AGAINST RATIONALISM

Michael Rosen

Rationality and the issues associated with it have always occupied a central
place within the Western philosophical tradition. Moreover, as the humanities
and social sciences have found themselves under assault from post-modernists
and deconstructionists, the role of rationality has also become a pressing
problem well beyond the borders of philosophy. In this paper I am going to
take issue with one of the most familiar ways in which rationality has been
conceived within the Western tradition of thought. Rationalism, as I shall call
it, embodies a particular conception of the nature of human action, choice and
well-being. The purpose of the paper is to call that conception into question
and to suggest the possibility of alternatives. But I should make clear at the
outset one thing that my purpose is not. It is not my intention to mount an
attack on the notion of rationality itself, either the general notion or the idea of
rationality in ethics. On the contrary. My hope is that these notions can be
defended better once we rid ourselves of certain prejudicial conceptions
regarding human nature. To put it briefly, I should like to free rationality from
rationalism.

The Rationalist Ideal

What is rationalism? Rationalism, taken most generally, subscribes to an ideal

of human self-development which consists in maximising human beings'
discretionary power of choice and using it to select between those desires
which are, and those which are not (or whose fulfilment is not) truly desirable.
For the self to be fulfilled, mature and happy, the rational aspect of the self
must be in control of its sensuous nature and desires. Harry Frankfurt gives a
particularly succinct statement of the rationalist ideal in his very well-known
paper Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person: A persons will is
free only if he is free to have the will he wants. This means that, with regard to
any of his first-order desires, he is free either to make that desire his will or to
make some other first-order desire his will instead.1 Rationalism is, of course,
by no means merely a modern view. On the contrary, the idea that we should
be emancipated, so far as possible, from slavery to our immediate desires is a
commonplace of Western philosophical thought that goes back at least to the
Greeks.
For the Greeks of the classical age, moral action was closely connected
to the possibility of rational knowledge; yet the moral order was seen to stand
permanently under threat from unbridled desire. Although Plato believes,
famously, that the practice of rational reflection has its effects on the feelings
and motivations of those who engage in it as we discover the good by reason,
so we come to love it he also believes that the unlimited effectiveness of
1

H. Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, in G.

discursive reason is not guaranteed and that it is not merely reason that must
hold the passions in check. So even in the ideal state, the Republic, a way must
be found for desire to be kept in its place. Plato puts a vivid example of the
way in which the appetite contradicts reason into Socrates's mouth:
...Leontion, son of Aglaion,...was on his way up from the Peiraeus,
outside the north wall, when he noticed some corpses lying on the
ground with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and
look at them, and yet at the same time he held himself back in disgust.
For a time he struggled with himself and averted his eyes, but in the
end his desire got the better of him and he ran up to the corpses,
opening his eyes wide and saying to them, There you are, curse you
a lovely sight! Have a real good look!2
Plato believes that his ideal citizens must have thumos: a third element
whose presence is responsible for giving reason power to surmount appetite
and desire. This capacity is held to be innate in human beings but can also be
trained. In that case the thumos can enforce the claims of reason against the
power of appetite:
So the reason ought to rule, having the ability and foresight to act for
the whole, and the thumos ought to obey and support it. And this
concord between them is effected, as we said, by a combination of
intellectual and physical training, which tunes up the reason by
Watson (ed.), Free Will (Oxford: O.U.P., 1982), pp. 81-95, p. 94.

intellectual training and tones down the crudeness of natural high

spirits by harmony and rhythm.3
So far, I have given a preliminary characterization of rationalism in
terms of its ideal of human development. I want now to pursue matters by
turning attention to the different means by which, it is thought, that ideal may
be achieved.

