A Loose Talk on “Reasonable” and “Lawful” — Why Is Violent Revolution Unreasonable?

18,338 characters2008.06.21

I want to note first that what I am saying is that violent revolution is “unreasonable,” not that I will never support violent revolution, but rather that there is no reason to support violent revolution. Although philosophy’s mission is to probe reasons, it is not the case that every one of a person’s preferences must be given reasons. For example, I like eating vegetables; then I like eating vegetables, that is enough, there is no need to come up with a whole lot of reasons to argue for the reasonableness of liking vegetables, as if those who do not like vegetables were somehow at fault. Even if 99% of the people in the world like eating vegetables, that does not mean the remaining 1% is at fault. To dress up choices that are purely personal preferences in the guise of rational argument and impose them as universal reasons—this is what is called the hubris of reason, the abuse of reason.

Of course revolution is not the same as lettuce and carrots, and to a certain extent reasons can and should still be given. For instance, if one wants to change from A to B, then we can discuss whether A is reasonable, whether B is reasonable, and so on. But “violence” is always unreasonable.

First of all, the reasonableness of ends cannot be inferred into the reasonableness of means; in particular, one cannot use other people or reason as mere means. Killing someone in order to save someone is also unreasonable. Why can one not use other people as means? I will come back to that slowly, but it is related to the next question—“one cannot use reason as a mere means,” or rather, “the reasonableness of the conclusion cannot prove the reasonableness of the process.” This may be easier to understand: say we say A is reasonable; that is to say, there are relevant reasons such as BCDE and so on that connect together to support A. But if we can be sure that A is reasonable, does that mean that I may randomly and arbitrarily fabricate a set of “reasons,” and as long as that set of reasons also leads to the conclusion A, then that set of reasons is reasonable too? Obviously not. Some people do not clearly distinguish between reasons and conclusions; when others question their specious arguments, they take it as an objection to their conclusions; or when they want to support a certain conclusion, they will use all kinds of reasons, even contradictory ones, by any means necessary to “argue” for it. These are all abuses of reason.

Saying that “violent revolution” is unreasonable has two meanings: first, “violence” is always unreasonable; second, “revolution” is always unlawful.

What I mean by “reasonable” has always been its simplest and plainest sense—“having reasons,” “making sense.” What is called making sense is also literal: that is, consistency and coherence, in other words, keeping one’s account throughout, making oneself internally consistent, without self-contradiction.

I think this explanation of mine is not only consistent with the plainest everyday usage, but also consistent with the etymology of “reasons.” Whether in Chinese or in Western languages, “dao” or “li” has the ancient sense of “speaking.”

A detailed discussion will be left to a separate essay. For now, let me record this: “reasonable” means “makes sense.” Then how is “speaking” possible? Where is the basis or foundation of “speaking”?—Everyday language. We always first speak and think in everyday language; even if certain matters require learning some specialized language in order to understand them, in order to learn such specialized language one often still needs to rely on one’s mother tongue, that is, everyday language, to understand and translate. Of course, one may also bypass the mother tongue and directly learn another language, but then one needs to personally take part in another way of life. Apart from relying on translation back and forth with the mother tongue, or directly learning another language by means of pointing and defining in another way of life and relearning language as children do, there is no other way to learn a different language.

