Reason and Budi

Epistemic status: quick thoughts, haven't tried to think through all the implications in depth.

I can't remember if I've written any of this in this blog before, but I have an idea of what reason is: the interrelationship of all truths, and/or of all evidence -- and, "evidence" being anything which people perceive, whether with senses, noetically, or in any other form that may exist. Reason is the process for coming to the whole truth.

Today I read an article about Indonesian philosophy, which discussed budi. It says at one point

The Great Dictionary of the Indonesian Language defines budi as an 'inner faculty which integrates reasoning and feeling to distinguish between good and evil.'

The article also mentions that Indonesian philosophy is integrative, mentioning how its Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam are seen as one thing, in a sense, which perhaps has some parallel to my definition of "reason".

How can budi and my "reason" interrelate? Perhaps budi is being present to the moment or situation which connects to one's reasonings and feelings? This presence enables you to see how they all add up to form some kind of moral judgment. You actually see them for what they are. Or maybe it's like if the world is full of 2's, and 4's, but without budi, you can't see when two 2s makes a 4, as though budi supplies the +'s and ='s needed to say "2 + 2 = 4"? So then budi is an embodied faculty which allows a person to form a more integrated truth, and thus is necessary to connect to or seek the whole truth, the ultimate goal of reason.

The whole truth is made up of sub-whole-truths, which contain the whole truth within some limited area. Each sub-whole-truth requires that the person looking at them have budi or something like it, in order to understand that reality, if that reality contains any kind of intuitive content. Perhaps merely to integrate reasoning with reasoning requires something akin to budi, although this is getting further from the definition given. Also, perhaps budi only applies to cases where good and evil or right and wrong are being distinguished. But good/right and evil/wrong (or "value and disvalue", perhaps) are woven into maybe literally everything, and thus (almost?) always are needed to know the truth of anything.

It's possible to limit yourself to only the sensory world (the sub-whole-truth of the sensed world), and thus avoid the intuitive and perhaps thus budi, but maybe you can't know good and evil that way, and for practical purposes, we need to know some kind of axiological charge of what we perceive so that we know what behaviors will be purposeful, will have a point, with respect to what we perceive. We relate to reality, and this is part of knowing the truth. We, as persons, who have to live. Thus we need to know good and evil -- maybe we have a kind of mutilated budi still in operation in the "fact / value split" West. This budi enables us to see that there is a point in doing things, and what that point is, despite the way our culture suppresses our conscious affirmation of moral realism, the idea that there is a fact as to what values there are. Any sub-whole-truth that connects to practical action requires budi or something like it.