Discursive Rationalism
(1) One view, which we might call discursive rationalism, identifies reason
itself as the effective means by which the self emancipates itself from its
slavery to a particular set of empirical desires. Discursive rationalism is, in a
certain sense, rationalism in its purest form. It asserts the distinctive capacity
of human beings to be motivated by the knowledge gained through reflection.
The tradition of discursive rationalism starts, I think, obviously enough, with
Plato and continues through the varieties of Greek thought to the extent that
the latter embodies the view that philosophical reflection is an essential means
for the practical achievement of the good life. The vein of discursive
rationalism comes to the surface as a theme in the philosophy of German
Idealism, culminating in Hegels vision of the unity of theoretical and practical
rationality in Absolute Knowledge and again in Jrgen Habermass hugely

2
3

. The Republic, Book IV, 439-40.

The Republic, Book IV, 441-42.

ambitious attempt to reconstruct the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School as

an exercise in hermeneutic self-reflection.
A commitment to this position is the central conclusion to emerge from
Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermass major work of the nineteensixties.4 Habermas there argues against (what he takes to be) the reductive and
purely instrumental conception of interests at work within the Marxist
tradition. He advocates instead a fusion of the Marxist idea of the interested
nature of action with the Idealists conception of rational self-reflection. Thus
the concluding third of the book carries the title: Critique as the Unity of
Knowledge and Interest. As Habermas himself puts it:
... the concept of the interest of reason, introduced by Idealism, needs
to be reinterpreted materialistically: the emancipatory interest itself is
dependent on the interests in possible subjective action-orientation and
in possible technical control... Interest is attached to actions that both
establish the conditions of possible knowledge and depend on
cognitive processes, although in different configurations according to
the form of action... The act of self-reflection that changes a life is a
movement of emancipation. Here the interest of reason cannot corrupt
reasons cognitive power, because, as Fichte indefatigably explains,
knowing and acting are fused in a single act.5
4

Habermas, J., Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) (London: Heinemann,

1978)
5
Knowledge and Human Interests, pp. 211-12.

Practical Rationalism
(2) But not all rationalism is discursive rationalism. Indeed, not even Plato is
committed to discursive rationalism alone. As the passage quoted above makes
clear, reason on its own in Platos view is not enough to enable us to overcome
our desires if the latters force is not otherwise held in check. Thus another
form of rationalism seeks to achieve self-mastery not directly, by rational
discourse addressed to ones own self, but indirectly, by rational action aimed
at changing ones desires. If Plato is the great initiator of discursive
rationalism, Aristotle, surely, is the founding father of practical rationalism:
the advocate of training and habituation in the service of discretionary selfcontrol. The supposition here is that we can diminish the power of unwanted
desires by acting repeatedly in such a way that they are overridden.

Pessimism
(3) So far, I have divided rationalism between those who believe that the end
of rational self-mastery is achieved by discursive means from those who
believe that it is to be achieved by means of educative practice always
remembering that the two themes may be married, more or less happily, within
individual thinkers. (We have seen as much in Plato, and the same is true of
Aristotle.) But there is one further approach to the rationalist ideal of human
self-development that has played an extremely significant role in the history of

Western thought. This position, which I shall call pessimism, characteristically

endorses the rationalists end of self-mastery but denies that the rational means
available to human beings either discursive or practical are sufficient to
achieve that end. Pessimism is represented most strongly within the Christian
religious tradition and its seminal figure is, without question, Saint Augustine.
Augustine accepted a great deal of Platonism (he concedes in the City
of God that the Platonists approached the truth more nearly than other
philosophers6) but in his account of knowledge and the will he consciously
inverts the Platonic metaphor of the self-development of the individual by the
light of reason. As he describes it in the Confessions: "... I did not know before
becoming a Christian that the soul needs to be enlightened by light from
outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the
nature of truth"7 Human beings, according to Augustine, cannot reach truth
unaided. Nor are they able to control their passions, even to prevent
themselves from acting in ways that they do not want to. In our fallen state, our
bodies are motivated not by reason and the will, but by lust. So, fallen human
beings are doubly removed from true goodness. First, their desires are not
those that a truly good being would have; but, secondly, there is a gulf between
desire and the capacity for action, and, in consequence, human beings are not
even able to live their lives so as to realise those evil desires that they actually
have:
6

