Logic and Lunacy
G.K. Chesterton and the Limits of Pure Rationalism
You’ll have to bear with me a bit this morning.
This won’t be a traditional Monday article release. I don’t have a well worked out essay to share on practical theology or disciple-making. In truth, my time for writing recently has been eaten up by other responsibilities.
But I have been reading a lot. Fiction-wise I’m two and a half books deep into the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. I’m not a big fantasy-head. But wow. This is the first series I’ve read I would say rivals LOTR. It has intricate characters, and the presence of moral vision reminiscent of Tolkien. Fantastic.
But the other book I’m reading also represents new literary terrain: Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. I’m told it’s his best, by Trevin Wax. And since he wrote the companion text for this version, I’d say he’s as good of an authority as any.
If you aren’t familiar (as I wasn’t) with Chesterton, he was a writer, journalist, and humorist active in the early 20th century. He was a convinced Christian, and had a profound effect on C.S. Lewis during his pre-conversion process.
I am only three chapters into Orthodoxy, which is Chesterton’s best known spin on apologetics, or defense of the Christian faith. Fascinatingly, he comes at it mostly through pictures, analogies, or images–punctuated with profound observations regarding human and divine natures.
You can see where Lewis picked up some of his style.
The second chapter is called “The Maniac”, and in it Chesterton layers a critique of pure rationalism (I’m going to avoid calling it “Pure Reason” only because I haven’t gone far enough to figure out how he overlaps with Kant, or if he even attempts at doing so).
Rationalism, loosely, is the enlightenment idea that all knowledge that matters can be discovered through deduction and logical processes. Chesterton, however, isn’t a total mystic either. He doesn’t wish to deconstruct logic, but only, by use of analogy, demonstrate its real limits.
He begins with provocation–stating that the most rigorously logical people in this world are those who are insane! Here’s how he puts it:
“Everyone who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
Chesterton’s point (as far as I understand it) is that logic and reason only function rightly when bound and ordered by certain first principles outside themselves. Anyone can build a tight and internally consistent system of thought that is nevertheless utterly divorced from reality, simply because it has factored out critical contextual truths.
For instance, on a philosophical level, one can build a worldview that denies the existence of right and wrong. Naturalistic determinism would be a prime example of such a philosophy. By the rules of logic the naturalist may argue we can’t prove that true moral categories objectively exist, so therefore they must not! But yet they do. This isn’t purely demonstrable by a system of logic, but it is the repeatable fact of human experience. Our personhood demands morality with a transcendent basis. Eventually, even the naturalist ends up reaching or contriving some work-around to achieve what their philosophical system should not allow.
This same thing is true for people who suffer lesser delusions. Think for instance of the man consumed by bitterness and some form of paranoia. Everyone is out to get him. He can prove it with layered examples, and appeals to reason after reason for his superior point of view and clear evidence for the malicious motives of others. The flaw in his thinking isn’t that his system “doesn’t make sense.” In all likelihood, his case is airtight. But you can see his error simply by zooming out. He’s left out technically unprovable data: like the existence of other independent minds which he cannot know. Humility and charity have also gone by the wayside, making room only for self-justified narcissism. Chesterton explains,
“Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions.
Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.”
Where Chesterton is ultimately going with this (again, as far as I can tell), is that an undervalued strength of true Christianity is its epistemological humility and self-awareness. At the end of the chapter he contrasts the circle of Buddhism (repeating, the same, closed, never ending or changing) with the expansiveness of the cross (able to grow outward forever without changing its fundamental shape). Our faith accounts for things unknowable and respects transcendence, while still expecting order where it ought to be. In this sense, the Christian worldview is “larger” and able to account for oddities and unknowns in a way that is satisfactory but not slickly systematized or overexplained. In this sense, it’s beautifully distinct from the many modern philosophies that exist coherently in coffee shops, but remain ill-fitted to actual human experience.
In his own words,
“The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle.”
I find this point of comparison between the person ideologically trapped in a consistent but narrow meta-narrative and someone lost in a more personal delusion to be fascinating. I wonder if there isn’t just apologetic merit to this line of reasoning, but pastoral value as well. In recent years I’ve known many people caught up in conspiracy theories, sometimes grand in nature regarding geo-politics and the economy, and other times localized to their own relational anxieties. In both cases the person appears to live in “a well-lit prison of one idea.” They have a common obsession with building a macro-explanation for their fears and struggle, and pressing that system toward a form of salvation.
Here is where incredible peace can be found in the vastness of Biblical theism. Logic and reason play an important function in this honest system, but they aren’t unduly stretched. We expect them to hold within our epistemological limits–and use them readily. But we can also without hesitation embrace what lies beyond our framework. In fact, what our senses tell us can only be trusted and followed because of the more transcendent realities they point us toward (i.e. the existence of the mind, God, meaning and purpose). External virtues now enter non-pragmatically: among them charity, humility, courage, hope, faith, love, and more. Notably, most of these are “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-23), and can only appear through a divine intervention that breaks the pure cycle of cause and effect.
Anyway, as presaged, this is far from complete. But I’ll leave you with Chesterton’s summary of his own chapter,
“This chapter is purely practical and is concerned with what actually is the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void. The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end.”
Contra Descartes and others, reason is most well-wielded when we begin with the infinite God, rather than our limited selves. Our own capacities were never meant to function as adequate first principles.
If you found these ideas as interesting as I apparently did, then go snag a copy.1 I’d love to hear what you think once you make it through chapter two.
Chesteron, Gilbert Keith. Orthodoxy: With Annotations and Guided Reading by Trevin Wax (p. 36). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.