Reason is typically defined as if it were an object or faculty separable from the human body, much in the way that many define the soul. I don’t believe in souls as being entities residing alongside or apart from our physical substance and I don’t believe in reason as defined by traditional thinkers. It’s not some faculty inherent to a human being nor is it some sort of mystical force which human beings can access.
Reason is an important but ill-defined set of mental activities. Usually, there’s an implication of a significant degree of abstraction when we speak of reason, but the very concept of ‘abstraction’ is problematic as I’ve pointed out in some of my writings. (See Ways of Speaking and True Being.) I hope I’ve increased the problems in a fruitful way by denying that abstractions are merely descriptive and claiming instead they’re real aspects of being, deeper levels closer to the stuff God created from nothingness.
Reason is certain activities of a human mind and that mind is what forms when a human animal makes more or less proper responses to his environment(s). Abstraction is inwardness or depth of being. Thing-like being is shaped from a strange form of being which is ‘abstract’. The same is true of living creatures which are inhabitants of the realm of things. The concrete flesh and blood of a human being is another level of being but that human being includes also the abstractions at deeper levels of being. This isn’t some sort of mystical claim, but rather an insight forced upon us when we take theoretical physics and mathematics and metaphysics seriously. So reason can be considered the movements of a human being in abstract levels of created being. But those abstract levels of being aren’t imaginary. They too are part of reality. Even when they’re other and more fundamental ‘phases’ of Creation, they’re present in this phase as well, our universe. Nor is reason imaginary or mystical or outside of Creation.
We can’t see the intertwining of space and time with our eyes or hear it with our ears but we can shape our minds to encompass it, through the abstractions of differential geometry and Minkowski spaces and so forth. If we were suddenly to find ourselves at the horizon of a black-hole, we would find that some abstractions bite harder than any lion on the Plain of Serengeti. We can’t perceive directly the bending of space-time but we’d know something was real if we were suddenly stretched out a mile tall as we fell into a black-hole with strong tidal forces. But those sorts of abstractions lie also at the foundation of the very substance of lions, which are also made of stuff which would cease to exist in a rather rapid and spectacular way if not for some of the oddities described by quantum mechanics.
Human reason doesn’t transcend Creation, it’s not alien to Creation. We’re creatures of this specific Creation and reason is an activity of the human mind by which we participate in that Creation. Reason results as we try to understand abstract levels of being but also when we try to apply those understandings to the more obvious aspects of our lives in concrete levels of reality. Reason can move outwards, no, it has to do so, to encompass our fellow creatures and our entire world, but its essence is penetration into deeper levels of being.