The Circular Reasoner

The Wheel Whose Axle Is the Wheel

Level 1 (Obvious) archetype, fifth of the Palayaka Vadin (Escapists) cluster of the Chatur-Vadin Framework. The Circular Reasoner uses the conclusion as the premise. Sanskrit logic named this Chakraka (the wheel), Anyonyashraya (mutual dependence), and Atmashraya (self-grounding) by the tenth century CE. The counter is seven words: your conclusion is your premise, that is circular. This lesson traces the archetype from Anselm's eleventh-century ontological argument through modern circular frames on Indian tradition and Western universality.

The Monk Who Defined God Into Existence

In the monastery of Bec, on the Normandy coast, one cold morning in 1078, a forty-five-year-old Benedictine named Anselm sat down to write a short book. Outside, the winter wind was coming off the English Channel. Inside, in a stone-floored cell with a single candle burning, Anselm picked up his quill. He had been struggling with an argument for weeks. That morning it came to him clean.

God, Anselm wrote, is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Anything that exists in reality is greater than the same thing existing only in thought. Therefore God, being the greatest possible being, must exist in reality. If he did not, he would not be the greatest.

The book was the Proslogion. The argument worked on its audience. It convinced generations of Christian theologians for nine centuries. It convinced René Descartes in the seventeenth century. It convinced Gottfried Leibniz after him. It did not convince Thomas Aquinas, the finest philosopher of the medieval Church. Aquinas suspected something was wrong with it. He could not quite name the wrong thing.

The wrong thing had a name. The Nyaya tradition in India had given it a formal name half a millennium before Anselm. Sanskrit logic called it Chakraka: the circular wheel. Anselm's proof smuggles its conclusion inside its own definition. Define God as that which must exist and the conclusion that God exists is already packed into the premise. The wheel turns because its axle is the wheel.

This lesson is about the fifth archetype of the Palayaka Vadin cluster of the Chatur-Vadin Framework, the Escapists. It is called the Circular Reasoner. The counter is seven words: your conclusion is your premise. That is circular.

Difficulty: Level 1 (Obvious). Circular reasoning is obvious once you see the circle. The catch is that most circles are drawn too large to see from the inside.