St Augustine, City of God (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 580

It was because man forsook God by pleasing himself that he was

handed over to himself, and because he did not obey God he could not
obey himself. Hence came the more obvious misery where man does
not live as he wishes to live. If he lived as he wished, he would
consider himself happy; yet even so he would not be really happy if he
lived in degradation.8
St Augustine's writings contain some of the most vivid (and touching)
of all images of human beings misery caused by their failure to match their
actions to their desires. At one point in the Confessions he relates the story of
his friend, Alypius, in a way that seems to represent (although we have no
reason to believe that the story was not true) a rhetorical echo of Plato's
account of Leontion:
[Alypius] arrived in Rome before I did to study law. There he had been
seized by an incredible obsession for gladiatorial spectacles and to an
unbelievable degree. He held such spectacles in aversion and
detestation; but some of his friends and fellow-pupils on their way
back from a dinner happened to meet him in the street and, despite his
energetic refusal and resistance, used friendly violence to take him into
the amphitheatre during the days of the cruel and murderous games. He
said: If you drag my body to that place and sit me down there, do not
imagine that you can turn my mind and my eyes to those spectacles. I
7

St Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: O.U.P., 1991), p. 68

shall be as one not there, and so I shall overcome both you and the
games. They heard him, but none the less took him with them,
wanting perhaps to discover whether he could actually carry it off.
When they arrived and had found seats where they could, the entire
place seethed with monstrous delight in the cruelty. He kept his eyes
shut and forbade his mind to think about such fearful evils. Would that
he had blocked his ears as well! A man fell in combat. A great roar
from the entire crowd struck him with such vehemence that he was
overcome by curiosity. Supposing himself strong enough to despise
whatever he saw and to conquer it, he opened his eyes. He was struck
in the soul by a wound graver than the gladiator in his body, whose fall
had caused the roar. The shouting entered by his ears and forced open
his eyes. Thereby it was the means of wounding and striking to the
ground a mind still more bold than strong, and the weaker for the
reason that he presumed on himself when he ought to have relied on
you. As soon as he saw the blood, he at once drank in savagery and did
not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. Without
any awareness of what was happening to him, he found delight in the
murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure. He was
not now the person who had come in, but just one of the crowd which
he had joined, and a true member of the group which had brought him.
8

St Augustine, City of God (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 589

What should I add? He looked, he yelled, he was on fire, he took the

madness home with him so that it urged him to return not only with
those by whom he had originally been drawn there, but even more than
them, taking others with him.9
For Augustine, it is characteristically human to find oneself out of one's
own control gripped by an illicit passion we would much rather be rid of, or
inhibited by fears and anxieties from doing what we know we could, should
and desperately want to do, for example. In those circumstances, the rationalist
philosophers appeal to our voluntary powers seems feeble and shallow. It is
not that rationalism fails to recognise the existence of a tension between
human reason and what we actually do, but its assumptions about human
nature the idea that consciously guided rational action is itself the best
remedy for the limitations of rationality lead it to such inadequate remedies.
Either (with Plato) it emphasizes argument and reflection, or else (with
Aristotle) the role of habit and training high-minded talks in the headmaster's
study or cold showers and cross-country running.10
9

St Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: O.U.P., 1991), pp. 100-101

In this respect, the Aristotelian picture of human beings was not
dramatically opposed to the Platonic: Aristotle, as much as Plato, depicts
human beings as caught in a permanent struggle to overcome their affective
side by means of their rational nature a struggle to which they bring native
endowments of varying amounts of discretionary power that they must try to
increase. Aristotle, however, does give more emphasis to the role of custom
and training in developing man's rational powers (although his conception of
training is by no means behaviouristic and Plato, of course, did not wholly
deny it any role) and he draws a distinction of principle (rather than merely one
of degree) between practical reasoning and theoretical knowledge.
10

