On directing reason to itself

Preliminary notes regarding directing reason to itself

Plato argues in the Republic that the good man reaches the highest pitch of happiness in contemplating the unchanging forms; also that the good man’s sense of justice moves him to turn his back on unfailing light and return to his fellows and the shadows of the cave. 

Aristotle continues this argument in holding that there are two importantly different kinds of thinking: calculation (inference) and contemplation (meditation).  Calculation “deliberates” about variable things; contemplation, by contrast, does not “deliberate” at all; it is more like appreciation than close analysis.  The father of logic also held that contemplation is superior to inference in that it does not deliberate but is the basis of deliberation; thus it counts as a more divine state of mind (Nicomachean Ethics, VI). 

Heidegger holds the same distinction between calculation and meditation: “calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next” whereas “meditative thinking collects itself and bides its time in quiet composure.”  Calculation wanders to and fro; meditation stays rooted in the home ground; calculation is practical and always seeks; meditation is poetic and merely perseveres.  Heidegger evens claims that calculation is not a thinking at all but a flight from thinking; likewise man is not a thinking being but a meditating being and the true issue of the day is to “keep meditative thinking alive” (Discourse on Thinking). 

Philosophy in the East never accounted sheer reasoning or inference as the essential ‘spiritual act.’  The summit of mindfulness in Eastern traditions has always been accounted meditation—a contemplative state —from which grows a kind of observant consciousness or witness.  Contemplative or meditative mind e.g. in Theraveda teachings, is an insistent consciousness or awareness or wakefulness, in which successive states of emotion, memory, association, sensation, inference and the like are registered, observed, transpiring and allowed to pass, without clutching or grasping or tarrying, succeeded by new trains and, after a lifetime of attentive practice, by tranquil composure.

—Gautama held that the concentration and equanimity practiced in insight meditation develops moral self-discipline; thus a kind of wisdom derives from the calm of meditative practice, allowing one to stand aloof from experience and extinguish clinging, clutching, obsessiveness within one.  One should neither hope nor fear nor clutch, but let slip the moments of experience.  Reaching this liberation shows itself in compassion.

A consequence of this line of thinking is that the development from intellect to ethics is not made via argument, inference, association or any kind of connectivity—from abstraction, to practice—but precisely because the thinker does not deliberate, reason, infer, or develop argument.  He practices steadying the mind to observe and not clutch; the more he is able to do this, the more compassion he shows for everything transpiring around him. 

This approach to intellectual honesty via attention offers a new prospect on the mental landscape; it suggests that the goal of radical inquiry is best accomplished by not inquiring; it attributes dishonest thinking to the false substantive of the fixed self; it returns thinking to the still more concrete reality of mere moments, observed, undergone and lived—rather than codified or judged. 

This suggests that intellectual dishonesty a kind of selfishness or egotism.

—These are a few researches into the powerful idea of doubting absolutely everything in order to surmount bias and reach wisdom.

In sum: everything that is essential to the question should be available in every instant of thinking; there is no need to get anywhere in reasoning, but instead to awaken in the present without stint or preconception.  This is how one becomes what one admires. 

Question: What is the point of directing reason to itself? 

Answer: Introspection makes the closest approach to realism.  Nothing is given in experience except thoughts—neither the mind nor the world.