Stagtine, 22. Which Way?

Section 2, Chapter 6

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Reason. The animacy of life. It is that by which we understand through sensory information the environment around us and that by which we are made capable of a response. Or so we are told. But, if Pascal is right, it is also that by which the shabbiness of the mind sloughs off its mastery.¹

Feedback loops without reason are like speech in the wind. Of little worth. But a good attempt, nonetheless.

It is this idea that also animates the farmer’s penchant to control life—breeding. If humans alone can employ reason and humans alone are needed to interpret life’s ebbing and flowing and responsive feedback loop, then humans are also alone. It is our sad power for we alone have it and it makes us quite lonesome.

Reason and the ability to act reasonably is what separates us from rocks and soil and grass and livestock. In this way, argue all of the thought leaders and founders of the better agriculture or energy movements, it is also good for humans to exercise our natural, colonizing right over rocks and soil and grass and livestock. We can call it management, to make us feel better.

But is this true? If it is, our penchant to control breeding will save the world. Because it is effective, girded by humanity’s prized reason, and infused with good intentions. If it is not, it will destroy the world. Because it oversteps Creation’s complex symphony, replaces purpose with efficiency, and denudes life into that which is reasonable and that which reasonably manages. Is Pascal right? Is reason the fount of our mastery or is reason the release of mastery altogether? This is the question.

Aristotle divided sublunary life into three classifications: plants, animals, and humans and gave each a corresponding soul type. Plants, he wrote have a vegetative soul; animals have a sensitive soul; and humans, we have a rational soul. He ascribed the weight of their difference in the observable fact of their effects.

Plants reproduce for the continuation of their kind and they do nothing else; animals have a certain level of observational capabilities but occupy the lowest possible levels of cognitive and cerebral function and lack both vice and virtue—and so “neither has a god;” humans are rational and our rationality allows us to think, to believe, to experience, to love, to know, and, most importantly for Aristotle, to rule.²

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