This symbol, the 'rationalist lens' (a stylized magnifying glass), has been proposed by Peter Magellan as a symbol to indicate rationalism, rather like the Ichthys does for Christians. 'Rationalism' means different things to different people. I mean it in three overlapping senses:

1) There is in general a reason for every thing (entity, event, process, proposition). This can be formalized, for example, by Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason;

2) The spirit and willingness to act on this principle and pursue reasons, not only in abstract and academic thought, but also in daily living (make that particularly in daily living).

3) Have our knowledge claims be based on provable facts where possible; and logical inference where not possible.

Note that my meaning of rationalism does not involve it in any of the historical philosophical disputes such as Rationalism vs Idealism or Rationalism vs Empiricism etc - nor with the more modern dispute of rationalism vs emotions or feelings. I rationalize with my brain, I emotionally feel viscerally, and both can inform and enlighten the other - in fact, they need to do so if I am to be a sane, integrated, loving human being.

In other words, rationalism can and should be practiced in our inner life and subjective viewpoints, as well as in our dealings with the objective world out there. Many things may not be amenable to rational investigation, and in those things I allow my rationality to be neutral - but it always has the power of veto.

Aristotle is in the list because he also asked questions, but unlike Plato's interest in absolutes and essences, Aristotle's questions were in addition questions in the 'middle range' about the everyday world we live in - not only essences, but the non-essential also ('accidents' in Aristotelian terminology).

David Hume, the 'gentle skeptic', is in my list, as asking questions that many people think are still unanswerable. His questions prompted Kant and most 19th century philosophy.

In more modern times, I would include William James, Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein. James's pragmatism and 'radical empiricism' ask more questions than they answer, and Russell explains and questions so lucidly that he is more of a delight to read when I think him wrong than most philosophers are when I think they are right. Likewise Wittgenstein.

The world is what exists without being experienced; it includes what is 'out there' as objective reality. My world depends upon the fact that there is an 'I' which experiences, and my world consists of what I do, in fact, experience.

Already after these two short paragraphs we are in deep philosophical waters. So one of my aims is to make this distinction clear and precise, and not to be philosophically naive about it. Discussions involving objectivity and subjectivity are often confused, which is one of the reasons I prefer to use the terms 'the world' and 'my world'.[1]

Each of these two worlds fascinates me. I will enthuse about each one in turn.

First, the world: I embrace most forms of realism, the reality of the world - that there is a reality independent of my mind, and that propositions about the world are true or false independently of whether I know or believe them to be true or false. In short, I can have direct knowledge of the world or reality as it is, a view sometimes called direct realism.[2]

We come to know this world best through rational and logical thought:

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. (Bertrand Russell [3])

I have always been in love with logic and reason. I got my doctorate in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics[4]; and my love affair with reasoned thought is both in the sheer joy of such thinking, and in a deep appreciation of the comforts and luxuries that we now have due to such thinking. This latter can be termed the 'scientific method' which can be defined many ways, but surely an essential part of it is that it deals with the objective world to the exclusion of all else. Science and technology's success is a direct result of putting the subjective 'I' aside completely, and viewing the world as what I am calling here the world.

The world holds me in awe. I am full of wonder at it, and of how reasoning about it can benefit me so much. I am also in awe of, and wonder at, the fact I am alive and can witness the world. That then brings me to my world.

'I' and 'my' are personal and relative pronouns, placeholders, that when uttered by a person in the world index the person uttering them. But when I say 'I', it is not relative but is about as absolute as I can get. 'I' is the central fact of existence for me, and is the pivot around which my world revolves - in fact, without the central and absolute fact of 'I', there is no 'my world', there is in fact nothing.

I have been wondering at, and exploring, my world for as long as I can remember. At school I was in constant rebellion against the arbitrarily imposed authority of others, particularly when that authority of the world was at odds with my own authority stemming from my world. In 1969 I spent a year attached to a Buddhist monastery for the express purpose of exploring my world, and the sometimes strange relation it seemed to have with the world. I have been meditating ever since then, as a serious and committed daily practice (thirty eight years, at the time of writing). Much of this website is my writings about meditation.

