Circular Thinking

Circular reasoning gets a bad rap in the Western world. Aristotle originated the idea, but I think he overlooked a healthy kind of circular reasoning.

In Prior Analytics (353BC), Aristotle listed a series of fallacious arguments, including “begging the question” or “proving what is not self-evident by means of itself.” This fallacy came to be known as circular reasoning. Here’s an example: The Bible is the Word of God because the Bible says it’s the word of God.

Aristotle overlooked another type of circular reasoning. He was a Greek philosopher and Greek philosophy is based on an image—straight lines—always going forward, progressing. Judaism, on the other hand, imagines life and God as a sphere. The central theme is return, the Hebrew word t’shuvah. It is rendered in English as “repentance.” Repentance is return, or homecoming, routinely circling back to where you started.

In this frame, circular reasoning is healthy. The 16^th century rabbi Isaac Luria saw it this way. “The path to the end of all things is also the path to the beginning.” Return is not narcissistic navel-gazing. It’s communal, circling back to outside voices—in Judaism, rabbi and prophet—in order to grow in self-awareness and wisdom.

The Early Church was Jewish for its first 300 years. It too imagined spheres, as in the Corpus Hermeticum, a body of 3^rd century texts from Hellenic Egypt. It pictures God as a sphere. This continued through the 16^th century. Giordano Bruno described God as “an infinite sphere.”[1] Images depicting the Trinitarian God included a circle. Christians routinely circled back to prophetic voices—priest and prophet—to become self-aware.

So what happened to the sphere image? Two developments. The Western church revived Greek philosophy. It embraced a linear frame. Centuries later, it embraced the Enlightenment. The idea of returning to prophetic voices felt stupid, or backward.

This shift began in the 5^th century AD when Nestorian Christians translated Aristotle into Syriac, the language of the Middle Eastern church. A century later, Islam conquered that region. Nestorian Christians taught Aristotle to their Arab captors. Islamic theology embraced Aristotelian rationalism. It made sense. Islam doesn’t hold to a Trinitarian God. God is One Being. He is not a sphere. Circular reasoning seemed backward.

By the 9^th century, Islam had overpowered most of the Western world. Aristotle, as well as the writings of two Islamic thinkers, Avicenna (980-1032) and Averroes (1126-1198), were translated into Latin. The Averroes’ influence at the University of Paris was so great that, in 1263, the pope reinstated the ban on the study of Aristotle. It did little good. A linear frame was taking over Western civilization.

Fast forward to Descartes (1596-1650). The Enlightenment. Descartes introduced two lines—faith and reason. Spinoza (1632-1677) elevated reason above the faith line. Reason dealt with facts. Faith dealt with, well, faith. Incredibly, Protestant missions became “the main carriers of the ideas of the Enlightenment.” The Protestant church “came to a comfortable cohabitation with the Enlightenment.”[2] It went linear.

But is that such a bad thing?

I think so. Imagine a clock face, a circle. At 2:00, write priest. At 4:00, write: prophet. These are right brain prophetic voices. If you want to see how they operate, watch this TED talk. Note the left brain. It has no direct contact with reality. It loves straight lines (no straight lines are to be found in the natural world). Only the right hemisphere has direct contact with reality. The left “re-presents” the right’s real life experiences. It is designed to routinely return these representations to the right brain, which acts as wise sage and—in the words of Daniel Kahneman—crap detector. This is critical, since, left to itself, the left brain is confident in its capacities yet in denial about its own limitations.

The irony is that business leaders get this. Take Pixar. It’s creating a sustainable creative culture, but this requires “an uncommon commitment to self-assessment,” writes CEO Ed Catmull. The company looks to neuroscience, including research indicating we initially see only 40 percent of a problem. Pixar established a “Braintrust,” a roundtable to see the rest. The Braintrust includes outside voices, ensuring healthy circular reasoning.

In 1952, Leo Strauss spoke on “the contemporary crisis in Western civilization.”[3] He said Judaism’s frame could not be assimilated with Western thought. The West is about progress, straight lines. “Progressive man” views return as “barbarism, stupidity.” Return fits Aristotle’s “begging the question,” a fallacious argument we call circular reasoning.

It’s not fallacious. Return was once a central theme of Christianity. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen.3:19). Nature shouts this reality. The earth is a sphere. The solar system is a sphere. The sun “returns” every morning. Our circulatory system returns blood to lungs for renewal. The human brain’s two hemispheres are designed to collaborate, “returning” authority to each other. Circles, circles, circles.

Making your head spin? Early Christians circled back to prophetic voices—priest and prophet—to be self-aware. Inside a spherical image, circular reasoning is a good thing.

[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)

[2] Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 33.

[3] Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization” Modern Judaism, Vol. 1, No. 1, Oxford University Press, May, 1981, pp. 17-45.