And any language provides a “world”: a language establishes connections between different characters and different things, so that concepts acquire “meaning.” At the same time, concepts also form all sorts of connections with one another. Some of these concatenations are merely ad hoc, suitable for a particular time and scene, and not durable and lasting—for example, “there is a coin on the ground.” This kind of connection has a certain meaning, but it is not yet a reason. Only when a certain connection is fixed by being entangled with other stable forms of connection, acquiring a certain solidity, no longer limited to a particular time and scene but possessing a certain degree of universality, does it become a “reason.” For example: “When a coin is tossed into the air, if nothing else catches it, it will fall down.” This kind of connection is precisely what is called a “reason.” The reason reasons are relatively stable and universal is because they can connect with other connections, forming one link in a great net (a system) rather than floating isolated. The other connections supporting a certain reason can be other reasons, and also include those more stable connections between concepts and things as well as general life experience. For example, the reason “a coin will always fall” is woven under the common-sense notion that “heavy things will always fall,” it accords with people’s general life experience, and it is also supported by the “reasons” in scientific language such as the law of universal gravitation and Newton’s first law of motion (scientific language is nothing more than a more carefully, more rigorously woven, tighter and more solid net built on the basis of everyday language and laboratory ways of life.) Thus this reason seems comparatively reliable. But because it is too specific, the connections supporting it are relatively weaker; the more abstract a concept is, the broader the things it can concern, and the more connections it may have. Therefore, the more abstract a reason is, the harder it is to obtain; once fixed, it is also the more solid.

Those stable connections that slowly accumulate over generations of people’s daily lives are called “common sense,” while the reasons obtained when philosophers, scientists, and the like consciously (reflectively) summarize, organize, correct, invent, arrange, deduce, systematize (note, they all have the “silk” radical!) … are called “theory.”

Any given connection is neither sufficient nor necessary for supporting a certain reason, just as a net can still be a firm and reliable net even if a few threads break and a few holes appear. As for how badly it must be damaged before the net is no longer a net, there is no absolute standard of judgment.

The reliability of a net also depends on the way it is woven. If its weaving is one in which each link depends on the next and none is dispensable (perhaps more like a hemp rope), for instance an artificial logical system, then any loophole may be fatal. But if it is originally a loose network, then the destruction of a few nodes is often of no consequence to the overall situation. A scientific or philosophical system is often somewhere between the two, similar to a spider’s web—there are several through-running main axes supporting its overall form; the destruction of any one main axis is catastrophic, but the general subsidiary mesh is easy to repair and improve, and breaking off a few sections does no harm at all; indeed, a proper amount of metabolism, of discarding the old and taking in the new, may even help keep the net alive and vigorous!

If a certain net is sustained within a larger net, then if it no longer conforms to the standards of the larger net, or in other words, if its connection with the larger net is severed, then it loses the basis on which it is sustained. Therefore, the reliability of a net depends not only on its own structure, but also on its relation to a higher-order system. And the most basic net of all is no doubt “language” itself—namely, everyday language as mother tongue. Everyday language is sustained within everyday life; language is an important part of human social life. But the boundaries of “reason” are after all within “language”; outside language, there is no such thing as “reasonable.”

That is to say, to say whether something is reasonable, one must first place it within the world of language before one can speak of reasons. Although besides language, the technology, etiquette, and ways of survival of a social community are also interconnected to form an entire system, just as an animal community is also a whole, still no one can deny the importance of language for human life.

Language is so important that human beings’ “world,” “self,” and “value” are all situated within the world of language rather than directly rooted in the life-world outside language. The more mature a culture is, the more it is supported by a weighty tradition in concepts such as “world,” “human being,” and “value.” One must note that “world,” like “table,” is a concept, and under different language systems and ways of life, the meanings of these concepts are vastly different.

In particular, “value,” “love,” “good,” “correct,” “justice,” and so on are even more deeply mired in the mud of language. They have not lost their connection with intuitive impressions; rather, because they are so abstract, they can be linked with almost every kind of impression, so that they are covered by layer upon layer of thick gauze, their true faces becoming ever more obscure and difficult to discern.

And it is precisely the philosopher’s job to sort out and clarify these entangled concepts. As for concepts like “table” and “cup,” they have more direct connections with the intuitive impressions of everyday life, and there is often no need to interrogate them deeply. But abstract concepts that are farther removed from concrete, immediate experience, yet entangle themselves broadly in people’s spiritual world, urgently require organization. The method is to clear away those miscellaneous “veils,” so that their most authentic connections may be revealed.

