées or gasoline S, realities understandable and immutable, and this knowledge is rational. There is in this direction a Platonic rationalism.

Aristote, on the contrary, supports its philosophy on the concrete observation of nature (physis), and poses the bases

formal Logique, in its Organon (we let us call today it general Logique),
of what one called thereafter the Métaphysique (beyond the physis, i.e. beyond nature),
of the ethical ( ethical in Nicomaque ).

But it is not the use of the reason, nor its claim, which is enough to define rationalism as doctrines. This one is constituted and systematized at the end of the Renaissance, under the specific conditions of the redécouverte of the ancient heritage, and the mathematisation of physics.

Modern rationalism rests on the postulate Métaphysique according to which the principles which underlie reality are identical to the laws of the reason itself. Thus it is principle of determining reason (or of sufficient reason) that Leibniz, in the Essais of théodicée (1710), formula in the following way: it is that never nothing arrives, without there being a cause or at least a determining reason, i.e. something which can be used to return reason a priori, why that is existing rather than nonexisting, and why that is thus rather than of very other façon. If it is nothing which is not nor does not arrive without cause, he is not nothing consequently which is not, in right, understandable and explainable by the reason. Within the framework of the onto-theology, this thought identity and to be it finds its justification ultimate as a God, creator of the world and his laws on the one hand, of the human reason and its principles on the other hand. It in what rationalism thus included/understood is achieved fully in the philosophical Idéalisme, to which Hegel will give its most systematic form, in the formula: what is rational is real, and what is real is rational (Foreword of the Principles of the philosophy of the right ).

It results from it that the reason, container of the universal principles and the ideas A priori expressing eternal truths, is immutable and identical in each man. It is in the sense that Descartes, in the Discourse on Method , written: The good sense is the thing of the world best divided , specifying that the power to judge well and distinguish truth from with the forgery, which is properly what one names the good sense or the reason, is naturally equal in all the men.

From the point of view of the origin of our knowledge, rationalism is traditionally opposed to empiricism, irrationalism, and the revelation:

Rationalism and empiricism

According to the Empiricism, the Expérience is the source of all our knowledge. As John Locke in the Essai explains it on the human understanding of 1690: Let us suppose that the spirit is, like one says, of the blank paper (tabula shaved), virgin of any character, without any idea. How is it made that it is equipped with it? From which does it draw this immense funds that the busy and limited imagination of the man draws in him with an almost infinite variety? From where does it draw this material of the reason and knowledge? I will answer of only one word: experiment; in it, all our knowledge is based and found in last authority its source. This experiment, it is that of our external directions, which enables us for example to form the idea of color, but also that of our thought in act, by which we are able to form the idea of thought, or reasoning.

Such a position leads to a devalorization of the reason: an idea is not, with the eyes of David Hume, that one copy of a similar impression , so that all this creative capacity of the spirit is nothing more than faculty to combine, transpose, decrease the materials which provide us feel and the experiment ( Investigation into the human understanding , 1748), combinations which it operates according to relations of resemblance or adjacency. From the point of view of empiricism thus, it is nothing in the intellect which was not initially in the sensitivity , it with what Leibniz will rétorquera except intellect itself .

Rationalism postulates, indeed, the existence in the reason of universal logical principles (principle of the excluded third, principle of sufficient reason) and of ideas a priori, i.e. independent of the experiment and preceding any experiment. Thus Descartes admits it the existence of ideas a priori and innate such as the idea of infinite, time, number, or the idea even of God who is like the mark of the workman on his work , simple ideas and first, without which the significant experiment would remain to us inintelligible: I consider that there are in us certain primitive concepts, which are like originals, on the owner of which we form all our other knowledge ( Letter in Elisabeth of May 21st, 1643). To the eyes of rationalism, indeed, the significant experiment could not make known true. Plato already denounced of it the fluctuating and relative character, which show us only one soft set of shades, and Descartes, in the first metaphysical Meditation, the misleading character: All that I received until now for truest and ensured, I learned it from the directions or by the directions: however I sometimes tested that these directions were misleading, and it is prudence to trust never entirely with those which have us once trompés. Rationalism, however, we will low see it in its critical form, does not repudiate the significant experiment but to forms a priori subjects it which makes it possible and organize some given.

