Listen to Reason

In his 2002 book, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders, Jacob Needleman presciently writes for our Tea Party time. What were our Founders really saying, really meaning? What was the Constitution about? In the reminiscence of the Civil War, who and what was Lincoln? What is the meaning of this country called America? These are the kinds of questions Needleman tackles with historicity and insight.

One of the things he comes up with is this thing of the Founders with reason. He says that we have it all wrong. He writes this:

This capacity which [the Founders] called "reason" has little to do with what we usually refer to by that name. It is not something that can be programmed into a computer; nor is it a collection of information and data; nor is it the power to develop ingenious hypotheses for the purpose of short-term prediction and material advantage--all these are capacities of the mind which in their way are shared by the animals and many of which can even be performed better by machines. By "reason," the Founding Fathers are speaking of a power within man that is capable actively of apprehending the essential truth and form of universal reality and morality. It is a capacity that acts independently of individual subjective emotion or instinctual attraction. By being thus independent of emotional or subjective  preference, this "reason" is able to be the conduit not only of knowledge but of love, love that is not shackled to the personal and preferential.

The founders of American and the thinkers of the Enlightenment must be understood as searching and thinking in the train of the Judeo-Christian and Hellenic teachings that spoke of the active intellect as the most sacred element within human nature--what Plato called nous, the governing, presiding force within the republic of man. Certainly, one could look at Eastern teachings about the consciousness that is higher than ordinary thought and emotion, and such examinations of the great Eastern spiritual psychologies can help us gain a new perspective on our own Western ideas. But it is not necessary to rely on the Eastern material only--we have this teaching in our own culture; and the Founding Fathers, sometimes knowingly, and sometimes only by unconscious inheritance, were deeply influenced and attracted to this teaching about an independent power of the mind, a presiding power which can legislate to the whole only through the willing consent of the parts of ourselves to be governed by the attention of reason.

Maybe we don't know what we are missing. Maybe in these turbulent times, we need to listen to reason.