@Procrustes,
Quote:Can anything be done without reason?
Certainly not for Kant, especially by the time of Beck's input and Kant's own later elaborations, where it's clarified that not until the intuitions of the sensibility are conditioned by the understanding do dichotomies like subjective/objective, phenomenal/noumenal, etc., even arise or have claims of necessity. However, as Alex Rosenberg points-out, one shouldn't consider intellectual operations and relations to literally rest in the "stuff" of language and various symbolic systems. Even Schopenhauer's "will" might be construed as illustrating how an aimless organizing power can either underlie or parallel what reason seems to be in the former's ideation.
Rosenberg . . .
"To use some philosophical jargon, I am an eliminativist about the propositional attitudes. That is, I believe that the brain acquires, stores, and uses information, but that it does not do so in the form of sentences, statements or propositions. The illusion that it does so is another one of those mistakes foisted on us by conscious awareness. The eliminativist thesis I just expressed will sound abstract and inconsequential to many people, and completely incoherent to many philosophers. In The Atheist’s Guide to Reality I explain why it’s true and what its huge upshot for theism and mystery mongering is. But I don’t deal with the philosophers charge that the denial we think in statements about the world is incoherent. That’s a task for an academic paper. Suffice it to say that neuroscience forces us to be eliminativist about some things consciousness foists on us, but it does not deny the reality of sensations, emotions or for that matter cognition—properly understood. It’s scientism that mandates the reductive explanation of all three, and that neuroscience is well on its way to providing." --
An Interview With Alex Rosenberg; "Talking Philosophy"