There
are, to my mind, only two ways of understanding the world: the senses
and our reasoning.
About
our senses, we know of our basic ones: touch, smell, hearing, ect.
The foundations of understanding the world with our body. To this
list, I also include our emotions. We feel them, sometimes rather
deeply.
Our
reasoning is how we understand the world with our mind. With this, we
can build the foundation of our personal philosophies. It’s also
elusive. We can’t sense our reasoning. Sometimes, our reasoning can
invoke emotions, but that doesn’t mean we are sensing our reason.
Part
of the debate, from what I can understand, is which of these ways of
understanding best help us navigate the world. We have the
rationalists, who chose reason, and the empiricist who chose our
senses. Both make good points in their positions I’ll not write
here, as they are many and sometimes beyond my grasp.
Yet,
if I may, I’d like to propose a stance that not only combines the
two, but shows that each need the other. I am not the first to come
up with this idea. But, as far as I can near tell, there is no name
for this stance.
In
Christian theology, there is a term known as synergism. There is a
debate in Christian theology about if people are saved by divine
grace or by human effort. Synergism says, why not both? Rather than
saying one must be right and the other wrong, the synergists say that
it's some combination of the two. There may be debate about how much
it involves one or the other, but it still comes down to the idea
that both work together.
Given
that it’s a religious form of what I’m proposing, let’s call
this position of both empiricism and rationalism philosophical
synergism.
Both
our senses and our reasoning work together to form our understanding
of the world. Our senses are our input. Without these, our reasoning
minds wouldn’t have anything to work off of. Yet without our
reasoning minds, we would have no way of filtering information.
Neither
of these systems are perfect, even when working together. Reason can
take us to the stars, our senses to the heights of ecstasy. But
reason can also make crackpot sensible, our senses tricked by simple
sleights of hand. Yet, on the whole, we can trust both when they work
together. Think fallibilism: we can’t guarantee that we’re right,
but that doesn’t mean we’re wrong, either. Our positions can
always change given new information. That new information may come
from our senses or from our reasoning mind.
(Side
note: I just learned about fallibilism, so my broad understanding of
it is that we can’t be sure about anything but knowledge doesn’t
need absolute certainty. Board understanding is not, typically, great
understanding, but as far as I can tell, it seems to be the case.)
Now,
some may wonder if either reasoning or our senses pull more of the
weight. It’s a fair question: is it more work to interpret our
emotions, or do our senses work harder because we’d have no way to
navigate the world? If I had to take a side, I’d side with our
senses. Every animal survives by their senses. Very few use reason to
navigate their lives. But then again, we might not be human at that
point: most animals evolved to their environment. Humans had to
adapt by using what was available, and that requires reason. So
perhaps it isn’t as clear as one would hope.
I
realize that this isn’t a formal philosophic argument. I am not a
professional philosopher. I only play one on the internet. But I
needed this more than you did: I needed to clarify my thoughts about
how I knew what I knew. If we don’t know how we know, we fall prey
to traps of both the mind and the body. Only by understanding
ourselves can we spot the traps before they ensnare us.
