Cogito, ergo sum. René Descartes famously claims after meditating on the certainty of human knowledge. Upholding the rational, thinking self, Descartes pioneers modern rationalist philosophy which believes that reason is the most effective, if not the only method of acquiring knowledge. I confess that reason, with its promise of universality and objectivity, enticed me into studying philosophy in university. But as I encounter more complex situations in life, I increasingly find reason incapable of representing reality and guiding my moral decisions. Reason seems to detach me from everyday life and trivialise ambivalent moral situations that do not immediately make logical sense. I have been internally conflicted regarding rationalist philosophy and the superiority of reason in everyday life. Recent classroom and out-of-classroom experiences also propel me to reflect on the limit of reason and what reason cannot explain. In this post, I reflect on what lies beyond reason and how to adequately access a moral situation.
My internal conflict reached its peak during a class on animal ethics. When the South African writer J.M. Coetzee was invited to give a lecture on the topic at Princeton University in 1997, he presented a fictional story. It is about a female writer who, just like Coetzee, is invited to lecture on animal ethics in a renowned American university, in front of professional philosophers. Instead of limiting the discussion to the ethics of meat consumption, the protagonist challenges whether reason is sufficient to establish the superiority of humans. Debunking Cartesian rationalism, she argues that reason was a vast tautology and a manifestation of human arrogance. She proposes a more radical egalitarianism emphasising embodied compassion towards animals. She even compares animal factory farms to concentration camps during the Holocaust. The fictional lecture is not well-received; most noticeably, her opinions are dismissed by her fictional daughter-in-law, a professional philosopher of mind, as “shallow relativism that impresses freshmen”.
Fig.1 Snapshots of J.M. Coetzee’s Fictional Lecture and Cora Diamond’s Response (Highlights Mine)
Philosophically engaged, Coetzee’s story has attracted considerable interests from contemporary philosophers. It is difficult to respond to Coetzee, given how the fictional form complicates his arguments. The instructor of the animal ethics class, Dr Chin Chuan Fei, shared Cora Diamond’s essay after discussing several responses from rationalist philosophers. Diamond notices that rationalist responses to Coetzee have treated his protagonist as a vehicle of arguments. That is, they reduce the story to its argumentative essence and access it with reason, overlooking what puts the protagonist in that situation. Diamond thinks that Coetzee’s story is first and foremost about a woman wounded by her reality and rational calculation in moral discourse, a woman whom her family refuse to support. The story conveys more personal struggle than its argumentative essence. Subsequent rational assessments of her lecture are precisely the mode of thinking that wound her in the first place. Diamond argues that the literary form is Coetze’s ultimate argument problematising the rationalist mode of thinking in contemporary philosophy which brutally reduces complex, conscious lives to abstract, argumentative essence.
I could not fully appreciate Diamond’s essay until I encountered a social media phenomenon last year. When the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong became more violent in October, one female student leader was interviewed by Deutsche Welle. When the interviewer asked whether she condemned acts of violence, she refused as she was afraid of further dividing student protestors in Hong Kong. Facing critical questions she did not know how to respond, the student leader ended up smiling with much awkwardness.
Video of Joey Siu being interviewed by Deutsche Welle
Interestingly, the video of the interview went viral on mainland social media which usually censor voices from Hong Kong. The image of the student leader typified mainland people’s imagination of the semi-autonomous region – polished, ungrateful, submissive and unreasonable. My parents also forwarded the video to me, believing that the interview demonstrated that pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong were organised by rebellious children. I almost judged the student leader in the same way as my parents. But I was reminded of Diamond’s essay regarding Coetzee’s fictional lecture. The student leader was reminiscent of Coetzee’s protagonist. She was also a woman wounded by her reality. I wondered what put her in such a desperate situation in the first place. Was it the civil arrest in Hong Kong? Was it her pursuit of liberty and social justice? She must have grown up in a very different political narrative. I hesitated to reduce her to an argumentative essence. Although she might fail my logical checks, reason is not the only faculty I rely on when I interact with others. Eventually, as a human being instead of a rationalist philosopher, I suspended my critical judgement while trying to imagine and sympathise with her woundedness.
Fig. 2 Screenshots of mainland online commentaries on the interview. Besides mocking her facial expressions, online commentators criticised the student leader for being childish, illogical, and submissive. Using phrases like “female terrorist” and “the ignorant have no fear”, such online commentaries went rival on the mainland Chinese social media.
Both Coetzee’s protagonist and the Hong Kong student leader are women wounded by their realities and rational human calculations. They feel estranged, frightened and helpless in a rationalist, patriarchal world that dismiss them with hostility, acrimony and bitterness. They both stand desperately in front of the powerful, hoping that their woundedness could at least be acknowledged. They vividly embody their woundedness and refuse to be assessed as a contextless argumentative essence. Neither wins much sympathy after they are responded with reason, a seemingly self-reinforcing, excluding thought process that actively anticipates its enemies and defames them. Thanks to Diamond, I realise how unprepared and detached my rational self was when assessing a moral situation that involved woundedness. I realise that these women have to be sympathised in totality, and their woundedness intrinsically resists my rationalisation. I am, for a moment, reminded of my humanity that precedes my rationality. I will remember these wounded women, as they demonstrate the limit of rationalist philosophy and the ostracist nature of my moral community.
I am not sure whether, as Coetzee writes, reason is indeed a vast tautology, but it has been undeniably used to consolidate power, order and political narrative. Rationalist framework constructs a subject-object relationship whereby a person in a complex context can be reduced to an object of study accompanied by a disinterested but clever subject. What I have learned from the sequence of events, if anything, is to suspend my belief formation for a while and wait to hear more perspectives. I do not mean to reject reason once for all and fully embrace subjective emotions or irrational impulse. Although reason will remain incredibly useful for my learning and my role as a responsible, reasonable global citizen, I realise that reason has its limit. I have been exposed and trained in my reasoning capabilities, but only to realise its inadequacy and incompleteness. Reality is multifaceted, and once in a while people are wounded by how unsympathetic it seems. Sometimes, I need to listen to my compassionate instinct and pre-reflective intuitions to access a moral situation. Moral judgements based solely on rational assessment may result in skewed perspectives and biases.
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