If those abstract concepts do not receive effective sorting and timely clarification, at first glance this does not seem to have much impact on people’s daily lives. But for the stability and development of society and culture as a whole, it is a grave danger. This is because if reason falls into confusion, it is very likely to be abused. We see that throughout history all wars and countless atrocities have been carried out under the banner of “justice”; we see people describe those who despise morality as “sincere,” and those who pursue morality as “hypocritical”; we see people define material desire as “human nature”; we see the word “science” becoming wildly overused and being enshrined as the highest authority; we see those noisy angry youths being called “patriotic”; we see violent revolution being called “reasonable” and even “lawful” …

The abuse of reason makes people increasingly averse to reason, until in the postmodern environment the whole society looks down on reason. But contempt for reason and indifference to it further promote the abuse of reason, and thus a vicious cycle is entered. After all, however much one may despise reason, human beings still cannot break free from their dependence on the world of concepts, and the danger of abusing reason is not alleviated simply by looking down on reason. And once one tries to escape from the random misuse of reason and seek certainty, many people swing to the other extreme: dogmatism. This is still an abuse of reason. And since Kant, the self-conscious mission of philosophers has been precisely to prevent the abuse of reason: to reject both the despotic tyranny of reason and the danger of falling into anarchic riot.

Since “reasonable” means “makes sense,” that is, being able to sustain itself within some net of “reasons,” then things that are reasonable are themselves things belonging to the net of language. If one says a certain claim is reasonable, then this statement itself has become a “reason.” If one says that a certain event or action is “reasonable,” one means that it is intelligible (the opposite being “unintelligible”), that it can be traced back to roots and sources within the web of concepts.

“Reasonable” and “lawful” are often conflated, and this confusion is not without reason, because “law” is generally precisely what reason “establishes.” Although from a faith standpoint we may speak of “natural laws” that exist in themselves independently of human language, once one uses laws as standards for judgment, what we use must necessarily be the stipulations agreed upon by human beings. Nature itself has no stipulations. People, for all kinds of reasons, using all kinds of methods, and based on all kinds of situations, have formulated all sorts of principles, rules, institutions, standards, and so on; these are what “law” is.

Violence is always unreasonable, but violence may be lawful (for example, executing a condemned prisoner is of course lawful); revolution may in certain cases be reasonable (revolutions within a local and specific scope), while revolution is always unlawful (the essence of revolution lies in overthrowing the existing law; repairs carried out within the limits permitted by existing law are called reform).

What needs to be clarified is that when I say “violence is always unreasonable,” I am not saying that the occurrence of violent acts themselves is unreasonable. In fact, we can of course understand the occurrence of many violent acts; we can use psychology and the like to explain why a person used a certain kind of violence at a certain moment, just as physics can explain why a stone fell to the ground at a certain moment. In this sense, reasonable and lawful are close, because that which conforms to laws can be understood.

In many contexts, especially in scientific discourse, reasonable and lawful are very close. Because scientific language is built layer by layer through human abstraction and careful construction, and the whole construction of science has from beginning to end emphasized the core concern of “legitimacy,” or rather “regularity,” discovering (inventing) and applying laws is precisely the main work of science. It is therefore unsurprising that the entire system of scientific language thus developed (including concepts, grammar, and related laboratory ways of life) is simultaneously a system of rules. The definition of every concept must conform to rules, grammar must be proper and orderly (taking strict logical laws as its model), and the way of life itself must also submit to definite, rigorous, repeatable rules (experimental methods). In this way, the “system of reasons” and the “system of rules” of the scientific community become one and the same.

However, even within science, reasonable and lawful are still not exactly the same thing. It is only under unexamined ordinary usage that reasonableness and lawfulness in science seem synonymous; yet when we need to trace their basis or source, we find that the two point in completely different directions. “Law” and “reason” both have hierarchies. For example, within the system of modern science, the laws of physics are more fundamental than the laws of chemistry. Simply put, the more abstract a law is, the higher and more authoritative its status. This is just like the constitution being the highest law, the most authoritative fundamental law.

