On Not Being an Ass of Reason
Week 23: Experimenting w/Absurdism
The briefest reminder: If you’re new here, we’re learning to thrive in the absurd in 4 siMpLe StEPs.
Accept the Absurd.
Embrace your freedom. (We’re here)
Live with Passion.
Keep fucking going.
We’ve already accepted that the world is absurd. If you’re into the idea of figuring out how the hell to embrace your alleged freedom, read on.
Last week at a dinner hosted by the Future of Free Speech, I was lucky enough to be sat by a wonderful man who shared the struggle of having many different passions. He was working on a play and also wanted to do stand-up, but couldn’t decide where to focus his energy. I told him I often experience the same problem, and that sometimes you just have to act. When this happens, I let the flow take me down a channel and hope I don’t drown. Sometimes I reach a dead end, but if I die, at least I died swimming. He smiled and reminded me of an old parable of a donkey, who, situated exactly between water and food, starved to death.
Little did my dinner companion know, this parable is called Buridan’s Ass. It’s a philosophical conundrum between epistemic and practical rationality, and generally, philosophers agree, just pick one. But it raises an interesting question:
How much deliberation is needed before action?
Of course, this depends on what’s at stake. If you’re an inch from death, and you need a blood transfusion, perhaps it’s not the time to weigh the risks. Most of the time, though, and certainly in the donkey’s case, the stakes aren’t quite so high. We’re not going to die from a lack of immediate action.
Since I’m properly fed, watered, and not in need of a blood transfusion, I can afford the luxury of indecision to consider this problem for a minute. But are we really destined to be “Asses of Reason,” getting stuck in analysis when we could act? This is where Buridan’s Ass as a metaphor starts to feel limited. After all, donkeys don’t die of starvation when surrounded by food. They’ve evolved to survive, as have we.
Ironically, the story of Buridan’s Ass wasn’t even Jean Buridan’s idea—it was invented by his critics to mock him. The French philosopher suggested that when faced with a decision, our “will” might allow us to wait until it’s clear which option is better. His critics turned this into a joke, imagining a donkey dying of indecision between two bales of hay.
Asses of Reason: The Downside of Deliberation
Switching the parable from a bucket of water and a bale of hay to two bales of hay shifts the discussion to one about free will independent of logic. I think this silly since if we have free will it would be intertwined with logic and everything else going on in our brains. The more interesting question is whether or not trying to use reason where we shouldn’t make us an ass. One might ask whether we are free or condemned to be “Asses of Reason”? I’d say some of us are more genetically geared towards being asses.
This sounds like an ass. Stubborn as hell - but a donkey here is smarter than an ass of reason because nothing’s going to stop a donkey from eating. Its will is geared toward survival. It’s not hemming and hawwing over which bale of hay to eat.
Applying Undue Reason
One of the most overlooked criticisms of Buridan’s Ass is in its premise: nothing is ever truly weighted equally. Yet, just telling people things are equal can send some of us into an absurd spiral trying to confirm it. When we overthink, we make ourselves into “Asses of Reason,” obsessively analyzing every decision, losing sight of practicality. Buridan had a point: we can hold off on choices until something changes, whether that’s due to free will or not. But we aren’t rational robots bound only to logic. For millennia, humans have acted because we simply felt like it.
So, when do we let go of our “gut” instincts and turn to pure reason? I’m not saying we shouldn’t deliberate and apply logic, but if that’s your only mode, maybe just chill. Sometimes, you need to act on instinct. Evolution didn’t give us impulses for nothing, and as much as we might fancy ourselves as gods of computation, we’re still close cousins of the ass. If we asked an ass to choose between two bales of hay, it has the sense to pick one and start eating—no overthinking, no unnecessary deliberation. But in the age of computation, some of us might be veering too far from common sense.
The “loading” icon in our brains sometimes spins incessantly until we reboot, and some programs of paradox will never resolve. Now, we have Buridanian Ass-like dilemmas such as the Halting Problem, where we’ve applied so much reasoning, that we can turn metaphors into silicon and create infinite loops without any instinct to nudge them out. This is the downside of employing too much logic - we get stuck between states. Perhaps logic erodes free will at a certain point and we find that
Making Universal Rules is (Sometimes) An Ass’s Errand
Getting stuck in a loop of logic sounds awful, but being human is kind of like being a strange loop. It certainly isn’t a static state, nor is it purely rational - at least not as far as we can tell. Sometimes we do calculus, sometimes we drink poisons like ethanol for fun. Logic isn’t always warranted, nor instinct, nor emotionality. Arguably it’s the movement between states that makes life worth living, and perhaps our challenge is to constantly balance on the wave, seeking a sort of Aristotelian Golden Mean. It’s much more fun to imagine ourselves surfing a Golden Wave than considering ourselves stuck in a loop of logic.
Funny enough, Buridan’s Ass owes its origins to Aristotle. Buridan was a big Stan for Ari, and while some claim his ideas ushered in the Copernican Revolution, others thought he was a conservative antagonistic, hanging on Aristotle’s words a bit too much. Aristotle first mentioned the precursor to Buridan’s Ass in On the Heavens where he was (incorrectly) arguing the rationale for why the Earth was the static center of the universe (because it’s “natural”, duh):
The weird thing is that Aristotle found a mean between being wrong and right here. The earth isn’t standing still, nor would men with hunger and thirst. Reaching for logic and forgoing instinct might lead to the same error. Life requires us to push and pull between thought instinct, reason, and will. This seems painfully obvious, but some people act like asses - like they don’t know practical matters can sometimes supersede abstract ones and the world isn’t just what you think it should be according to logic. And certainly no solely by your logic.
The good news is that we’re not going to die from indecision. You chose to read this newsletter and made it all the way to the end. Congrats on being decisive. Maybe it was a good choice, and you feel more confident about your choice to read it, or maybe it was a bad one and you’re questioning your own ability to make reasoned decision. Either way, we’re at the end and must now decide what the fuck to do next. Either way, don’t be an ass. Even one of Reason.
Thanks for going down this donkey hole with me. Hope it helps solve some shit for you or at least inspires you to do something.