The consequence to be drawn if we believe both that the good life is

one lived in accordance with reason and that reason is not enough to control
the passions is simple: the pessimistic view that human beings are not made
for happiness, in this life at least. This is Augustine's position. He fully
endorses the primacy of reason over the passions his ideal individual is the
one who has withdrawn so far as possible from sensible pleasures and holds
those that he does indulge in firmly under the hegemony of the will. But he
does not make the assumption that what is higher in value is for that reason
higher in effective power that all we need to do is to counterpose calmly two
rival claimants on our wills and the experienced observer will inevitably
gravitate towards the higher pleasures.11 In fact, the presumption is just to
the contrary: the only thing that can save us from the perversity of our
corporeal and appetitive nature in relation to our wills is the mysterious
beneficence of divine grace.

The Critique of Rationalism

Having thus sketched the contours of rationalism, I now turn to the more
difficult (and, to be quite frank, more questionable) part of my paper: the task
of articulating at least the outlines of a plausible critique of it. Surely, you
might say, the near-unanimity that we find amongst the greatest thinkers of the
Western tradition regarding the value of the rationalist ideal should show us
11

The phrases are, of course, John Stuart Mill's.

that it is basically correct. The practical issue, then, is about the effective
means (if there are any) for realizing that ideal, whilst the philosophical one
concerns its metaphysical presuppositions and ethical implications. Moreover
one would have to be blind not to see that the twentieth-century political
movement that most consciously rejected the rationalist picture of human
nature produced effects of unspeakable barbarism.
Nevertheless, and however tentatively, I should like to take up that
challenge. At the same time, I should like to draw your attention to a current of
thought about human nature that exists, for the most part, outside the main
stream of the philosophical tradition but that is, I believe, no less worthy of our
attention for that. The critique of rationalism that I will develop will have three
main ingredients. First, I shall present a view according to which the rationalist
ideal of increasing the discretionary power of choice vis--vis first-order
desires is not appropriate. Next, I shall suggest that the pessimists critique of
the effectiveness of rationalist means is at least plausible. Finally, I shall
develop a view according to which the use of rationalist means to develop selfcontrol, to the extent that they are in fact effective, are damaging to attitudes
and psychological states that human beings should value.
It will be recalled that the rationalist ideal as I presented it envisaged a
situation in which human beings were able to reject or endorse any of their
first-order desires as they wished. I left it open which, if any, they should
endorse or reject, or in terms of what criteria they should do so. This was a

deliberate omission, for it is evident that rationalists divide deeply regarding

just these issues. At one extreme is the idea Kant is its most obvious
protagonist that first-order desires have no intrinsic value whatsoever, that
their satisfaction is, at best, of instrumental value in the pursuit of what alone
is good without qualification: the exercise of the free, rational will. For the
utilitarian, at the other extreme, all first-order desires will participate to a
greater or lesser degree in what alone can give value: the capacity to produce
pleasure or to diminish pain. Yet, to the extent that the utilitarian would prefer
us to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction
of least resistance, she too will endorse the rationalist ideal of self-mastery.
Similarly, rationalists disagree fundamentally about the status of the
criteria upon which first-order desires should be assessed. Frankfurt, as I
understand him, is content that those desires that govern the free persons
selection of her first-order desires should be ultimately subjective. Charles
Taylor, on the other hand, in a well-known paper that is in part a response to
Frankfurt, argues that such assessments at their best are best understood as
exercises in deep self-reflection whose epistemology is that of discovery rather
than choice.12 Yet I take it that both Frankfurt and Taylor subscribe to the
rationalist ideal.

12

Charles Taylor, Responsibility for Self, in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will

(Oxford: O.U.P., 1982), pp. 111-26.

Is it Always Good to Increase the Power of Choice?

