Does the word "reason" serve as a meta-ideal? Is Reason, in its highest sense, "holy"? "Holy" is a feeling that looks like a halo. Does man tend to find some concept sacred, ideal? A character or an abstract word can serve as the "hero." The pacifist too is a holy warrior (suffers against war). And pacifism is a concept. Can the modern word "ethic" serve ina way that religious words once did? Are we the slaves/fools/beneficiaries/children of ruling concepts(myths), unconscious idolatries(projections)? Maybe Reason stands also for Know Thyself and Define Your Terms. Adam naming in the Garden-in-itself..... Is Philosophy, sometimes, the religion of Reason then? Is philosophy another version (diluted or explicit) of Self As God?

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Quick thought; You think/conceptulaise more as a philosopher therefore you are worth more, therefore you are more likely to be considered a God?
Is this what you are asking, or is it,
Are philosophers more prone to God-ship?

What makes you think being God is any better than being Me?

I say that maybe we all have a word that is attached to the feeling of God. Is "reason" this word for some people. Is "Reason" for some people a halo? A connection to the sacred? Do we make a religion of the intellect? I suggest that this religion exists.

---------- Post added 12-20-2009 at 04:52 AM ----------

But I think there are many words/roles that we can associate with god, halos, the sacred, the ideal. All paths lead to same sense of grandness, peace, love, etc. except there is a dark side to myth/religion

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I think if you go back to the Greeks, there is the idea that reason corresponds to the divine in man, and that the intellect (=that which perceives by way of reason) is what sets man apart from beasts and is therefore distinctively human. This became 'nous' in Plotinus, 'the rational part of the soul'. However I think 'rationality' and 'reason' had a rather more esoteric meaning in the ancient world than it does today. Going back to Plato's idea of intelligible realities, those 'higher forms' which could only be discerned by the philosopher. This was developed in neoplatonism as the idea of 'nous', which was like 'the image of the divine in man' and also that by which the divine was known (cf Eckhardt 'the eye with which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me')

The very idea of 'ratio' in pythagorism was mystical insofar as it sought to intuit the ratios by which everything was arranged (as exemplified by geometery, music and the sacred arts.)

In that context, the idea of reason was connected with the sacred, but I don't think this is any longer the case in the modern world. Also, note, that in many religious traditions, human reason is regarded as subordinate to other forms of spiritual intuition, gnosis, jnana, etc and to revelation by which truths innaccesible to human reason are revealed.

thus we were created to be Gods reason, to be reasonable for God, to even excuse both God and ourselves perhaps?
I dont see how reason can be fully attributed to God, even sanity may not be Gods to have/hold, God was is not even necessarily a personality,
God is more 'embodiment' which is certainly more your and mine 'Holy',
We were created form the chaos to rule over it,
whether this is for God or for us? is another story.
'The reason', i might have less issue with.
We were possibly created to give God reason, does this lead that God has ever been unreasonable? (without reason) (reason is an atribute?)

I dont see how one can feel/sense granduous in the face of peace or love, which both peace and love are all the senses and more or none of them at all,
something different than sense, something more? sure, but not necessarily better,
especially not better if one cannot experience both peace and love without the senses.
But if it is 'sense' then this is trying to describe something less than tangible but at the same time so much more.

(The Vulcans regard Logic as devine, logic is closer to God than reason)

Beautiful exposition. Do you think a shadow-version of this/that ideal still rides on the back of philosophy as referee or as the assistant of the physicist? Philosophy as language monitor? Also I think of "the word was with God and the word was God." Hegel/Kojeve as the ladder that climbs itself to discover its circularity and become Goot (Good/Gott/Glot/Clot/Ought/Not). I think Nicolas Cusanus used Intellect for that. Your answer is exactly on the theme I wanted to visit. Also at the spectrum of the ideal. To examine its peak manifestation and its dwarfish shadow? Or should this shadow be a separate myth/concept?

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I wouldn't be at all suprised to find it in Hegel; in fact he might have been one of the very last to hold this type of view. As for Nicholas, he was among other things a Catholic cardinal in the medieval times, so his idea of reason would have been largely Thomist, but he was also a mystic and possibly steeped in some aspect of the hermetic or pythagorean mathematical philosophy (I read in Wikipedia that Kepler thought him 'divinely inspired').

But 'natural philosophy' so-called, and its exclusive concentration on material phenomena and forces, must abandon any such medieval or ancient ideas of reason and concentrate on its application as described by Galileo with regards to the measurement of material bodies. I'm not sure, but I suspect that this also had to do with the ascendancy of William of Ockham and Francis Bacon, the triumph of the nominalists over the realists and the empiricists over the rationalists.

Nicolas did some great geometric metaphors for God. For instance: a polygon with an infinite number of sides. (Spengler thought that math was a true expression of culture. Nicolas described God with proto-calculus? (Using a limit concept? I'm no math pro, as much as I like it.) Spengler says Faustian man is a function rather than an integer like the Classical man.(That's a paraphrase from my good friend Umo...)

Maybe Hegel is the great bridge, because he called his system Science, wanted it rigorous, and yet it still attempts to be an image of God. At the moment is seems to me like this, via Zizek: the discursive understanding negates its own negations until this web of negations is forced to repeat itself, having no more moves to make The line discovers its a circle, nothing left to negate, a tongue for a tail. (having become conscious of itself as the Concept. Reason is Understanding that has fully devoured itself?) As if an irrational number were discovered to be a repeating decimel. What if Pi wasn't really an irrational number. We just got lazy. (However I think its proven irrational, but the example gets my point across. Is Buddha pi? I'm interested in the names of god/the meta-ideal, X, "being under erasure." Hegel is not my favorite but one who certainly fascinates me. But some of that is Kojeve's genius, his great exposition/interpretation of Hegel. Terse and apt....

Perhaps the nominalists triumphed because rationalism deprived of its mysticism is inferior to nominalism. Does rationalism cool and become dogmatic naive deductions? Was rationalism the Holy Ghost dressed up as Metaphorical Geometry? Did the Rats loose the Dove or did the Nommies shoot it away? (Isn't linguistic philosophy a particularly caustic extension of nominalism, to the degree that it denies the sacred? But it can serve different functions for different ideals, this meta-rhetoric known as the linguistic turn (and trope means turn!) ). "Be not a dope for tropes" it warns us. Instead be a dope for the anti-trope, the counter-pope.

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What do you make of Hegel's connection to German mysticism?

Hegel had a mystical element in his thinking and was of the Platonist line, but at the same time, the mystics main faculty was not reason but 'divine illumination'. Where Hegel tried to articulate every aspect of existence, the mystics (Jakob Boehme was very characteristic of late German Mysticism) are trying to convey the insight that has arisen for them as a result of their ex-static real-ization.

Another point I think Hegel was right about was the historical determinants of consciousness, which is why materialism triumphed at that time in history, after religious institutioinalism had more or less defined god out of existence......