The Deeper Reasoning
If living with and then without autistic housemates has done me one service, it has been to make me value irrationality as a mode of progress. There is a stagnant, stoic, static property to rationality that is attached to the very core: in your travels you will eventually find what is the very best you can be and do, and once you have this, change nothing. Freeze time.
Already we have a statement that sounds profoundly irrational coming from the depths of reason. Do not change the very best. If we here think of "time" as a stepping of phases of reasoning rather than the vibration of an atom or the difference of agreed upon reference frames, then the physical irrationality of freezing time has no place. The nonsense I mean is that reason brings you to change in one direction, the "right" direction, and leaves you there. In engineering analysis, this is a high virtue. Usually, there is a way to perform more analysis and learn more specific knowledge about the toy you're building or have built, but no one does this because it would be pointless, irrational. On and on we could go, but rather we would build something else. We know when we have enough.
Until things break, then we don't know enough. When a telecommunications writer creates a manual for a product, the firm can send the manual to a test audience, find places to improve that the writer would not have thought of, and improve. When an architect made the Tacoma Narrows bridge, that was it. He couldn't hand the specs to nature and ask for what it thought. Nature instead told the architect that its bridge would satisfy the dynamic conditions of a Hopf bifurcation and reach a stable limit-cycle when the wind swept through the Narrows using one of the best ways to tell anything: an example. This is the difference between working with words that represent other words, and working with words that represent things.
Its not that engineers and architects can't account for everything, or even that we can't account for enough, the problem is that accounting for enough or for everything appears an irrational act, and so we abandon it. Truly, most of the time, this is a great, powerful assumption. This is the assumption that allows engineers to work on more than one successful project in a lifetime. But why do we call it reason?
Indeed, this very thing which we have called reason has killed many people for an oversight. Reason has let many tragedies occur. Reason has crushed you to the earth and driven your mind against a sandy stone. John Stuart Mill warned us about reason, too. His proposed wielder of reason was an amorphous majority of people. Mine is the weapon itself. Without that sword there would be no threat, so I will understand the sword first and then approach the man, and Mill has done the second part handily for me.
I am satisfied that reason is a dangerous weapon and a great hazard. What I need to address is the circumstances in which reason should be abandoned. Put down the sword when you enter the home: there are no soldiers around the host's chambers. The most important context is that of family. Reason is a good tool for cold calculation. Have you ever met a woman who likes a "calculating" man? Or a man whose type is "efficient"? We look for tenderness and love, we look for cooperation and fellowship, we look for virtue and uprightness. Have we all lost our minds?
What we use is not the sword of reason to look for a mate, but something else. Something new and very very old. The Deeper Reasoning. The Deeper Reasoning is the main tool of any household. The Deeper Reasoning makes 9PM a usual bedtime, and makes collections of junk appear on the wall. The Deeper Reasoning keeps family photo albums and lets junior take the car out for a spin. This is the first place I see this new tool in use while the sword is sheathed or put away altogether. It is the pen.
Next is the school. This is the armory and museum of weapons. Reason is everywhere, but here I see the pen acting behind it all. It is necessary, because you cannot cut children down with swords, or even expect them to be able to wield them well with no practice. So we use the tool first. Imagine the context of children in a school learning is gone. Now you have 40 children in a classroom, performing a simple equation or a sheet of them or spelling a word over and over. What that looks like now is a performance in autism. Why are they there? What is the point of having all of them do the same equation? What is the point of doing an equation so simple in the first place if it does not explore the boundaries of mathematics? You know exactly the answer to all of these questions because you do have the context of children in a school. The pen is why all these children work this math problem. It is to learn to use the sword someday.
It is crucial to understand why The Deeper Reasoning is in fact rational, while it appears on the surface to be nonsense. The pen dictates an initial goal or desire that reason alone cannot give you. No one would use a sword to eat soup, and no one would decide what he wants in life with reason alone. Once you have used the pen, then you take up the sword. Given that you want a loaf of bread, you use every available sensibility to find or make it. This is where your reason fits into your morals, too. This is why rationality is not the same thing as morality, is not the same thing as humanity, is not the same thing as virtue.
So you should know that really great logic is illogical.