The first move that the anti-rationalist can make is to take issue with the
rationalists presumption that to weaken (by whatever means) the affective
force of our first-order desires in favour of our ability to exercise our power of
choice over such desires is, in general, a good thing. At this point I should like
to make the argument more specific by illustrating it in terms of the ideas of
the thinker who, it seems to me, presented the first comprehensive (if not
always wholly consistent) anti-rationalist account of human nature, JeanJacques Rousseau.
For Rousseau there is one first-order desire to weaken which in any
way would be disastrous. This is the sentiment that he identifies under the
name of piti (sympathy):
I do not think that I need fear contradiction in attributing to man the
sole natural virtue that the most extreme detractor of human virtues
would be forced to recognise. I am speaking of piti, a disposition
appropriate to creatures so feeble and subject to so many ills as
ourselves; a virtue all the more universal and all the more useful to
men for preceding in them the use of any reflection, and so natural that
even the beasts at times show visible signs of it.13
Piti is of extraordinary importance for Rousseau for it is the fountainhead of moral action. More than just an individuals passive reaction to the
13

Discours sur l'origine de l'ingalit, pp. 196-97.

perception of suffering, piti is both a feeling and a motivation to action;

individuals who are gripped by piti act morally, not because they judge from
some impartial standpoint that it is right to act in that way, but out of regard
for what are, in the end, their own feelings. It is a tuistic or non-I desire
that is, at the same time, motivationally primitive: it is not a means to the
advancement of a kind of self-interest that can be characterised in other terms.
To weaken this feelings power to move us without our choosing so to be
moved would be to weaken morality, not to strengthen human freedom. Yet it
is just this that has been the consequence of the advance of civilisation and the
consequent development of reason, according to Rousseau:
... piti will be all the more powerful, the more intimately the observing
animal identifies itself with the suffering animal. Now it is evident that
this identification must have been infinitely more close in the state of
nature than in the state of reasoning. It is reason that engenders amourpropre [vain selfishness], and it is reflection that strengthens it; it is
reason that turns man back upon himself; it is reason that separates him
from everything that disturbs or afflicts him; it is philosophy that
isolates him; through it he says, secretly, to the image of a suffering
man: Perish if you will, I am secure. Only the dangers that threaten
society as a whole trouble the tranquil sleep of the philosopher and
draw him from his bed.14
14

Discours sur l'origine de l'ingalit, p. 198.

If we take Rousseaus point that piti is a natural virtue, it follows that

at least one first-order desire is ethically good. Hence any rationalist strategy
of diminishing the force of first-order desires in favour of a general ideal of
increasing the selfs discretionary power of choice is not appropriate. We
should not be in a position in which we are called upon to choose our response
to anothers suffering: it should be a natural and immediate reaction.

Scepticism about Rationalist Means

The second stage in the construction of a critique of rationalism starts by
endorsing pessimisms scepticism regarding the effectiveness of the means
chosen by rationalism to advance its ideal. During the discussion so far I have
been speaking of the individuals first-order desires as if they were, as it were,
a fixed inventory of psychological facts about that individual facts that might
exercise a greater or lesser tug in relation to that individual but which could be
spoken of essentially in detachment from the individuals environment.
Returning to the case of Alypius, however, it will be recalled that the key to
the malign desire that takes hold of him against his will is a perception in
this case an auditory perception (the roar of the crowd that arouses Alypiuss
curiosity) followed by a visual perception. When Alypius sees the bloodthirsty
acts in the amphitheatre that he becomes seized with passion a passion that
does not let him go after the event is over but brings him back to the games
time and again.

Now if discursive reasoning about what is desirable is to be effective it

presupposes that such links between perception (I mean sense-perception) and
desire, stimulus and response, are sufficiently weak to be broken by discourse
alone. Likewise, to the extent that a training in practical self-control is
supposed to habituate us to acting in a way that ignores or overrides our
perceptually stimulated desires, it assumes that the link between perception
and desire will be sufficiently weak for self-denial to be an effective means of
developing self-command.
The anti-rationalist thus sees a dilemma. Either rationalist means of
weakening the connection between perception and desire are effective or they
are not. If they are effective, then what of those cases where the connection
between perception and desire is itself of great importance: where the
perception of suffering generates piti which acts, in turn, as a motivating
internal reason for action? Will rationalism not destroy moral motivation? On
the other hand, if rationalist means are ineffective, what is to say that
undesirable desires will not return with undiminished force (as did Alypiuss
desire to see the games) once the individual once again faces the perceptual
conditions that occasioned them initially?
It is, of course, logically possible that the situation is even worse than I
have depicted it. It might be that rationalist means are sometimes effective and
sometimes not, but that the scope of their effectiveness is exactly the reverse
of what we would wish: that they break the connection between perception and

