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Free Thinking : The nation

From the UK, philosopher Jonathan Rée

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1. A short history of freethinking, part two

   • Jonathan Rée
   • 24 Sep 06, 09:50 PM

   Yes indeed: the ideal of freeing ourselves from prejudice is fraught with problems. (Many thanks, Nadim, for a superb little dialogue about this.) We can never be sure whether we are making progress with it. But that does not mean we should give up trying.

   In the first place, the indispensability of logic. As I said the other day in what I thought a dry and boring, but necessary, post on ‘Logic, or how to think’, we should always try to work out the logical entailments of what we affirm or deny. What is logic after all? It is simply what happens when thinking becomes self-conscious, just as arithmetic is what happens when counting becomes self-conscious.

   If people’s sums don’t add up, we tell them to check them and try harder, and won’t be very impressed if they retort that they are freethinkers, and as far as they’re concerned the world itself is unarithmetical. And we should be just as impatient with our home-grown illogicians, who claim that the world itself is illogical, and even imagine that they are speaking in the noble name of ‘freethinking’ as they do so. The world is complex and full of surprises, no doubt: but that only goes to show that we need to keep checking our logical compass.

   Secondly, the problem of prejudice. When I said we should try to free ourselves from prejudice, I did not mean that we could ever succeed, still less that we could ever know that we have succeeded. But that need not stop us being on our guard against the effects of our own prejudices – excavating our unconscious reasons for thinking as we do, and correcting intellectual distortions due to our own laziness, vanity, and self-regard. That, I suspect, is the best route to the only kind of freethinking worth having. (I plan to come back to the problem of intellectual narcissism in a later post.)

   And two of my intellectual heroes had some fine things to say on this point.

   Continue reading "A short history of freethinking, part two"

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