Hello, I’m writing a science fiction, fantasy, and philosophical novel, and in one section I’ll discuss whether reason truly exists in the world or only exists for itself. I’d like to share my reasoning to get feedback and better understand these concepts so I can develop them more effectively in my novel.
Reason is nothing; reality is completely indifferent to it. Reason arises from nothing and without purpose, like a futile whirlwind in the desert thousands of miles from any observer. It is not the product of anything, and nothing is what it produces; it is neither remembered nor forgotten, nor even thought about. Similarly, reason arises randomly in the universe, like a billiards game governed by fixed laws. A collection of particles capable of rearranging itself.
The only difference between reason and the whirlwind is that reason thinks about itself. The whirlwind simply vanishes without resistance; reason employs mechanisms to avoid perishing.
Reason deceives itself. It dreams of being necessary. It dreams that it is useful, that it is capable of distinguishing good from evil, right from wrong, real from unreal… But it is reason itself that establishes these categories and concepts. It gives importance and value to words.
Reason is not a path to being or knowledge, but a phenomenon that cannot be understood or validated since any analysis of it comes from within itself. Reason does not fail. Reason has no mission. Reason does not matter. It speaks to you of ways to know the truth, but the concept of “truth” only exists as the product of a succession of logical arguments; it does not exist outside of reason. It is a construct to convince itself that there is a goal and that reason is not only the path to reach it but also the traveler who traverses it. Truth adds nothing to reality.
You see the world through reason, you feel the world through reason, you consider it, hear it, and imagine it through reason. There is nothing that isn’t an artifice of reason, designed to make you believe it’s necessary.
Outside the cage, there are no differences, no concepts, and yet you can’t escape. You are not inside the cage; you are the cage. What lies outside no longer belongs to reason.
Not only is reason unfounded, but so is the assertion that it is. There is no criterion by which one formulation is more legitimate than another that doesn’t operate within reason, not even to dismiss the legitimacy of all of them. And yet reason, which is what concocts these thoughts, still resists. Knowing this doesn’t make you wiser, more cynical, or freer.
And it doesn’t allow you to accept it. It doesn’t validate the idea that reason’s existence and non-existence are the same thing. It can’t. It continues to generate concepts, ideas, and arguments. They are not false, they simply don’t touch anything.
All thought, from the most mundane to finely constructed structures like mathematics or philosophy, is based on logical rules proven true by reason. Such reasoning is based on logical axioms, which, although they cannot be proven within the paradigm employed, could be proven from an external and broader paradigm in which the former emerges from the latter, and therefore the axioms of the first paradigm are not valid in the second. But for logical axioms, any attempt to validate them from a deeper and broader framework would require logical reasoning to evaluate these axiomatic propositions and therefore to employ the logical axioms themselves. This would present a self-referential paradox.