desire in the moral case but that, when it comes to undesirable desires, they are
ineffective or even counter-productive. As a matter of fact, for reasons that
would take me too far from my main argument to go into here, that is precisely
Rousseaus view.
The outline of Rousseaus anti-rationalist position is by now, I hope,
emerging. Not all first-order desires are equally good (or bad). Some those
that embody piti are good for a familiar reason: they incorporate concern for
others. Others, in particular those that are generated by the vain selfishness that
Rousseau calls amour-propre, are bad, again for a familiar reason, namely,
that they are self-multiplying and insatiable. Thus (although this is one of the
pervasive myths about him) Rousseau is no irrationalist.
Nor is he a pessimist. Like Augustine, Rousseau challenges the idea
that reasoning (the private and independent exercise of the power of
reflection) is a suitable means to achieve moral rationality and self-command.
Yet here the two part company, for, unlike Augustine, Rousseau does not
believe that self-command is impossible, except by the miraculous means of
divine grace. Rousseau believes that there is a rational order to the world and it
is both discernible by human beings and capable of being followed by them
although to be able do so their reason must be (as Rousseau expresses it in
mile) perfected by feeling.15) Our failures are the result of lives lived
15

Perhaps surprisingly, Rousseau quite frequently uses the term reason in an

affirmative sense, particularly in mile. There Rousseau endorses the ideal that
human beings should be ruled by reason rather than appetite; that reason is not

wrongly in societies that are badly arranged, not inevitable consequences of

Man's Fall. Reason must be supported by feelings of the right kind. Such
morally appropriate feelings are threatened by the withdrawal of the self into
the private realm of subjectivity. Not only does the self-centred use of
reflection, motivated by vain selfishness (amour-propre), fail as a means of
moral self-improvement, but private subjectivity is pervaded by feelings that,
unlike the moral emotion of piti, are detached from practical engagement. For
reason and feeling to be brought into agreement with one another, reasoning
alone is not sufficient. As Rousseau puts it:
Whilst it might be possible for Socrates and minds of his calibre to
acquire virtue by means of reason, the human race would long ago
have ceased to be if its conservation had been dependent solely on the
reasonings of its members.16
As it happens, Rousseau addresses the issue of the connection between
perception, feeling and right action at a rather unexpected point in his writings:

redundant in the moral sphere (Reason alone teaches us to know good and
evil. (mile, quoted in The Indispensable Rousseau, p.185.); and that mastery
over the passions is a good thing (see mile, Book 5).
It seems clear that, for Rousseau, reason has more than one sense.
Affirmatively, it is the capacity to judge rightly, feel appropriately, and to
match our actions to our feelings. Negatively, it is the exercise of reflection
and speculation in abstraction from direct experience. It is all too easy,
therefore, to suppose either (on the basis of his critical remarks) that Rousseau
is an irrationalist, or, if the more positive statements are included, that he is
simply confused.
16
Discours sur l'origine de l'ingalit, p. 199.

