This book describes a lost tradition that can be called reasonableness. The tradition began with Aristotle, was recommended to Western education by Augustine, flourished in the schools of the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, then got lost in the academic and philosophic shuffles of the twentieth century. The modern critical thinking movement has tried to reclaim some of the tradition, but the central idea of reasonableness—the part that makes it broader than mere reasoning—remains gutted. For Aristotle and the subsequent tradition of Western education the difference between reasoning and reasonableness was partly a matter distinguishing three sources of information, the methods for handling those three sources, and understanding the levels of certainty available in each. The three sources can be generically called intuition, experience, and testimony. The first two were available to an individual reasoner, but the third was social. Testimony required the individual to trust information gained from other people. The first two were the stuff of reasoning, but the third was the key to a broader reasonableness.

One of the most provocative parables used to teach the subtleties of this aspect of reasonableness was first offered by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Locke has a King of Siam, while listening to a Dutch ambassador tell of the far north, suddenly recoil at the report that water gets so cold in Holland that it turns hard enough for an elephant to walk on it. Astonished, the king replies, “Hitherto I have believed the strange Things you have told me, because I look upon you as a sober fair man, but now I am sure you lye.” The story’s goal is to help readers understand that reliance on one’s own experience and reason is limited and that assent to testimony, even highly improbable testimony, from a credible witness is important for right reasoning. Although the story became the fodder for people on both sides of the eighteenth-century debate about the reasonability of belief in miracles, Locke had more mundane issues in mind. He was exploring the levels of certainty and guidelines of trust inherent in the slippery realm of information we gain from sources outside ourselves.

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), an Oxford don, then a Cambridge professor who wrote popular stories and Christian apologetics in the middle of the twentieth century, had much to say about testimony. In one of his most famous children stories, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), one of his minor characters is a professor disgusted that basic principles of being reasonable had not been taught to the children in his charge. Confronted by the two oldest of four siblings with a fantastic tale from their younger sister about a land of Narnia, and a mean-spirited denial from their younger brother, the professor listens carefully and asks them an unexpected question:

They answer that their sister is the more truthful, but that in this case, her story just can’t be true.

Lewis, in the manner of the traditional humanist education that reached back to Aristotle, believed reasonable people should be taught guidelines for handling testimony. Among these guidelines was the priority given to the character and circumstances of the testifier over the material testified. In other words, given a trustworthy testifier, reasonable people must open their minds to anything—even things beyond general experience—or else they risk being caught in their own experience in the way that the King of Siam refused to believe in the existence of ice. Applying this rule of priority, a rule the Ramist called “reciprocation,” yielded not an absolute conclusion on the matter, but rather a tentative way of proceeding.

What interests me most is the professor’s criticism of English logic education in the middle of the twentieth century. The schools were struggling with how to teach the social aspects of reasonableness. Self-realization, heroic individualism, and a narrow sense of humility and democracy worked to encourage an image of the lone-wolf critical thinker.

The Port-Royal Logic was first published in French in 1662 and was initially titled La Logique ou l’art de penser. For its first half century of European use, its popular Latin translation was called Ars Cogitandi. Over two centuries of common use, it was sometimes referred to as the Jansenist Logic but most often simply called The Port-Royal Logic. Like Quintilian’s Institutio, The Port-Royal Logic is pleasantly readable, wisdom-filled, and organized for easy use by young students and old teachers. Although rooted in the mathematics-inspired reasoning methods of René Descartes, the textbook also offered a longer, stronger, and deeper recommendation for testimony in the art of being reasonable than any previous textbook. Most importantly it dismissed the Aristotelian tradition of topics, modeled a new four-part structure in which the first three parts described reasoning in geometrical fashion and the fourth advised on the broader matters of reasonableness. Testimony, probability, and degrees of assent were important aspects of this larger reasonableness. As the Ars Cogitandi—the Art of Thinking—it became the most influential general education textbook of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Key to The Port-Royal Logic’s discussion of testimony was, first, a traditional Aristotelian optimism about the persuasiveness of truth even among humans prone to error and deception. Second, it overflows with an Augustinian emphasis on the rightly oriented will and simple good sense. Laziness and lack of concern for the truth were presented as the enemies of reasonableness. Vigor, conscientiousness, and trust along with a measure of good sense were the start-up qualifications for thinking well and deciding wisely. “Right reason,” The Port-Royal Logic states, “accords all things their appropriate status. It makes us doubt those that are doubtful, reject those that are false, and recognize in good faith those that are evident.” Third, in Renaissance humanist fashion, The Port-Royal Logic advocates the naturalness of reasoning well. Technical terms, memorization of syllogistic forms, and frustrating added baggage were logomachies to be jettisoned. Finally, the book advocated mathematicizing good judgment. Dialectical probability was given more rigor through mathematics, and The Port-Royal Logic spurred long-influential attempts to treat testimony like a math problem. Disarmingly written, the book synthesized classical traditions, Cartesian reasoning, and Augustinian reasonableness in a way that encouraged and empowered readers.

