While reason may indeed be defined according to its own criteria–that is, it is reasonably defined–I submit that this is not a function of tautology, but of the axiomatic and irreducible nature of man’s inherent and innate ability to conceptualize his existence. If man is going to conceptualize himself, and his environment, and his relationship to his environment, and this according to his root and innate ability to conceptualize, then I submit that the concepts he so devises must and will necessarily show compatibility with one another in order to be meaningful, relevant, and efficacious. That is, they will be compatible in order to be possible at all. (For fundamentally incompatible concepts simply cannot be created.)  Therefore, when specific concepts do not show compatibility with one another when combined (e.g. “She took a a right turn to the left.”), man will apprehend quite automatically that meaning, relevancy, and efficacy have been violated. And this, he will correctly assert, is a violation of reason. And by this violation he will recognize that his ability to claim truth–that is, to discern the difference between what is and what is not–has been compromised.

Well…until he doesn’t.

And by this I mean until he decides–to his own destruction–that conceptual consistency is not necessarily the means by which what is (that is, the truth) is established as distinct from what is not. In which case, man’s ability to conceptualize–the root of his own will and his own meaningful consciousness–becomes null. And since conceptualization is the foundation of human consciousness and gives relevancy and efficacy to human perception (empiricism), its nullification leaves man with a consciousness that cannot actually define that of which it is conscious. 

What I am asserting is that a rejection of reason (as a tautology, for instance) is a rejection of conceptualization itself, or the ability to conceptualize, and this is a rejection of consciousness. Which is a rejection of the awareness of Self, which is a rejection of the Self, period. For the Self consistently defined is of no more veracity than the Self inconsistently defined. Which means that there is no actual definition of the Self possible. For a contradictory definition is just as “valid” as a non-contradictory one. Thus, there is no difference between what is and what is not. The Self then implodes under the weight of the inconsistency. The human individual ceases to have any value, or any truth. And worlds are destroyed by this kind of thinking.

Which brings me to my next point. We need to stop asserting that the West, or Western thinking, is somehow a bastion or legacy of reason. Believe me, if that were the case, western governments would not exist, and all western societies would be categorically voluntary, and all wars of religion, and nation building, and colonization, and rank ideology would never have occurred, and would not be occurring today. Collectivist determinism, and all of its evil spawn–communism, fascism, democratic socialism, monarchism, Protestantism, Catholicism, scientific determinism, nationalism, racial and cultural Marxism–would not exist nor have ever existed. Time and Space would not be submitted and venerated as actual and causal, nor human consciousness and will a function of natural law, nor it declared that God created the universe out of nothing, which makes so much non-sense that people don’t bother even trying to explain what this means beyond some perfunctory Bible paraphrasing or proof texting.

Trust me, if the East avers irrational mysticism and paradox as the root of Truth, then the West is utterly blind to it, offering nothing. If the East is rationally misguided, then the West is positively retarded.

END