We Don't Need No Steenking Sufficient Reason!

Time only for a brief post. Gotta run. But it shall be continued...

Schuon is -- to express it in a breezily non-Schuonian way -- very big on the principle of sufficient reason, which simply means that things happen for a reason, and that this reason -- i.e., cause -- must be proportionate to its effect.

Or, to put it the other way around, if you're going to try to explain an effect, the cause needs to be sufficient to do the job.

Gee, sounds kind of obvious when you put it that way, Bob. What's your point?

Right away I can think of a couple of potential pitfalls with this principle. For example, one of the things that drives conspiracy theorists seems to be the disconnect between cause and effect, for example, vis-a-vis the JFK assassination.

In that case the effect was of world historical significance, but the cause was nothing more than a chronically embittered leftist worm. Hence the search for causes more proportionate to the effect -- the CIA, the Mafia, Castro, LBJ, etc.

Another area of potential misunderstanding has to do with natural selection. Darwin coined the term "exaptation" to describe characteristics and traits that are selected for one reason, but end up being used for another.

For example, although noses hold up eyeglasses, that is not why noses were selected. Likewise, my hand fits perfectly around a beer bottle, but they tell me that that is not why hands were selected. Who knew?

But the theory of exaptation -- like Darwinism in general -- quickly becomes absurd if pushed too far. For example, the above linked article suggests that our pursuit of truth might be an exaptation of "the human ability to use logic and reason [which was] originally evolved to win arguments and convince others."

Now, does this explanation pass the test of sufficient reason? Did it win the argument and convince you? This is an example of how Darwinism eats its own entailment and paints itself into a logical coroner. It's like suggesting that baseball was invented in order to win games, which any Cubs fan knows is untrue.

As we all know, I do not believe that natural selection provides sufficient reason to account for the human state, which is characterized by such things as truth, free will, love, objectivity, disinterest, beauty, and nobility of character, not to mention sanctity, valor, wisdom, mystical union, etc. It has nothing to to with religion per se, just the minimal demands of logic.

The Darwinian fundamentalist will respond that his theory does indeed account for these things, but then again, he is admittedly just using logic and reason because it was naturally selected to win arguments and convince others, surely not because it is true, of all things. For to believe otherwise would put the horse before the cart, and we all know that horses were invented to pull carts.

Echoes of Perennial Wisdom is by far Schuon's most compact book, and he has a literary style that is already as compact and precise as it can possibly be. No one, in my experience, says more with less, which makes him the anti-archetype of the tenured, the ultimate instance of which being deconstruction, which tells us everything about nothing.

What if we affirm, with Schuon, that "Truth is the reason for man's existence"? This cuts right to the chase, and says that nothing less than Truth can be the sufficient reason -- an adequate explanation -- for man as such. Could it be true?

Well, let's define our terms, beginning with truth. What is it? It is conformity between subject and object, or intelligence and reality; it is to discern the substance in the accident, the essence in the form, the principle in the manifestation, the center in the periphery, indeed, the cause in the effect (to bring us full circle).

Personally I am more partial to love being our sufficient reason, but as we shall see, it is impossible for a man to love lies and remain a proper man.