Appendix A: From Reason to Intuition

Gary North - March 14, 2020

I wrote this appendix in 1976. It was published in a book I edited: Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective (1976). I reprinted it in my 2015 book, The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics. It is the Appendix. The book is posted here.

I will include the appendix in the typeset edition of this book. I will do this because the essay is integral to those sections of this book that deal with epistemology: what can man know, and how he can know it. I hope that a PDF of The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics remains online, but I cannot guarantee this. So, if someone has Volume 2 of the Scholar's Edition, he will have access to the essay.

In it, I focus on the epistemological writings of Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman. Mises was a deductivist. Friedman was an inductivist. They both invoked reason. Thy both invoked intuition.

They were both humanists in the tradition of Immanuel Kant. Kant also invoked reason and intuition. Kant invoked reason as mankind's means of understanding the phenomenal realm of scientific cause and effect. He invoked intuition as mankind's means of retaining his freedom from the absolute determinism of the phenomenal realm. He called the realm of intuition the noumenal realm.

The two realms are absolutely separate. They operate in terms of antithetical assumptions. The noumenal realm is said to be utterly beyond the determinism of mathematics, science, and mechanical causation. It is here that men find their freedom from impersonal mechanism and also other men's control over them through science. The noumenal is also (somehow) the realm of ethics: responsible volition. Kantians debate endlessly as to whom men are responsible or how. Who or what imposes sanctions? Kantians do not agree. The noumenal is also the realm of human personality. But there is a huge problem with the noumenal realm: it cannot be defined or even described by the categories of reason's point by point logic. It has proven impossible to explain how the noumenal is connected to the world of logical causation.

This is the modern version of the ancient debate between Parmenides' fixed logic and Heraclitus' perpetual change. It is the logically irreconcilable dualism of determinism vs. randomness, fixity vs. change. The philosophies of autonomous man cannot reconcile this dualism, also called an antinomy.

In my essay, I show how humanistic economics has not solved the problem.

The PDF of the appendix is here.