Universidad Francisco Marroquín
Guatemala

II. The Crisis of Human Reason

All education, from elementary to higher, tries to provide human beings with what they need to fully develop their constructive capacities, and thereby prepare them to be able to search for their own satisfactory way of life. One of these capacities, the sum total of the rest, is the potential to live peacefully with other human beings. However, peaceful coexistence requires that we all make an effort so that reason is paramount in all aspects of human life. This means, among other things, that we all make an effort that the ideas of others be respected, since no one holds a monopoly on truth. We must also be willing to respect the rights of others, as human beings and citizens, as the only way to live in peace.

The violence of our time constitutes evidence of the decline of human reason throughout the world and, consequently, of the worldwide failure of education. As we have suggested, the rational capacity of man is manifest not only in his search for adequate means to certain ends. It is also manifest in the value he assigns to those ends. It is not necessary to argue for the view that not all that man is in a position to reach is valuable, for it would be enough to recall that from the very beginning man has had at his disposal adequate means to destroy himself.

Today's university must face the challenge of the universal crisis of human reason. When reason's voice is weak, everything is threatened. Liberty, peace, civilization are threatened. Indeed, the very life of man as a species is threatened.

As we have pointed out, the crisis of human reason reveals itself through violence. Violent actions, especially those that are political in nature, are motivated by specific interpretations and valuations of given social conditions; they do not spring from social conditions themselves, as some suggest. Man cannot act unless he does so on the basis of an interpretation -however rudimentary- and all interpretations are in principle capable of being mistaken. To assume that man can react automatically or instinctively (that is without the mediation of an interpretation or valuation -not only to simple physical stimuli such as rays of light and changes in temperature, but also to such complex stimuli as a whole social environment) is to make an evidently false assumption. Men react in identical or almost identical ways to physical stimuli, but to social, political, artistic or religious conditions their reactions vary considerably.

The crisis of human reason is also revealed in the rejection or unthinking abandonment of some of the fundamental values of Western civilization, such as peace, the infinite value of the person, freedom and the respect for property. As sources of rights and obligations, these values have made peaceful coexistence possible. Such values, contrary to what some people think, have been discovered rather than invented, by persons of great wisdom. Thus, it is neither through the arbitrary decisions of rulers nor the pressure of ruling groups that these values have become instituted. And their validity has nothing to do with the age in which they have been discovered. For example, many features of the Greco-Christian philosophy of man and life have greater significance for our time than some of the later experiences of humanity including, undoubtedly, certain aspects of our contemporary experience.

However, just as it is not the antiquity of the classical experience that determines its validity, so it is not the contemporaneity of ours that determines its invalidity. Perhaps the contemporary experience of man and life will become "classical" for coming generations. That will depend on our achieving greater depth and scope in our understanding of mankind.