Like Lahav, I believe philosophy is an opening up process with no certain result, though, I see Lahav’s ‘free seekers of wisdom’ (Lahav, Reflection 4) as opening up to being free to change, act, and love as much as somehow striving for a state of wisdom. Again, like Lahav, I also reject the case for logic, though logic as a thing with a purpose in its own right, not logical process as an underlying fabric of reason. Our reasoning, as ‘seekers’, does not have to be entirely rigorous, but it has to be convincing. If it is not, then, even though we may accept belief over ‘truth’, our wisdom becomes a state of mind resting on faith, and faith, like any other resort to unexplainable commitment, is uncertain, untestable and unreliable. The appeal to reason as a substructure to convincing belief is, I believe, our only way out of the trap of faith.

If inner transformation (which Lahav defines rather ambiguously as ‘learning to relate to life’ (Lahav, Reflection 4)) is to lead to wisdom, then it must be born of something reliable. If the route to wisdom is unreliable then the achieved ‘wisdom’ itself is unreliable. If we attain wisdom, but it is either unreliable or we suspect its reliability, we are in danger either of living an unsuspecting falsehood or of being ‘wise’ in bad faith. Wisdom may give ‘life to new visions’ (Lahav, Reflection 4), however, we must recognise that these visions arrive via a thinking process and that their source may lie in existing ideas. To say ‘transformation’ is the answer, as though ‘transformation’ somehow contains both the result and the explanation, is to duck the issue of what exactly is the ‘path’ to wisdom. Inspirations or visions leading to transformation have credibility — indeed this is often how we would explain such an experience — but to imply there is no logical connection between the source of the inspiration or vision and the inspiration or vision itself is misleading. Such a view also disguises the fact that the source of inspiration itself may be, importantly, the product of reasoning. For example, I may be inspired, have vision and be transformed by knowing of Descartes’ meditation and yet see no causal link beyond my inspiration. Indeed, the nature of inspiration often precludes seeing such a link even though it is there. The work which triggered the inspiration (Descartes’ meditation) is based on work which itself is reason-based. If Descartes’ meditation is a product of rigorous reasoning, and we are inspired by it (or something associated with it), and would not have been inspired without his reasoning effort, we cannot claim that our inspiration (and by implication our vision and subsequent transformation) is immune from reason or derives from something which is not reason. To ignore this would be an act based on faith.

Lahav says he has never met anyone ‘opened to new vision by the sheer logical validity of the argument’ (Lahav, Reflection 4) and on the face of it, this is compelling. Who, for example, would admit believing in angels because it was logical, and who would feel comfortable reasoning their way into being in love? But this is to polarize our nature, to imagine black and white where there are only shades of grey. Bertrand Russell, for example, could never believe in God because he was never convinced that God existed. Had he believed that God existed (in the same way that he felt the revelation of being an idealist — ‘Great God in boots! — the ontological argument is sound!’ (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 11, p.63)), he would have been transformed, but his transformation would have been based, not on the transformation itself but the reasoning which preceded it. Russell craved transformation (from someone who did not believe in God to someone who did), but he did not crave a transformation based on ‘faith’ as this would eliminate any appeal to reason. Faith exists where reason does not and is only compelling to the faithful. We do not need faith in order to be transformed, though we may need courage, or freedom, or love. Faith is not a vehicle for meaningful transformation because no transformation can be complete without the individual feeling sure that the transformation is believable for some good reason (the shared meaning here of ‘reason’ in both ‘reason’ and ‘good reason’ is not by chance). If we rely on faith to ‘guarantee’ the transformation, then we move even further back into the shadows, even deeper into the cave, where we are surrounded by the corrupted images of the hopeless.

True, transformation can seemingly be an inspiration (a vision, a ‘flash’, a revelation), but these are descriptions of the experience not of the transformation itself. It is the same as love at first sight, it is a revelation, but there is still a chain of reason behind this experience of revelation, it was just too rapid to appreciate. Moreover, there are many chains of reason which lead up to the point of inspiration; the narrative context of any individual at any point in time is profoundly complex. If we deny this then our ‘transformation’ is not simply something beyond our comprehension (in that we cannot comprehend the reasoning chain of ‘love at first sight’) but something beyond the world of reality — part of an imaginary world which, though fascinating, is simply false. There is grave danger here of creating what we might call ‘unicorn-wisdom’ — fascinating, elegant, magical, but not real.

None of this denies the reality of transformation, but it warns against imagining that there is something magical about inspiration, or revelation, or love. Philosophy — thinking — can lead to transformational insight — revelation — but it does not have to be conducted with total (or indeed any) rigour. Our thinking simply has to convince us that we know enough of the history of our revelation to assert its soundness. If this is insufficiently mystic and has no mystic appeal then it is so much the worse for mysticism. Real transformational insight is not mystical, it will always be based on reasoned triggers, divine or commonplace, and could equally occur on the ‘Road to Damascus’ as on the ‘Road to Bali’.

Russell, Bertrand. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Volume One, 1872-1914, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967.

Lahav, Ran. ‘Much More than Critical Thinking’, ‘Reflection 4’, 5 November 2005, http://www.ranlahav.net