Rationalism and irrationalism

It is necessary to understand here by irrationalism the reference to any experiment or any faculty other than the reason and not obeying for its laws, supposed to give a major and more authentic knowledge of the phenomena and beings, and leaving room to a fringe of unutterable, mystery, or unexplainable. Rationalism is opposed in this direction to the Mysticisme, the magic, the Occultisme, the Sentimentalisme, the Paranormal or to the Superstition. Only make authority the rational processes: intellectual obviousness, demonstration, raisonnement.
It is with sentimentalism Romantique that is caught of it Hegel in the foreword with the Phénoménologie of the spirit , when it evokes this alleged philosophy which by the absence of concept is given for an intuitive and poetic thought, throws on the market of the whimsical combinations, an imagination only disorganized by the thought - fantastiqueries which are neither flesh, neither fish, neither poetry, nor philosophy . That which claims to touch the truth in the unutterable experiment of the intimate feeling condemns to the silence and the loneliness of incommunicability; in other words, it presses with the feet the root of humanity .

Rationalism and revelation

From a theological point of view, rationalism proposes the natural light of the Raison in opposition to knowledge revealed that the Foi constitutes. Against the Fideism, he asks that the articles of the Foi and the Écritures themselves be subjected to the rational examination. Spinoza, in the Treated théologico-policy , develops a critical reading of the Old Testament.
Descartes, in the foreword with the Seniors and doctors of the faculty of theology of Paris who precedes the Méditations metaphysics , affirms that all that can be known of God can be shown by reasons which it is not need to seek elsewhere than in ourselves, and than our spirit alone is able to provide us . According to him indeed, parallel to the Theology revealed, only the Raison enables us to show the existence of God by the ontological Argument, so that the existence of God necessarily rises from sound gasoline, as it necessarily rises from the gasoline of the triangle that the sum of its angles equalizes two right angles.

Thus, for Descartes, the research of the truth can only be done by the Raison, without the light of the Foi ( Principles of philosophy ). The Cogito ergo sum postulates that the man is a intelligent Substance which can reach the truth.

Critical rationalism

Critical rationalism, resulting from the Kantian company, can be characterized by three features:

renouncement of its dogmatic claims and metaphysics.
the integration of the experiment within dialectical experimental.
recognition by the reason itself of its limits and its historicity.

The Kantian synthesis

The development of modern experimental physics, at the end of the Rebirth, with the major figures of Galileo, Torricelli, and Newton, little by little will lead to a revision of the Staff Regulations of the reason in its relationships to the experiment. Assumptions not fingo , I do not forge assumptions , Newton declares: the science of nature claims the observation of the facts, and cannot rise from only principles a priori. Kant, very attentive with this question, takes of it note in the Critique of the pure reason . It distinguishes three faculties there:

the Sensitivity or faculty of the empirical intuitions, by which something is given to us.
the Understanding or faculty of the Concept S. the pure categories of the understanding are the rules which enable us to organize the experiment a priori, such as for example the relation of causality. None of these two properties is preferable with the different one. Without the sensitivity, no object would not be given to us and without the null understanding would not be thought (…) Their union alone can leave the connaissance. Connaître, it is thus to apply concepts to intuitions, so that thoughts without contents are empty, of the intuitions without concepts, blind men .
the reason or faculty of the Ideas. An Idea being able to correspond to no object given in the experiment (God, the immortality of the heart, freedom), such suprasensible objects cannot thus be objects of knowledge to the direction defined more high.

One can consequently estimate that Kant operates the synthesis between empiricism and rationalism, by giving right to as to the other. But this synthesis actually takes place in the direction of a critical rationalism: That all our knowledge starts with the experiment, that does not raise any doubt (…) But if all our knowledge begins with the experiment, that does not prove only it derives all from the expérience. Given empirical indeed, given the certainly irreducible one to the reason, can be organized and give place to a knowledge only through the forms a priori of our spirit:

forms a priori of the sensitivity itself, which are the space and the time,
pure categories of the understanding which so to speak constitute the logical structure inherent in our spirit, structure in which we format the data resulting from the sensitivity to operate the synthesis of it, and whose all the switching functions derive from our judgments. (For the complete table of the categories, to see the Critical article pure reason)

So that reality In oneself remains to us forever unknowable: we have access only to one phenomenal reality .

If thus Kant is diverted Cartesian postulate of the simple and innate ideas constitutive of a pure knowledge independent of the experiment (dogmatism), it is to substitute the pure categories of the understanding to them which are the condition of possibility of any possible experiment.

