musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Is Reason a Servant or a Master?


More recently than I care to admit, I have begun to wonder if knowledge –reason– merely exists to augment our judgement, or to achieve some goal or other. Is knowledge on its own somehow just a means to an end? Something inherently subordinate to results? What is knowledge for?

In other words, ‘Is reason essentially a servant, a clever instrument for achieving ends supplied from elsewhere? Or is it sovereign, capable of judging, revising and even legislating ends for itself? Can it ultimately shape the direction of human life, or is it merely along for the ride?’[i]

There was a time when I assumed that knowledge functioned as a steppingstone, an instrument to carry us closer to a target. In my naïveté, I seldom asked whether the target was one worth choosing. But I was younger then and not so heavily encrusted with the barnacles I have attracted in Retirement.

Life was not simpler then -just different. Knowledge was a matter of putting those words I’d learned in textbooks into action. That, I assumed, was their function: to foster my journey to wherever it might lead: a journey towards an unknown Future. I do not regret the destination, you understand, but after all it was just a lottery; it could very well have turned out differently. Still, it was a choice, but reason is only one way of choosing the route to a goal. The throwing of dice or the place where a roulette wheel stops can help determine choices, but a little too randomly for someone like me who hoped for some appropriate guidance, rather than chance.

I grew up with Willie back in the Winnipeg of the 1950ies. And then, just as Life rebounds from one obstacle after another like the steel ball in those old pinball machines, we lost touch. It was a different time, of course, and apart from letters or expensive phone calls, the distance and inevitable address changes made communication difficult: I mean we were only friends, and not particularly close. Unlike me, Willie had neither enjoyed school nor charted his future for a greater distance than the next month might take him: serious decisions escaped his interest; he might just as well have flipped a coin.

Although I was his friend, I couldn’t imagine living like that, and after Grade 9 or so, he dropped out of school when his father lost his job. He and his father moved away to greener pastures as Willie uncharacteristically put it; they were both restless souls.

There was something about Willie that I missed, though: he seemed content to adapt to whatever befell him, good or bad. “It is what it is,” he would say whenever he failed an exam at school or was penalized for not completing his homework.

Willie was not unintelligent, though; he and his father were extremely adaptable he used to tell me. “It’s the apple and the tree,” he would explain, knowing I would understand. “Knowledge is only useful if you use it,” was another aphorism he would say with a wink if I shook my head disapprovingly when he did something I couldn’t understand -like delivering newspapers on his bike to make some spare change.

“I was bored after I dropped out of school, and I got to read the papers if I had a few left over at the end of the route,” he explained.

I was doubtful about that, though: “I thought you didn’t like reading, Will…”

He scrunched up his face and then somehow rolled his eyes. “Why would you think that, G?”

It was my turn to do an eye-roll. “Because you never seemed to read enough to do your homework, or to pass exams at school…”

He shrugged at that observation. “The stuff they taught us never seemed very useful…” He thought about that for a moment. “I mean what good is that kind of knowledge, G? How’s it ever going to help me with my life…?”

‘Two trains running,’ I thought.

Me, I’d plotted everything out: knowledge was not so much a tool to reach a destination as a way of deciding whether the destination was one that was actually one worthy of my choice.

But worthy for whom? ‘Aye, there’s the rub’ as Hamlet mused in his famous soliloquy in Shakespeare’s eponymous play. Was Willie’s use of his admittedly scattered non-directional reasoning -his knowledge- somehow the same as mine?

Willie, I happened to notice in an online tribute to him recently, had become the editor of a small town newspaper that became famous for its extraordinary fight for adequate housing for his town’s poor.

So, is reason a tool, or a way of thinking: knowledge for its own sake? Is it only valuable relative to achieving some end? A way of plotting the best course for a destination that could not have been anticipated beforehand? Is being content with when and where we arrive merely a very human way of rationalizing the destination or the route? Making excuses for wandering along an unknown trail because no harm came of it? Or does that, too, require knowledge and its acolyte, Wisdom, to make the best of something previously unforeseen… something as yet unknown? Untested.

How can one not help but think of the last verse of Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Was that Wisdom, knowledge, or what happens when you simply rationalize Luck? I just don’t know anymore… if I ever did.

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/why-real-intelligence-is-something-more-than-optimisation

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