The Greeks and Romans developed a place for testimony and authority in topics manuals as nontechnical, extrinsic, or inartificial arguments. The early Christians, dependent upon Jewish history and reports of Jesus’ work and resurrection, had reason to emphasize the reasonableness of reliance on testimony. Luke in his sketch of Jesus’ life and the early church bases his authority on eyewitness accounts. Paul, outlining his authority to teach, claims access to divine testimony. As Christians came to dominate Western education, they had good reason to retain Greek and Roman ways of teaching testimony and authority in the art of being reasonable.

St. Augustine is the most important figure in this creating a Christianized version for the dialectic using testimony. Augustine did not simply baptize classical traditions. He created a new tradition that was psychologically deeper, epistemologically more sophisticated, and ecclesiastically anchored. In medieval Europe the classical and Augustinian traditions of testimony and authority were constricted within two lesser traditions, the Boethian and Cassiodoran. In both cases, the traditions were stripped down and presented without the rich examples, discussion, or analysis of earlier writers. Boethius encouraged a philosophical and theological tradition that held extrinsic knowledge at arm’s length. He also tantalizingly but without explanation proposed a position between Aristotle’s persuasive truth and Stoic assent that depended on a spontaneous and willing belief. Cassiodorus was the most significant developer of a pedagogical tradition that encouraged emphasis on testimony and authority. Working in the Hellenistic tradition of encyclopedists who wrote economical and comprehensive guides to the liberal arts, Cassiodorus provided an overview of what should be taught in each of the seven arts, which became the model for the tightly packaged form of dialectic that came to dominate Renaissance and early modern education. Given the centrality of historical reports in Christianity, it is surprising that the Christian-dominated culture of medieval Europe did not do more with the dialectic of testimony and authority; however, Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodorus kept testimony and authority firmly in the curriculum.

EYEWITNESSES AND FAITH BEFORE AUGUSTINE

Early Christian apologetics was founded on appeals to the authority of history and eyewitness testimony. Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned after reinterpreting the history of Abraham, Moses, and David in a way that supported Christianity.

When it comes to questions of human and divine testimony, wrote John Henry Newman in his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), “Aristotle has been my master.” Like his mentor at Oxford, Richard Whately, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Thomists and Scots, Newman believed that education would be best served by reviving the reasoning and reasonableness of Aristotle. First and foremost, he thought, the term “logic” should be reserved for formal reasoning—the study of the structures of valid inference from premises to conclusions. The sources and even the ultimate truth of the knowledge that serves as premises was not germane to whether a valid inference had been drawn. Great advances in the discipline of logic would come from this narrowing of focus. Secondary to this narrowing was Newman’s interest in the venerable tradition of Aristotelian reasonableness, drawn from Aristotle’s other writings on dialectic, rhetoric, ethics, and politics. Newman, being primarily interested in religious reasonableness, reached back to the Nicomachean Ethics to affirm one of the fundamental dichotomies of reasonableness: “a boy may be a mathematician, but not a philosopher.” Syllogistic logic had its proper applications, Newman believed, but cooks do not need to be chemists and masons do not need to be mineralogists. The life of being reasonable was broader, richer, and more subtle than formal reasoning. “Logic,” Newman declared, “makes but a sorry rhetoric.”