The abandonment of the claims metaphysics

Consequently Kantian criticism, to claim to know suprasensible objects concerns an illegitimate use of the reason. Thus are invalidated the attempts at rational demonstration of the existence of God: against the ontological argument of Holy Anselme and Descartes, Kant explains why simple concept of God, one cannot deduce the existence analytically from it. I thus had to remove the knowledge to substitute the belief to him.

It is finished by it claims metaphysics and dogmatism of the reason. In the years 1830, Auguste Count, in his Course of positive philosophy , described in these terms the state positive, or scientific, to which finally the intelligence arrived: Lastly, in the positive state, the human spirit, recognizing impossibility of obtaining absolute concepts, gives up seeking the origin and the destination of the universe, and knowing the intimate causes of the phenomena, to only stick to discover, by the well combined use of the reasoning and of the observation, their laws effective, i.e. their invariable relations of succession and similitude. It is a question from now on of including/understanding how a phenomenon occurs. The observable facts are bound by laws which express of them only the constant relationships.

It is from this point of view that in 1964, E. Kahane, in its rationalist Dictionnaire , can define it in the following way: Rationalism explicitly comprises the hostility with any metaphysics, the refusal of very unknowable a priori, and the exclusion of any other mode pled of knowledge, such as the revelation, the reduced intuition with it only, etc

The dialectical experimental one

Far from excluding the experiment, Kantian rationalism does one of the two sources of our knowledge and reconciles of it in this direction rationalism and empiricism. But it is advisable to specify what one consequently understands by “experiment”:

It could not consist, as would believe it a naive empiricism, in a rough fact, a truth of reality being given to us in the obviousness of the immediate report. Without the mediation of the reason indeed, the experiment would remain dumb and could nothing teach us. The facts do not speak about themselves. Kant - it should still here be evoked - there insists lengthily in the Critique Pure Reason :

physicists understood that the reason sees only what it produces itself according to its own plans and which it must take the fronts with the principles which determine its judgments, following immutable laws, that it must oblige nature to answer its questions and not to let itself lead so to speak leaves some by it; because otherwise, randomly made and without any plan traced in advance, our observations would not be attached to a law necessary, thing that the reason requires and which it needs. It is thus necessary that the reason arises to nature holding, with a hand, its principles which only can give to the concordant phenomena between them the authority of laws, and other, the experimentation which she according to these principles, to be educated by her admittedly but not as a schoolboy who lets himself say all that likes the Master imagined, but, on the contrary, like a judge in functions who forces the witnesses to answer the questions that he them pose. What is thus schematically traced to us, it is the step of the applied science such as it takes shape since Galileo:

rigorous Observation of a phenomenon which one seeks to explain
Formulation of a Hypothèse, which is a statement that one can subject to a test
Expérimentation, by the development of an assembly making it possible to test the validity of the assumption.

In the same way that a “man of experiment” is not only one man who lived, but a man who knew to think of this lived to draw some from the lessons, the experiment for the scientist has direction only according to problems which he seeks to solve, and of rational assumptions which he works out for this purpose. Gaston Bachelard, in the new scientific spirit , explains it in these terms:

(…) an experiment can be an experiment well done only if it is complete, which arrives only for the experiment preceded by a project studied well starting from a Théorie completed (…) The lesson of reality is not worth that as much as they suggest rationnelles. achievements The experimental device, carried out in laboratory, rationally is planned and built by the researcher, according to the assumptions that he wants to test. It requires a complex equipment, which is itself the result of a former theoretical effort. Like Bachelard (quoted COp) specifies it: (…) one needs that the phenomenon is sorted, filtered, purified, run in the mould of the instruments, produced on the plan of the instruments. However the instruments are only materialized theories. It leaves there the phenomena which carry of all shares the mark théorique.

From where the expression, by this same philosopher, of “rationalism applied”. The experiment in laboratory is thus not reality in a rough state, but a rebuilt and selective reality, in which the truth is worked out through a whole of operations and rational procedures which correct our naive and spontaneous approach. Nothing is given, all is built. In this dialectical direction experimental takes shape, a dialog and a collaboration between the experiment and the reason, leading way, according to the expression of Bachelard, to one nonCartesian epistemology .