But “reason” is completely different. “Reason” is within language, and the more “fundamental” language, or so-called “metalanguage,” is precisely language that is more concrete, richer, and more real. The most basic language is the language of life; those more abstract systems of language must be placed under everyday language before they can be understood by people. Human beings always first learn everyday language and then understand specialized languages; they also always first live in the everyday world and only then can they possibly participate in professional life. Therefore, tracing the source of “reasonable” and asking for the basis of “lawful” will move in completely different directions: lawfulness takes the most abstract and simplest principles as its highest basis, while reasonableness takes the most intuitive and most everyday life experience as its source.

For a social community, reason and law become “ethics” and “law.” Ethics includes the customs of human relations that have spontaneously accumulated within cultural tradition, as well as the ethical theories summarized or designed by individual moralists; law includes the rites and rules that have spontaneously accumulated within cultural tradition, as well as the written statutes compiled by those in power.

Historically, there are always common sense before theory, and always unwritten rules before written laws. But once laws are established, they possess greater authority. Yet do not forget the distinction between reason and law—the highest authority of law is not at the same time the highest authority of reason.

Returning to the previous question: when I say “violence is always unreasonable,” I am not discussing whether violence is lawful. If one discusses the lawfulness of violent acts, one must first determine which law applies: one may judge by natural laws or scientific laws, for example by placing violent acts under the rule systems of physics or psychology in order to interpret them; or one may judge by social etiquette or law, to see whether the violent act is “discourteous” or whether it has “broken the law,” and so on. But these questions are all discussions of “lawfulness.”

What I mean by saying violence is always unreasonable is in fact only to express the simplest fact: violence, as the name suggests, is to “not reason,” to strike at others by means of force rather than by reasoning. That is to say, when violence is carried out, either the perpetrator is simply barbarously unreasonable, or the perpetrator cannot achieve his aim by reasoning and is forced to adopt other means; in short, the beginning of violence is the end of reasoning. In this sense, saying violence is always unreasonable can be said to be an a priori analytic proposition.

Perhaps I am merely playing with words, but the significance of this fact is enormous. No matter how many reasons people weave around violent acts, how many theories they package them in, none of that can change this fact: violence is a renunciation of reason, and no reason whatsoever can support a violent action. What reasons can support are only “statements,” “judgments,” and the like within the web of reasons; since violent acts abandon for themselves the bindings of the web of reasons, they are always unreasonable.

People ought to make this clear: when they are talking about how reasonable a violent act is, what they are actually talking about is its lawfulness. “Justice,” “correctness,” or “rightness” are synonyms of “lawful,” and judgment of these concepts depends on the law or standard applicable to that situation. That is to say, people should calmly recognize that when we say a certain act is “rightful,” we are in fact saying: relative to a corresponding set of laws (standards, rules), this act conforms to what is required by them.

Therefore, one can say that a certain violence is rightful, but this must always be in relation to some legal system. But what if the purpose of this violence is precisely to overthrow the existing law? When we want to abolish or enact laws, we may ask about the reasonableness of this change, but only when there still exists a “higher law” to rely on can we ask about the “lawfulness” of revising the law; here, lawful does not mean relative to the law being revised, but relative to the higher law that has not lost its authoritative status. But if a revolution is actually to overthrow the entire existing legal system, so that even the “fundamental law” is deprived of its authoritative status, how can one still speak of “lawfulness”? (Of course, if those in power do not themselves abide by the law, and the insurgents overthrow them by violent means, then such action under certain conditions can be said to be lawful, but such action is more properly called an “uprising” or a “coup” rather than a “revolution.”)

In short, “violent revolution” is doomed to be neither reasonable nor lawful.

June 21, 2008