For all this time I have been reading mystics of all religions, and none - anyone who seemed to have something to say about my world, and the amazing fact that I am, and that I am aware and conscious, and that I am aware of being aware and conscious. The more radically subjective the author is, the better. Examples are D T Suzuki (the originator of Zen in the West) who defined 'enlightenment' as 'pure subjectivity', and Douglas Harding, whose experiments on 'headlessness' are as radically subjective as you can get.[5]

I have made this distinction between the world and my world for the purpose of analysis, but of course in many ways the two are inextricably entwined. Without 'my world' there is no 'the world', at least for me. And for me as a baby and infant, there was only my world. My ability to abstract myself and to form a view from nowhere (in Thomas Nagel's famous phrase) of the world was called growing up. This ability seems to be what distinguishes humanity from all other creatures. On the other hand, I am not committed to metaphysical dualism, so I accept 'my world' and my consciousness of it exist from the world, meaning are epiphenomena of my brain and body.[6]

To return to the question at the top of this page, Why Philosophy?, my answer is then that it is for me an attempt to explore the two worlds: the world of objective reality, and my world of how things appear to me here; and how they relate, how they are similar, and how they differ. It is that program that I believe enables me to live in the best possible way (see my short answer at the top of the page), and my commitment to the rational endeavor means that I have to give good reasons for what I believe and do.

Philosophy though, as I find it, is an attempt to understand both worlds from the viewpoint of the world. Very little philosophy seems to me to be interested in my world from the viewpoint of my world. There are of course exceptions. I think phenomenology [7] is an exception, and the Philosophy of the Implicit, particularly as furthered by Gene Gendlin, is a notable exception.[8]

That is why in conjunction with philosophy, I also need a disciplined practice of exploring my world from the viewpoint of my world, which is for me meditation. Both are necessary. When I meet a philosopher, particularly one who is interested in cognition, consciousness or philosophy of mind, my immediate question (whether I actually ask it or not) is what practice does this person do to explore their own radical subjectivity (meditation, art perhaps, dance or sport - the avenues are many)? In the same way, when I talk to a meditator, perhaps on a meditation retreat, my question is how does this person relate their experience to the wider context of the world? If a meditator's response is that it is only their experience that is important, I consider that as poverty-stricken as a philosopher who is only interested in intellectualizing and manipulating concepts.

A final point about philosophy as I find it today: it seems to me that too much of it is written in an unnecessarily combative manner. When presented with a philosophical idea or system, I believe a fruitful attitude is to consider first what about it is correct or true, or could be correct and true. Too often the first consideration is what is wrong with it, how can it be attacked and falsified. A critical attitude is of course necessary, but only after an attempt first to see what is good and true and beautiful about it; otherwise we are just playing an intellectual game of one-upmanship, rather than trying to increase our understanding of what is good and true and beautiful. I let Bertrand Russell have the last word:

In studying a philosopher the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude...Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second...When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking...[9]

Notes

[1] An excellent book using 'worlds' in this context is Geoffrey Klempner's Naive Metaphysics: A Theory Of Subjective And Objective Worlds (Avebury Series in Philosophy, 1994 - online zipped copy). Note that in spite of the title, it is not at all a naive book.

A good online article discussing subjectivity and objectivity is Sandra La Fave's Thinking Critically About the Subjective/Objective Distinction, which draws on John Searle's distinction between metaphysical and epistemological objectivity/subjectivity.

See also my articles on this website Viewing The Viewpoints and my thesis A Metaphysics Of Distinction, Performance And Practice
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[2] I use 'direct realism' as articulated in Laura E Weed's The Structure of Thinking: A process-oriented account of mind (Imprint Academic, 2003), one of the best books I have read discussing knowledge, realism, object-positing, properties, Forms, and how we think about all these and more.
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[3] Bertrand Russell 'Unpopular Essays' 1950
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[4] See my page on this site about my academic work.
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[5] I write about Douglas Harding elsewhere on this site. It is well worth a visit to his Headless Way website.
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[6] A persuasive account of consciousness and 'I' from the materialist and reductionist viewpoint, while maintaining all the facets of experience and 'my world' that I would want, is Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007). In particular, he rescues the word 'epiphenomenon' from its normal derogatory use as considering a phenomenon secondary to what it springs from, to a potent principle of explanatory power.
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[7] For a recent account of phenomenology's exploration of human experience, see N.Depraz, F J Varela and P.Vermersch On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing' (John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2003)
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[8] For a bibliography and an outline of Gene Gendlin's philosophical stance start with the Focusing site. I have found the best book on his work is a collection of articles by critics of his, each one of which has a response by Gendlin, and which also has an introduction by him which is a summary of his thinking as a whole: Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and thinking in Gendlin's philosophy. Edited by David Michael Levin, Ph.D.. Evanston (Northwestern University Press.) I have met Gene, and found that he truly walks his talk, meaning that his philosophy and his Focusing practice do full justice to my world from the viewpoint of my world.
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[9] Bertrand Russell The History of Western Philosophy (Simon and Schuster Inc, 1945, page 39)
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