Walking the Tightrope of Reason: The Precarious Life of a Rational Animal (review)

Hume Studies Volume 31, Number 1, April 2005, pp. 169-172 ROBERTJ. FOGELIN. Walkingthe Tightrope of Reason: The Precarious Life of a Rational Animal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 203. ISBN 0-19-5160266 , cloth, $22.00; ISBN 0-19-517754-1, paper, $13.95. This lively little book—170 small-format pages, excluding front and end matter—has its origin in the author's 1995 Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa lectures at Dartmouth College. Consistent with this origin, it speaks primarily to a general audience rather than to philosophical specialists (as Fogelin says in his Preface). Nevertheless, even specialist readers will find Walking the Tightrope of Reason valuable . It revisits figures (Sextus, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein) and issues (skepticism's depth and uses, reason's infirmities and indispensability) that have long and productively occupied Fogelin, and here we see his thoughts about these figures and issues clearly and whole. The book consists of an Introduction and seven nicely unified chapters. In the Introduction Fogelin claims that reason, left to its own devices, moves between the unsatisfactory poles of (1) rationalist metaphysics and (2) skepticism or relativism. On issue after issue, thinkers at these opposed extremes subscribe to some common underlying disjunctive principle: for instance, either God exists or everything is permitted, either texts have fixed meanings or they are meaningless, either something is certain or nothing is even probable. Fogelin willingly concedes that such choices can seem deep and unavoidable, and that in many cases we may never entirely free ourselves from the sense that we must make such radical choices. But to the extent that we can free ourselves, Fogelin proposes, we will do so by constraining reason to work within the "ordinary, workaday world" (5). This view of reason's usefulness within limits, and self-destructiveness beyond those limits, Fogelin later labels "circumspect rationalism" (70); sketching this view and its appeal is the book's goal. Chapter One, "Why Obey the Laws of Logic?" explores the law of non-contradiction . Fogelin labels traditional defenders of this logical law Parmenideans (partisans of stability and unity), and labels radical opponents of this law Heracliteans (partisans of dynamism and diversity). Heraclitean remarks include Emerson's jibe at foolish consistency and Whitman's claim that, since he contains multitudes, he can blithely contradict himself. Nietzsche and "many postmodernists " are examples of more thoroughgoing Heracliteans. Fogelin, inspired here by Wittgenstein, argues that Parmenideans and Heracliteans share a mistaken assumption: that the law of non-contradiction is an ontological constraint, ruling out real change. Instead the law is a constraint on language, a tautology. In one way, this first chapter exemplifies Fogelin's general method: uncovering the Hume Studies 170 Book Reviews shared assumption behind two opposed philosophical extremes. In another way, though, the chapter is atypical, since it is straightforwardly deflationary (abandon the assumption, and the problem vanishes), while Fogelin usually emphasizes that philosophical problems about human reason are deep and durable. Perhaps Chapter One is atypical in this way because, while Fogelin doesn't exactly take sides in the dispute between Heracliteans and Parmenideans, still his main point is that denying the law of non-contradiction is "a foolish error" (41). (In general, where postmodernism is concerned, Fogelin pulls no punches and spares no ridicule.) In Chapter Two, "Dilemmas and Paradoxes," Fogelin argues, again following Wittgenstein, that our lives are governed by systems of rules that are inconsistent, at the margins anyway; and that we should "learn to live with inconsistency in... a discriminating and civilized manner" (42) rather than becoming obsessed with eliminating inconsistency at all costs, or allowing ineliminable inconsistency to stymie us. His first example of an inconsistent system of rules is an imagined game he dubs Ludwig, where unskillful play can lead to a dilemma: two rules, "you must move here" and "you mustn't move here," come into conflict. (Incidentally, in light of this description it is mildly surprising that Fogelin doesn't consider the real example of stalemate in chess: a situation in which a player is both required to move and unable to move. In fact the rules of chess are structured such that this "paradox" yields a clear result, namely, a draw...

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