From Irrationality. Published by Princeton University Press in 2019. Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris 7–Denis Diderot. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine and other publications.

Logic might be, metaphorically, an octopus, as Cicero said. But the octopus, literally, is no logician, even if, significantly, between 2008 and 2010 an octopus named Paul was hailed as possessing the power to divine the outcomes of football matches. Widespread public openness to cephalopod intelligence helped to create the appearance that something more than simple divination was occurring—as one might believe in trying to predict the future from the course of motion of an ant or a goldfish: something more like a true prophetic intelligence. But of course few would confess to being truly convinced by the appearance, as reason, on the most widespread view today, belongs to human beings alone (and even human beings cannot predict the outcome of unfixed future sporting matches). Everything else in nature, in turn, from bears and sharks to cyanobacteria, rain clouds, and comets, is a great force of unreason, a primordial, violent chaos that allows us to exist within it, for a while, always subject to its arbitrary whims.

This view sets us up, as human beings, starkly against, or at least outside of, nature. And this is the view that has been held by the majority of philosophers throughout history. Most of them have understood this outsider status to be a result of our possession of some sort of nonnatural essence that makes us what we are, such as an immortal soul, endowed from a transcendent source and ultimately unsusceptible to erosion, corrosion, and other natural effects. For philosophers of a more naturalistic bent, who have dominated philosophy only in the most recent era, human reason is not ontologically distinct from vision or echolocation or any of the other powers evolution has come up with, enabling different kinds of organism to move through the world. It is part of something vastly larger—namely, nature, and all the evolved adaptations that it permits favoring the survival of organisms by myriad pathways—but that vastly larger thing itself still has no share in reason.

This feature of the currently prevalent, naturalistic understanding of reason—namely, that it is found within the human being exclusively, even if it is just as natural as echolocation or photosynthesis—is more indebted to the Cartesian tradition than is usually acknowledged. Descartes grounded his human exceptionalism in dualism, taking the soul as something nonnatural and ontologically discontinuous with the human body, which for its part was on the same side of the great ontological divide as animal bodies, oceans, volcanoes, and stars. But naturalism has been effective at finding ways to preserve human exceptionalism while at the same time collapsing the ontological divide posited by dualism. The most prevalent view today is that reason is something uniquely human, which we deploy in a world that is variously conceived as either nonrational or positively irrational. In this, modern thought sharply departs from certain basic presuppositions of the ancient world. On the most common ancient understanding of the human being as the rational animal, it was taken for granted that human beings were sharing in something, reason, that did not simply exist immanently within them, but rather had its own independent existence. Human beings were, among animals, the only ones that possessed reason as a mental faculty that they could bring to bear in their choices and actions, but this did not mean that the rest of nature had no share of reason at all. Rather, the world itself was a rationally ordered whole: it was permeated by, was characterized by, was an expression of, reason.

It is true that in the history of analytic philosophy we find a prominent view that is fairly similar to the ancient one. Thus in Gottlob Frege and the early Wittgenstein, the structure of facts in the world is the same as the structure of propositions in human-generated arguments: the real and the intelligible are one. In more recent years John McDowell has pushed an even bolder account of the identity of mind and world, to the point that some critics have accused him—as if it were prima facie evident that this is a bad thing—of absolute idealism.¹ But for the most part the presumption has been that, as Gassendi put it in the seventeenth century, logic is the art of ordering our thoughts, and not the force that makes the world itself an ordered whole rather than a dark chaos.

The widespread ancient sense of rationality is perhaps what also lies behind the curious expression in contemporary American English, in which we describe a decision that is particularly easy to make as a “no-brainer.” The implication here is that one could take the prescribed path even if one did not have a brain—the organ standing in here metonymically for its function—simply in virtue of the fact that its rightness is inscribed in the order of things. Not having a brain, or any consciousness at all, yet doing the correct thing anyway, this peculiar phrase reminds us, might be the ultimate expression of reason.²

This is the vision of the world, and of humanity’s place in it, imparted in the Australian poet Les Murray’s lines:

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the
universe

The world itself is, on this view, what bears meaning. Our own language, and our efforts to portray the world in it, far from being what is meaningful, are only feeble and inadequate echoes of this world, cutting us off from it. It does not connect us to the world; still less does it make us the world’s masters.

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See John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1994]).

I owe this insight to D. Graham Burnett (in personal correspondence).