The Evolution of Reason

Abstract

In an earlier work we showed how Hegel, in an attempt to explain the notion of becoming, to make it rational — or at least reasonable — had introduced the notion of a concrete reason: a reason of a kind hitherto unknown to logic. He had tried to justify this extremely bold innovation by arguing that the nature of human reason must have changed over the centuries through the very use humanity had made of this instrument. We endeavored to show that the claim of the German metaphysician was not tenable, that in fact everyone since the beginning of thought had used one and the same logic, and that the phenomenon of becoming in particular had remained just as opaque to reason after Hegel as it had been before this alleged institution of the concept of the ‘reasonable’. At the same time, however, we admitted the theoretical possibility of some such change in the nature of reason, anticipating that if it should occur, it would be possible to discover it and determine its exact significance through an examination of the reasoning processes employed by science (cf. ES 2:379 ff.).