in his autobiographical classic, the Confessions. He describes there the plans

that he had for a book that he, in fact, failed to write:
It has been observed that the majority of men are often in the course of
their lives quite unlike themselves; they seem to be changed into quite
different people. But it was not for the purpose of establishing such a
well-known fact that I planned to write my book; I had a more original
and important purpose, which was to trace the causes of these changes,
isolating those that depend on us in order to show how we may
ourselves control them, and so become better men and more certain of
ourselves. For it is, indisputably, more difficult for a decent man to
resist the desires he should subdue, once they are formed, than to
prevent, change or modify these same desires at their source if he were
in a position to go back so far. A man resists temptation once because
he is strong, and succumbs on another occasion because he is weak,
though if he had been in his previous state he would not have
succumbed.
Looking within myself and seeking in others for the cause upon
which these different states depended, I discovered that they had a
great deal to do with our previous impressions from external objects,
and that, being continually a little changed through the agency of our
senses and our organs, we were unconsciously affected in our thoughts,
our feelings, and even our actions by the impact of these slight changes

upon us. Numerous striking examples that I had collected put the
matter beyond all dispute; and thanks to their physical basis they
seemed to me capable of providing an external code which, varied
according to circumstances, could put or keep the mind in the state
most conducive to virtue. From what errors would reason be preserved,
and what vices would be choked even before birth, if one knew how to
compel the brute functions to support the moral order which they so
often disturb? Climates, seasons, sounds, colours, darkness, light, the
elements, food, noise, silence, movements, repose: they all act on our
machines, and consequently upon our souls, and they all offer us
innumerable and almost certain opportunities for controlling those
feelings which we allow to dominate us from their very onset... I made
very little progress with this work, however, the title of which was La
Morale Sensitive ou le Matrialisme du sage.17
Where Augustine considers the senses to be a permanent threat to the
feeble defences of reason, for Rousseau, the world of the senses is not held to
be inherently inimical to human rationality; nor is the remedy for incontinence
the development of discursive reasoning or the dull repetition of habit, but the
search for a healthy and balanced form of experience. Rousseau's aim is to
develop reason (in the sense of the power of the self to perceive, feel and act
rightly) by bringing it into balance with its environment.
17

. Confessions, pp. 380-81.

The Negative Consequences of Rationalist Techniques of Self-Command

I come now to the final part of my outline of a critique of rationalism. My first
two points, made with aid of Rousseau, were (1) that the rationalist ideal of
self-command threatens to break the important connection between moral
perception and action and (2) that rationalist techniques may be ineffective
against recalcitrant desires, particularly where such desires are triggered as a
result of sense-perception. Yet someone might easily remain unimpressed by
these considerations. Rationalist techniques are, she might argue, at least
somewhat effective (and what more can we plausibly hope for?) whilst, on the
other hand, there is no reason to suppose that an agent who achieves the ideal
of rational self-command would, for that reason alone, be disinclined to accept
the claims of morality: it is just that the connection between perception and
moral action is no longer direct and unmediated by reflection. To such an
objector, then, the last part of the argument will be of particular importance.
The argument has the following structure:
(1)

It is argued that rationalism (that is, the employment of rationalist

techniques and the endorsement of a rationalist ideal for the self) does indeed
have practical effects, even if these are not the achievement of the rationalist
ideal of self-command. These effects amount to the establishment of a certain
personality or character-type, the rationalist self.

(2)

The effect of the rationalist self is to cause the selfs experience to lose

at least part of its intrinsic value. The claim is that certain kinds of experience,
like piti, have value not just in promoting a good end (motivating moral
action) but intrinsically.
Once again, I shall focus the discussion by presenting it through the
thought of an anti-rationalist thinker, in this case, the novelist Stendhal and his
book De lamour. The book turns on a distinction between two types of lover
and the different experiences that they have of love. The distinction is
epitomized in the contrast between two fictional characters: Goethes Werther
and Don Juan. Each represents a different character type. Don Juan is the type
of the active, goal-directed individual. He lives his life under the domination
of his ongoing projects. Insofar as he responds to the outer world with his
feelings, those feelings are positive or negative insofar as what he encounters
favours or obstructs his ends. For the Don Juan, according to Stendhal,
Love... is a feeling akin to a taste for hunting. It is a craving for an activity
that needs an incessant diversity of stimuli to challenge skill. 18 Don Juan is a
kind of reductio ad absurdum of rationalism.
Werther, on the other hand, is the passive, sensitive lover. His feelings
are essentially responses, inasmuch as he allows his perceptions of value to be
given to him unexpectedly and, at times, quite irrationally in the context of
his love. The Wertherian lover sees the world as a lover does. That is, he sees