So logic textbooks in this revived Aristotelianism became less directed toward teaching testimony and authority. On the other hand, academic subjects were shuffled around as the modern university curriculum developed, and new philosophy departments were still expected to teach general education reasonableness. Here Aristotle was a model, since he had taught not only logic but general reasonableness. Aristotle had initially divided the sources of knowledge into intuition, experience, and information communicated by other people. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle had wrestled with intuition and experience as “preliminary problems” to syllogistic demonstrations that yield certainty, and in Topics and Rhetoric he taught the handling of facts and opinions gained from other people that led often to less than certain conclusions. If philosophy departments were going to teach about the former they should hold onto teaching the latter.

In the fourth century bce, Greek thinkers first articulated the idea that supreme wisdom takes the form of theoria. These philosophers defined their new conception of knowledge in different ways, using different modes of discourse. In addition to offering philosophic analyses and discussions of theoria, the fourth-century philosophers employed powerful rhetoric in the attempt to define this new intellectual practice. None offered a completely neutral or analytic account of theoretical activity; all developed what G. E. R. Lloyd calls “a discourse, or one might say a rhetoric, of legitimation.” In this chapter, I will examine one of the central strategies deployed in the attempt to conceptualize and legitimize philosophic theoria, namely, the frequent use of the discourse and structures of traditional theoria.

The fourth-century philosophers borrow the notion of “contemplating the spectacle of truth” not from the Presocratic tradition but from a specific civic institution – that of theoria. In ancient Greece, theoria was a venerable cultural practice characterized by a journey abroad for the sake of witnessing an event or spectacle. This chapter will examine the three most prominent forms of theoria in the classical period: visits to oracular centers, pilgrimages to religious festivals, and journeys abroad for the sake of learning. In all journeys of theoria, the pilgrim or theoros traveled away from home to see some sort of spectacle or to learn something about the outside world, thus confronting foreign peoples and places. In classical Greece, the theoros could be sent as an official representative of his city, in which case the theoria was carried out in a civic and political context. But a theoros could also venture forth on his own, enacting a “private” rather than a “civic” theoria.

Plato is famous for his denigration of the physical world. In the myths in the Phaedo and Phaedrus, however, and in the “likely account” in the Timaeus, Plato offers a very positive account of the physical cosmos as a whole and of certain (exceptional) bodies within it. In particular, he identifies certain bodies as perfect (or near-perfect) “images” of the Forms: they are not just shadowy eidola, but agalmata or “sacred images” of true reality. These bodies are either exceptionally beautiful bodies in the terrestrial realm or the heavenly bodies in the celestial sphere. Although Plato generally has a very negative view of the sensible world, he makes an exception in the case of physical beauty: beautiful bodies have a sort of sacred status which generates, for the philosopher, the kind of sacralized visualization that theoroi experience at religious festivals and sanctuaries.

Italo Calvino's dazzling book, Mr. Palomar, offers a portrait of postmodern ways of seeing. Its hero, Mr. Palomar – named after a famous telescope – spends his time conducting experiments in viewing and contemplating the world around him. In a chapter entitled “The Contemplation of the Stars,” Palomar ventures out to look at the heavens “in order to detach himself from the earth.” In this endeavor, Palomar deliberately follows the example of the ancient Greeks who, he believes, achieved knowledge and tranquillity from this exercise. He goes to the darkness of a nearby beach and, after spending half an hour perusing his astronomical charts, settles down to study the stars.

This activity, however, turns out to be quite complicated: “to decipher a chart in the darkness he must also bring along a flashlight. The frequent checking of sky against chart requires him to turn the light on and off, and in the passages from light to darkness he remains almost blinded and has to readjust his vision every time” (43).

Wonder plays an essential role in the pursuit and practice of theoria, yet it is rarely analyzed in the scholarly literature. As Aristotle stated so memorably in the Metaphysics: