Blanshard Suggests Ethical System To Heal Reason-Feeling Dichotomy

To the reflective thinker the inarticulateness of the practical man often makes him seem a strange combination of the wizard and yokel, Brand Blanshard maintained last night at the fifth annual Alfred North Whitehead Lecture.

Blanshard, currently professor of philosophy at Yale, utilized a well-known Whitehead dichotomy in discussing "Practical Reason."

According to Whitehead, human thought can be divided into the reason of Plato and the reason of Ulysses. The platonic thinker is a spectator all of the time, "a spinner of mathematical webs." Men of the Ulysses genre, on the other hand, possess the "wisdom of foxes."

This practical reason can only be understood, Blanshard claimed, "if we take off the distorting spectacles of technological advance." Tracing the development of various ethical systems from their Greek and Judaic sources, he noted that a conflict between reason and feeling has constantly plagued philosophy. Clarks versus Shaftesbury, Hume versus Kant, and, more recently, the emotivists and imperativists versus the deontologists--all represent in their ethical controversies a form of the basic reason-feeling conflict.

"We must leave emotivism and its more pallid linguistic legatees behind," Blanshard said. A rational defense of a way of life lies in showing that it produces more good than the alternative. Yet, reason without enjoyment is valueless.

Seeking a synthesis rather than mere agglomeration, Blanshard suggested two attributes which make a possession "good": the fulfillment of impulse and the satisfaction attending fulfillment. In such a system the categorical imperative still has meaning.

But, to say one "ought" to educate oneself does not mean one "must" do so. Rather, it implies that such activity is in keeping with the needs of one's character structure.