reality in a certain way because he is in love. Yet, in contrast to the Don Juan,
he does not see the world simply as a means towards the satisfaction of his
desires. Stendhal's key idea is that sensitive love makes possible a kind of
imaginative perception: what he calls crystallization, based on an analogy
that he repeats several times in the book:
At the salt-mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into
one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it
out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no
bigger than a tom-tit's claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating
diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable.
What I have called crystallization is a mental process which
draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the
loved one.19
The imagination, in other words, enriches and beautifies the world for
us; it gives the sensitive lovers experience a value that it would not otherwise
have, even if it leads to actions and judgements that would seem to the
outsider demeaning or absurd.20 Don Juan, by contrast, can never experience
this enrichment of the world.21
Stendhal, Love, translated by G. and S. Sale (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1975) p. 209.
19
Love, p.45
20
Passionate love spreads all Nature in her sublimity before a mans eyes, like
something invented only yesterday. He is surprised never to have noticed the
strange sights he now perceives. Everything is new, alive, and pulsating with
the most passionate interest. A lover sees the woman he loves in every skyline,
18

Unlike Werther, for whom realities are shaped by his desires, Don
Juan's desires are imperfectly satisfied by cold reality, as in ambition,
avarice and other passions. Instead of losing himself in the bewitching
reveries of crystallization his attitude is that of a general to the success
of his tactics, and in brief he destroys love instead of enjoying it more
than others, as is commonly believed.22
Although Werther perceives the world as containing values, it is not
that his valuings are claimed to be objectively correct as Stendhal makes
clear, they are subjective and, perhaps, to the outsider, wholly unintelligible.
Yet that is not Stendhals point. What gives those valuings their value is not
their objective truth but the fact that such a mode of perception has an
affective richness and depth that itself gives value to the individuals
experience. From the Don Juans point of view, Werthers valuations serve no
overriding end. Nevertheless, Stendhal has no hesitation in declaring that a
Werther is happier than a Don Juan, for the latter reduces love to the level of
an ordinary affair.23
Rationalism, to the extent that it encourages the production of
character-types such as Don Juan at the expense of Werther, leads to a loss of
and as he travels a hundred leagues to catch a momentary glimpse of her each
tree, each rock speaks to him in a different way and teaches him something
new about her. Love, p. 209.
21
Instead of the tumult of these magical visions, Don Juan requires that
external objects, which he values only in proportion to their utility, should be
given piquancy by some new intrigue. Love, p. 209.
22
Love, p. 206

value, the anti-rationalist claims. Yet what is particularly significant is that the
criteria for the assessment of value available from within the rationalist
tradition of ethical thought provide no clear way of registering this loss. Does
the Don Juan undergo fewer pleasurable experiences than the Werther?
Probably not. Does he satisfy fewer of his desires? Quite possibly not. Are his
first-order desires less consonant with the discretionary power of his will?
Certainly not. Has he developed fewer of his powers? No. Are the long-term
projects in terms of which he frames his life less ambitious, coherent and well
realized? Again, it would seem not. So why, then, should someone think that
he is worse off?
The history of Western philosophy offers us a huge diversity of
answers regarding the nature of human well-being (I made reference to a few
of them in the previous paragraph). Yet it is significant that, according to many
of those criteria, it is the Don Juan who appears to be leading the more
successful life. According to Stendhal, the Don Juan is simply less happy:
his experience is qualitatively inferior. Yet philosophys received notions of
what makes life valuable seem to be incapable of registering that fact. I do not
suppose, however, that I am alone in finding Stendhals case for the superior
value of the sensitive lovers experience over that of the Don Juan perfectly
intelligible indeed persuasive. If this is something that ethical theory has

23

Love, p. 206

difficulty in accounting for, then the problem lies on the side of philosophy, it
seems to me.