The sentiment of rationality

 Summer school begins next week, I'm teaching Rationality--a sequel to last summer's Enlightenment and a prequel to next spring's Experience (to be previewed in the tag-team interdisciplinary course I'll get a two-week block of, in fall). 

The binding thread and shared premise of all three Master of Liberal Arts courses is that humanity is equipped with an underdeveloped capacity for reasoned and intelligent action. Reason, perpetually guiding and correctively guided by experience in turn, is potentially our greatest tool for amelioration and progress. Our history and trajectory may seem to belie the premise, but a complementary premise is that it's still not too late to vindicate our nobler hopes and dreams. The doomsday clock has not struck the terminal hour. Yet. 

Steven Pinker wrote our main text last summer (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress) and this (Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters). He's a great writer and wit, and lately a provocateur whose critics consider him un-progressive and scientistic (in a bad way). One rationale for reading him is to assess such criticism. The greater rationale is to see if his analysis can help steer our increasingly irrational culture and politics back from the abyss of unreason, fear, supersitition, and incivility. Tall order.

We're reading Pinker, but I read him against an un-Pinkerish backdrop: William James's pragmatic framing of what rationality is and why it matters. Perhaps Pinker, James, and all of us can agree in broad strokes that (as James's abstract indicates) "rationality means fluent thinking"; but what such fluency is (in a characteristic Jamesian locution) "known as," how it is actually expressed and experienced by individuals and communities, may be a point of some dispute. We'll see. One of my own goals for the course is to decide if I still like James's framing of the issue in these terms:

When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness,—this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it,—is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational.

Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency, produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. --"The Sentiment of Rationality," in The Will to Believe and other essays

A sentiment is a feeling, a subjective state of satisfaction. The better, more rational feelings and satisfactions are those we can reconcile with the various and alternate feelings and satisfactions of the greatest number of our peers. The better sentiments are thus inter-subjective. 

A Jamesian is always inclined to respect subjectivity but to esteem and exalt  inter-subjectivity even more. We live in a time of subjective over-indulgence. Rational pragmatists must draw some boundaries, must exclude some subjectivities. Specifically they must repudiate those pushing faux conspiracies and factual fabrications. I'm sure James wouldn't deny that. I'm not sure he was clear or emphatic or explicit enough as to why. We'll see.