I come from a world in which people who call themselves ‘rational’ can dimiss the experiences of others as ‘irrational’ largely because they do not understand how such experiences work, they can explain the experiences away, or they think the experiences are inherently implausible by their standards of rationality.
Likewise I meet people who see rationality as a curse that is leading us to destruction and actively attempting to destroy all the things that matter, and shatter our relationship to that which ‘is‘ (the cosmos, nature, ‘spirit,’ imagination, feeling etc.)
Personally I see this cultural opposition between rationality and experience as destructive. Rationality is only ever as good as its axioms and evidence gathering techniques.
Thought systems highly influence (and limit) the way we can see the world and the way we experience the world. They often lead people to seek self confirmation, and can become a prison, whether we call them rational or irrational.
If reality, experience or the best theories we have say that your rationality is wrong or limited, then it is rational to change what constitutes rationality, although it is often thought not to be.
Newtonian mechanics overturned the rationalist objection that ‘action at a distance’ was occultism. Newton also proposed the (at the time) irrational argument that he had no conceivable explanation of why gravity worked (“I make no hypotheses”) and this did not matter. Eventually, people adapted and got use to the idea his mechanics could only explain the patterns of gravity’s working, and that was good enough (for the moment).
Obviously relativity theory, non-Euclidean geometry and quantum mechanics all threw out what had previously been considered rational axioms. In discovering and explaining more experience, these theories broadened and overturned what became seen as a limited rationality, which impeded investigation. Rationality adapted.
What people call rationality is often used to simplify or delete experience, thus removing complexity from the world, when complexity is vital to understanding the world.
At the moment there is a long fight going on in popular philosophy and in science to insist that what we call Mind is emboddied and not abstract, and that we do not understand the supposed limits or potentials of Mind (partly, it seems to me, because we tend to separate it from matter, or reduce it to what we think of as matter). Because of our history it is hard not to fall back into something resembling a mind body opposition and separation, or to say one is derived from the other, without recognising that this changes ‘the other’.
Feeling and embodiment is part of thought and human recognition of situations, and this has to be recognised. If some people need to be shattered by the grief of what is happening in the world, in order to think about and perceive the world differently, then that is what is needed. It is not rational to deny this, even though some people will claim that such feeling, or action, is irrational, and possibly fear it.
If people need to really realise that animals other than humans have minds and feelings or kinship with humans, in order to relate to those animals, or in order to understand or value those animals and help prevent them becoming extinct, then that is part of reality, and understanding it is rationality in action; dismissing this need is not rational. Neither is it rational to insist that animals do not have minds at all, because their minds might be different. Nearly everyone treats animals they know as if they have minds and feelings, because mindful behaviour in those animals seems obvious.
If dreams and imagination can bring people insights into life, it is not rational to dismiss them as “only” dreams or “only” imaginings. Just as it is not rational to dismiss making symbolic responses to a problem and do nothing; as symbolic responses can motivate ‘real’ responses.
As many people know, sometimes new ideas which help us understand things arise from dreams, from images, from what we call intuition. This arising can appear irrational, but it is irrational to ignore it.
Some people have what they call spiritual experiences, sometimes these do seem irrational, or even faked to gain fame, power, influence or money, but it is irrational to dismiss the whole class of these experiences, or their effects and possible effects on the world. Those people who fake rationality do not discredit rationality and those who fake spirituality do not discredit real experience. Such experiences are probably fairly normal (at least according to surveys and my experience of others), and given their normality, surprisingly under-investigated. Psychologists, such as Jung, who have been interested in such experiences have persistently been accused of irrationality or occultism because of the interest. Yet it is part of life, and should not be condemned if we wish to understand humans.
We will never dispose of religion, even if some of really want to, and it seems fatal to abandon it to power-hungry abusers or fanatics.
Those people who have these experiences may fear their experiences will not survive investigation, but perhaps that means the tools we have used for investigation are not useful.
Sometimes people appear to get wound up in defending the emotional or felt truth of their axioms against the evidence. In which case we can say the axioms are acting as defence mechanisms rather than truth mechanisms. Some say that science strips away the poetry of the universe, but in reality science is another, slightly more coherent, poetry.
Sometimes I am told that some research shows that rightwing politics tends to be more ‘rational’ than left, and I’m usually confused by this, as a lot of (but not all) rightwing politics seems to involve shouting, name-calling, threats, irrational discrimination, assertion of falsehoods, and avoidance of complexity. Non of which seems particularly rational. (See “Trump 2020 Hurting Your Feelings Isn’t a Crime” sweat shirts and “Liberal Tears” coffee mugs). However, it does tend to deny empathy, concern or tender feeling for others (while making harsh, or purely competitive, feelings ok) and I suspect that is what makes it seem ‘rational’ to those who think it is. If humans are feeling creatures, and base their relations to others on feeling, then it is not rational to deny it. The fact that this kind of rationality is so irrational in its behaviours, implies its ‘reason’ is a defense against gentle feeling, and this defense might be useful to survival in a neoliberal society.
To reitrate: rationality which does not recognise reality is not rational, and needs to change, and change what it defines as irrational.
As a mode of thought, rationality conditions what people see in the world. Hopefully, if it is disrupted enough, then we can chuck aside non-working axioms and evidence procedures and start again with new ones.
The processes which lead to new ideas and paradigms are generally going to differ from, and produce ideas outside, established ‘reason’ and its axioms. These insights are inherently going to be seen as ‘irrational’, because they do differ from previous rationality and its axioms. This does not mean all insights are useful, they need to be tested in practice against reality, and modified or abandoned as required
This adaptation and exploration is rational. It is not always what people who claim to be rational do.
Rationality also needs defence.
Firstly, while people often say ‘science is leading us to destruction’, this is simply not true. It is because of science that we have known for 40-50 years we are heading for ecological destruction. Scientists have been warning us repeatedly but we, and our leaders, have not listened or have refused to listen.
Secondly, it is not remotely rational to pollute more than the environmental ecology can process. It is not rational to poison the ecology and think we can get away with it. The planet is finite, it is not rational to think in terms of endless planetary extraction. It is not scientists, or rational people, who are telling us its ok to pollute or ignore ecological destruction and climate change. It is not scientists, in general, who have campaigned to keep fossil fuel corporation profits high. Some may have done so, but by doing so they foresook their calling and their rationality in favour of continuing paychecks.
Our society is not destroying itself because it is too rational, it is destroying itself through certain forms of irrationality, hope and the power relations that enforce those irrationalities because they seem essential to a particular class of people. Our politics is not rational and it aims at overcoming scientific-ecological rationality, in the name of neoliberal economic and sometimes spiritual thought.
Rationality works to improve and systematise what we know, and to work out test points for that knowing.
Rationality also offers tools for making arguments, refining arguments, and testing argumenets. If the tools are not adequate for what you need to do, then make new ones, which seem rational. This is what we had to do in the social sciences and humanities, and we will never know if any adequate tools are possible. The tools need to be relevant to the task.
Rationality is useful. The understandings provided by science, are useful to us. It is easy for humans to self-deceive, rationality provides some tools for easing self deceit, and for communicating experiences to others.
There is no necessary collision between rationality and experience, or rationality and survival. Retreat from science will not help us any more than retreat from human psychology and spirituality will help.
Tags: complexity, philosophy
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