Tha Habit of Reason

Yet another masterpiece by Brand Blanshard:

Then what is thinking? It is this: a directed effort to reach the truth by solving some particular problem that stands in the way.

The first step is to make the problem specific.

The second step is to form theories freely of how to rid yourself of that burden.

[The third] step is to develop in foresight the consequences of your proposals.

The fourth and final step in thinking is to compare the consequences of your proposals to see which is best in the light of your scheme as a whole.

Life is a succession of big and little crises, and one main aim of education is to supply us with the strategies necessary for dealing with them. Furthermore, dealing with them thoughtfully may become a habit. Indeed, my thesis today is that if you have acquired that habit of reasonableness, you will have acquired the best thing that an education can bestow.

An hour, a day, a life ordered by reflective choice strikes them as gray and dull.

He was so present-minded about what was before his mind that he was absent-minded about what was before his eyes. [about John Dewey]

Why is it that, with all the advantages and with the appeal to reason open to most of us, so few people succeed in guiding their way by thought? The true answer is that each of us is a divided self. A person is a bundle of impulses or drives, of which the drive to know is important but feeble, and the others, especially when acting together, are far more powerful. Why more powerful? The answer is biological.

Now the reason our impulses to feed and fight, to fear and rage, are so hard to control is that their roots are millions of years old in our racial history; the reason foresight and logic are so feeble in restraining them is that their cortical bases are relatively recent, only a few hundred thousand years old; they are therefore relative newcomers in the management of behavior.

One may fall back on the airy line of Walt Whitman and say: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.” So what? he would add. Well, that “what” is that you have stopped thinking.

There is not one rule for thinking in religion and another for science; there is one great honest rule for both: Adjust your belief to the evidence.

If you are not a better citizen, a better man or woman, a better member of society, because of the years you have spent here, then either you or the university has fallen down on the job.

Thought is no enemy of feeling; indeed it may itself be driven by a passion for truth, as it was in Einstein, for example, and in his favorite philosopher, Spinoza.

That excellent English critic F. L. Lucas says, “Imagine the greatest man you can think of, in a bad temper; does he still, at the moment, seem great? No. Not even were he Alexander. Real greatness implies balance and restraint.”

I have not heard of an American jailed for being too thoughtful; but our jails are full of people who are there because they surrendered to impulse before they took thought.

The modern Socrates was, I think, Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was three men: one, the man with an old sweater and baggy trousers who stood on a Princeton street corner eating an ice cream cone or helped a little schoolgirl who had heard that he was good at figures; two, the physicist who pursued to the end of that revolutionary trail of thought that ended in the tiny formula E = MC2, energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light; and three, the postwar Einstein, who dedicated himself to saving the world that he saw his formula might destroy.

Men like Socrates and Einstein are what William James called “quarto and folio editions of mankind.” You and I are paperbacks.

Democracy and distinction are subtly at war with each other. The pressure of the media and the shrinking of the world are casting our minds into molds. The route to escape is through thought. By taking thought, we can choose our own media, select our own music, create our mental environment; we can surround ourselves with the best that has been thought and said in the world.