Scenic Route — Post 1
“Reason is the slave of the passions.”— David Hume
I was studying David Hume for my On Evil series, and the reflex to look up etymology kicked in. Where does reason come from? After looking it up and pondering it in the shower, the irony of the word’s journey — and what it’s used for now — hit me, and I felt like sharing it. It definitely didn’t belong in the post, though. So we’re taking the scenic route today.
The sign says — reason.
The Word’s “Progress” (ratio → raison → reason)
The word reason, ironically enough for Hume’s insights, didn’t start out as some kind of answer. It started as math. Not moral math, or the arithmetic of higher thinking. Good old counting. Ratio. Reckoning. Balancing the books. Keeping score.
The part that made me laugh out loud in the shower — fully embracing my wife’s Word Nerd moniker — is this: Etymonline ties reason back to Latin rationem, which means “reckoning, understanding, motive, cause.” So the word gets a big promotion. New office, new title, new job description. Now reason becomes the editor-in-chief when we need something that sounds clean and principled.
But just because it’s in the corner office doesn’t mean it forgot where it came from.
The same etymology notes the Enlightenment-era shift, where reason becomes “a sort of light in which every mind must perceive.”
“Be reasonable.” “Listen to reason.” “The voice of reason.”
We talk about reason as if it’s an impartial judge.
What Reason Actually Does
If reason begins as reckoning, I reckon I could argue it’s a tool for giving an account. It’s what you use to explain how the numbers work after you’ve done the math. It’s what you use to make a story coherent. It’s what you use to justify a decision — or a reaction — after it’s already done. Sometimes it’s honest. Sometimes it’s revisionist. Sometimes it’s bullshit you’ve made up to make yourself look good.
The irony: the life of the word mirrors the life of the thing. We like to imagine reason as the cause of our actions, but most of the time it’s the narration. Out of fear, desire, loyalty, resentment, hunger, love, habit — the mind does what it does, and then reason shows up to explain it. Conveniently after the calculation, because reason is the calculation. It’s not separate from the math — it’s the ledger.
Hume’s Move: Verdict First, Reasons Second
This is where Hume starts to feel less like a philosopher and more like a mechanic.
In the first post of On Evil, I used him for one simple move: he refuses to treat moral judgment like a math problem. When you solve a math problem, it’s clean and definitive. You can prove it with more math. Moral judgments don’t work like that. The verdict shows up first. Then we start working out what math problem justifies how we’ve decided to feel.
When someone comes back with “I have my reasons,” I question whether they’re describing a chain of logic they followed to get there — or if they’re buying time while they do some mental mathematics, generating a narrative, defending an ego.
I don’t think reason is irrelevant. I just want to narrow the scope of its job description.
Why This Matters
I’ll stop short of turning this into a continuation of the On Evil post — the scenic route shouldn’t become a main road.
Reason started as accounting, got a big promotion to moral terminology, but in practice it still does the original work: makes the math work, balances the books, makes the story structurally sound.
If reason is a story we tell after we’ve already reached a verdict, then evil starts to sound like a different kind of narrative choice. We frame it as a discovery when it’s just a term for a conclusion we’d already reached.
What decision are you still building the case for — even though the verdict’s been in for a while?
Sources:
Plain truth. Rough edges.
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