Historicity of the reason

With the Phenomenology of the spirit , Hegel proposed the historicity of a reason which develops its forms through the history of the world. Like remarks it Gilles-Gaston Granger, the great discovery hégélienne, it is the historical character of the reason , and this awakening of historicity determines contemporary rationalism. To design creationist of reason, such as it still appears in the categories of the understanding whose Kant intended to draw the complete picture once and for all, is opposed from now on a dynamic design of the reason, always related to the historical context and epistemological in which it is spread.

Bachelard, by introducing into the formation of the scientific spirit (1938) the epistemological concept of Obstacle, wants to show a rational thought in catch with “crises of growth”: It is in the act to even know, closely, that appear, by a kind of functional need, slownesses and disorders. It is there that we will show cause stagnation and even of regression, it is there that we will detect cause inertia which we will call of the obstacles épistémologiques.

The progressive conquests of rationalism are consequently done against the reason itself, so that while reconsidering a past of errors, one finds the truth in a true intellectual repentance. Passed of errors: hasty generalization of knowledge, verbal practices, pragmatism, substantialisation, naive realism which are as many obstacles as science draws up vis-a-vis itself. To specify, rectify, diversify, they are there dynamic types of thoughts which escape from the certainty and the unit and which finds in the homogeneous systems more obstacles than of impulses. The rational spirit, within the framework them sciences, must be a critical spirit always in alarm in front of its own factors of inertia, always prompt to call in question its own conquests. Remain then the most difficult task: to put the scientific culture in a state of permanent mobilization, to replace the knowledge closed and static by an open and dynamic knowledge, dialectiser all experimental variables, to finally give to the reason reasons to evolve/move.

In the same order of ideas, Karl Popper, in the logic of the scientific discovery , tries to show that the character of a scientific theory is due to its Réfutabilité. One indeed cannot, starting from singular experiments, so many are, to conclude with the universality from a law. But one can test it: it is enough to show only one contrary observation with a universal statement to be certain that this statement is false. Truth is thus not simple reciprocal forgery, so that one cannot check an assumption, but to only try to falsify it. A theory will consequently be held for true only as far as it will resist the experimental tests to put it in failure. It is to say consequently that science progresses by refutations and experimentation: nothing is final, the truth is always provisional.

The reason is not conceived more as a closed and rigid system of determined principles a priori, but well like a plastic and dynamic reality, like a constructive process, whose the history testifies even to knowledge. What one regards as being a rational explanation thus depends narrowly on the historical context in which she is formulated, of the state of knowledge, and the developments in the technologies of observation and experimentation. The concept of Probability, for example, introduced into the complex models of the science of the particles, or that of local model, could not intervene as rational within the framework of physics galiléenne or Newtonian explanation. Like Gilles-Gaston Granger specifies it: Thus science progresses it by successive goings beyond of the out-of-date forms of the reason (…) True irrationality thus seems rather a regression towards anachronistic forms of the explanation.

Such critical rationalism, widened wants to be: a rationalism removed from its prejudices metaphysics, closely mixed with the development of sciences, which is built by going beyond of its own historical forms, and resulting from a dynamic design from the reason.

Rationalist organizations in France

the rationalist Union;
the freethinking

Christian point of view

Encyclical Fides and Ratio of Jean-Paul II of the September 14th 1998, on the relationship between the Faith and the Reason.

the Syllabus of Magpie IX condemned certain aspects of rationalism, when too much radical.

Artistic point of view

There exists current an architectural rationalist.

References

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method , 1637.
Rene Descartes, Meditations on philosophy first , 1641.
Baruch Spinoza, Treated théologico-policy , 1670.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Tests on the human understanding , 1705.
Emmanuel Kant, Critical of the pure Reason , 1781, second edition 1787.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the phenomenology of the spirit, 1807.
Auguste Count, Course of positive philosophy , 1830 - 1842.
Gaston Bachelard, the new scientific spirit , 1934.
Gaston Bachelard, formation of the scientific spirit , 1938.
Karl Popper, the Logic of the scientific discovery , 1934, ED. Frenchwoman Payot, 1973.
Gilles-Gaston Granger, the reason , Puf, I, 1955 That-know.

External bonds

Associations claiming rationalism:

rationalist Union
French Association for the zetetic scientific information
Circle
www.rationalisme.org - ESA Confabulated

Random links:

Video games Magazine | William Peter Blatty | MountyHall | Aurèle Nicolet | Small Gray (extraterrestrial)