Entry 344 — Reason Can Explain Everything
Too worn-out today, who knows why, to have anything for this entry but an opinion. It’s the one in my title. I believe that every question will result in one of three answers: a rational answer, a failed attempt at a rational answer, and a willfully false answer. The first will come about when someone intelligent uses reason on a question that proves tractable. The second will come about either when person of limited intelligence is unable to use reason on a tractable question, or when an intelligent person uses reason on a question that proves untractable–because the person lacks the intelligence or knowledge to deal with it. The third will come about when a person consciously or unconsciously needs it to be to his liking much more than he needs it to be true, so he does not use reason on it.
A good example of the latter is the answer of many to the question, “What is poetry?” Some poets need this answer to be “something too sublime to be defined,” because that seems to them to raise them to the level of supreme priests of some sort, wise in the ways of secrets beyond the ken of the uninitiated. Others need it bo be “something too vaguely defined not to apply to just about anything,” which allows anyone to call himself a poet, which will gratify a egalitarian, and win him followers since those happy with criterialessness are always much more numereous than those who are not. Finally, many will need it to be beyond reason because they are deficient reasoners, so don’t want reason to be consider of any real value.
I’ve left something out of this discussion: the fact that ost people concerned with the question of what poetry is, are really concerned with the question of what a moving poem is. It is that which they claim reason can’t begin to explain. But I am sure it can be. I feel fairly confident that I’ve done it–essentially as something that causes pleasure in certain inter-related parts of the brain, a sort of poetry center that neurophysiologists will eventually pin down. I have detailed ideas as to exactly what will cause that center to experience pleasure, too: in brief, a text, with or without averbal matter, that qualifies as a poem by my definition (i.e., a text with a certain percentage of flow-breaks), that is neither too familiar or too unfamiliar to the person encountering it.
Similarly other supposedly beyond-reason things like love and hatred can be similarly explained rationally by the existence of love and hatred centers.
That it is sometimes extraordinarily difficult to find an answer to a question does not mean that reason will never find an answer to it.