The Revenge of Reason is a little unusual in that it's an essay collection laying out my work over the last 15 years or so. It covers a lot of ground, dealing with questions ranging from what is art and what are games to what is real and why does anything matter. 

At its core, there is a bigger argument about the relationship between reason and freedom. What I present in the book is a conception of reason that is fundamentally concerned with its capacity for revision. What’s important about reason is not building up from certain foundations, but our ability to continually revise the rules that govern the way in which we think, and indeed how we live. The relationship between those two sides is the book's main focus.

I think my most original contribution is about the duality between the theoretical and the practical sides of reason. This fundamental revisionary force of reason—in the theoretical realm— ensures that any of our assumptions and any of our concepts can be challenged and revised. This corresponds to a conception of autonomy—in the practical domain—where fundamentally, any of our priorities, desires, principles, and projects must be subject to revision and rethinking. This is the core of what it is to be a free agent and to have a self—to be able to ask yourself, who am I and why am I doing this?

Any of our institutions or practices—and that includes things as simple as, how do we examine and assess people in education—can't be taken as foundations. They have to be seen as things that can potentially shift, as the world that we encounter shifts, and our societal priorities change. This kind of revision works both at a social level, and at an individual level. 

There was a fantastic example from a trained mathematical physicist on Twitter (Jonathan Gorard). He said he had this experience of always being the smartest person in the room, always digesting material easily—until he reached a certain point in his education and encountered a really hard problem. He struggled with it and went to someone else in his course who saw the solution immediately.

Suddenly, he realized, “Oh, that’s not who I am. I’m not…that guy.” But what that did was free him up. It meant he didn’t have to pursue pure mathematics just because it was expected of him. He could work on applied math problems he actually found more interesting. That’s who he was going to be. The way we hit stumbling blocks and obstacles can force us to reconceive who we are and what we’re doing. For me, that’s a dramatization of freedom.

We all have contradictory beliefs—kind of implicit conflicts that we don’t realize until we confront them. The same is true of our desires and motivations. We have things pulling us in different directions, until we hit a point where we discover we can’t do both. How we are confronted with these contradictions, and the way we respond to them, is what’s significant about freedom. That’s how we construct ourselves.

Crucially, my view isn’t that we have an essential, authentic core that’s already there and we just need to drill down into it. The self isn’t something that’s already there—it’s constructed through this process.

Ongoing thread. More from Peter Wolfendale to follow.