About 2500 year ago, Heraclitus said: "the way upward and the way downward are one and the same" (Fragment 60). As always with the enigmatic and evocative fragments of Heraclitus - I've written before about his statement that "you can't step into the same river twice" - there are multiple interpretations of this one, from the mundane (the road up a mountain is the same as the road down a mountain) to the mystical (humanity's way up to god is the same as god's way down to humanity). For today I'd like to link this saying to the Aristotelian theme of practical wisdom (φρόνησις).
Ancient philosophy scholars are fond of talking about the "practical syllogism" - i.e., the few times that Aristotle lays out a semi-formal reasoning process leading to a decision and subsequent action (to choose a trivial example, "I'm hungry", "This apple is edible", "I'll eat this apple"). As David Wiggins says in one of his papers on weakness of the will: "Aristotle calls such patterns of reasoning "syllogisms" because of an analogy that interests him between deductively concluding or asserting and coming to a practical conclusion or acting."
Typically this analogy is held to proceed in a downward direction: the "real" kind of syllogism is abstract or theoretical (as in formal logic) and the "practical" syllogism is a pale imitation of the original. Yet, looking at things from the bottom up, I suggest that the formalisms of logic in fact derive from the everyday reality of action-oriented deliberation, not the other way around.
I see are several reasons for leaning in that direction. First, the English word 'syllogism' is merely a transliteration of the Greek word συλλογισμός, which means "thinking things together" - i.e., reasoning plain and simple, not necessarily the kind of reasoning one experiences in logic, science, or mathematics. Second, deliberation was central to human existence long before Aristotle invented formal logic, so it stands to reason that the former served as a model for the latter: formalizations are dependent on that which they formalize. Third, we engage in everyday reasoning much more frequently than logical reasoning: our lives and activities are literally suffused with thinking, whether we're talking about the work we do, the relationships we nurture, the crafts we learn, the places we go, the foods we cook and eat - the list is endless.
Naturally, if the way upward and the way downward truly are one and the same, then in fact there is only one form of reasoning, which manifests itself in somewhat different ways depending on the context, the objects we're thinking about, the level of formalization and detail involved, the intended outcome, the emotional resonance of the matter at hand, etc. This is why, for instance, Aristotle argued that wisdom (φρόνησις) and statecraft (πολιτική) are the same thing but "differ in being" (i.e., making wise decisions differs from providing leadership even though the two activities involve the same skills). Just as the ancients proposed the unity of virtue (whereby all forms of character-thriving are interconnected), there is, I suspect, something like a unity of thinking in human experience.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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