1.4 Reason in medieval thought

Against the background of the medieval perspective of things striving to follow the implications of their nature, reason is understood as the guide which tells human beings how to behave so as to fulfil their true nature - or, in Danby's formulation, how to obey the laws of Nature.

Think for a moment of the human being making decisions within the medieval framework. That framework will equip you with the belief that you have a "nature" which you are to "strive" to fulfil. How are you to know how to apply this in particular circumstances? - to decide what to do as you confront particular choices?

The medieval answer is: you are provided with your Reason for exactly this purpose. It is your Reason which acts as your pilot, as a guide to show to you what your true nature demands of you: what you should do.

The distinctiveness of this conception of reason is highlighted when you contrast it with later perspectives. It is very different from the way of thinking which emerges in the 17th Century. Reason comes then to be seen as a tool, a tool which allows us to make correct inferences, to move from given premises to any conclusion that they support.

The premises don't even need to be true: reason discerns the legitimacy of the move, without commenting on the starting point.

You remember the point elementary logic texts make much of: there is a vital distinction between truth and validity.

We can reason correctly that

but that tells us nothing about the truth of the premise that no swans are black. The reasoning is absolutely correct, though the conclusion reached is wrong.

You may have come across the discussion of reason and its role in guiding behaviour that we find in the Modern David Hume:

Reason on its own gives us no guidance over what we ought to do: it is our desires that constitute our goals. Reason only comes in to help us see what we should do if we desire to do this or that.

This is the new sense of "reason" at work, and it gets established with the new science.

(There is a monumental attempt to restore reason as a guide to the ends human beings should pursue at the end of the 18th Century when what became known as the Romantic Movement tried to check the all-conquering advance of science. It was Kant, heralding this movement, who paradoxically tried to construe reason as a 'prompting of the heart', pointing us along the right path. I try and explain this here. I myself don't see that the attempt was successful. I think we still work essentially with the concept of reason propounded by the early Moderns (and by Locke in particular).)

But in the medieval period, "reason" does have to do with truth. It discerns the truth about our nature, and to an extent the nature of other creatures. It discerns for us our aim, what the end of our action should be. It tells us what we ought to do.

The Modern conception of nature is different.

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Reason, Nature and the Human Being in the West
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