This inaccurate
phrase offers an interesting source for a
fallacy noted by
Milan Kundera in his novel
Immortality. In all
Romance languages, evolved as they are from
Latin, and in English as well, the word "
reason" denotes both "
cause" and "
the process of reasoning," suggesting that any event's cause must have a
logical connection to its result.
This produces a number of problems, not least of which is the utter inability of most Western nations to understand socio-cultural phenomena in anything other than a hyper-Hegelian, rational, systematized context. School shootings are an excellent example: we strive to locate their cause in myriad logical ways, negelecting to consider the possibility that something about the modern era, something neither logical nor rational precipitates violence and destruction. In searching for "reasonable" sources for such behavior, we inevitably miss the point: something irrational, unreasonable, something related to broad psychosis in the contemporary American, could be at fault.
A notable exception to this confusion: the German language. Kundera notes that the German word for "cause" is "Grund," a word derived from the word for earth or ground, which suggests that some events have as their cause something buried, intrinsic and irreducible, illogical and unintelligible. Kundera thinks that we all behave in our lives in manners related to our individual "Grund," our base identities, rather than according to "reasonable" psychological predictions or other logical systems of understanding.
We struggle to trace causal factors, to understand the "reasons" behind events, but the presence of a cause does not entail the presence of rationale.