A Sense of Proportion

Considering the high value we seem, as a society or culture, to accord rationality as a standard for thinking and behavior, one might expect that we have a very clear understanding of what the word means. But when I started looking into this issue a few years ago, I discovered very quickly that almost no one can give a clear account of what constitutes rationality.

For most people, rationality is one of those “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” concepts. It floats around in our world, we hear it in various contexts, and we form impressions of it based on how we hear it being used. But no one defines it when they use it, they just assume that everyone knows what they mean, and we who hear them likewise assume that we know what they mean.

When I started asking, “What is rationality?” and “What does it mean to be rational?” naturally the first place I looked was in dictionaries. What I found there was unhelpful. In the first instance, I was told that rationality is “reason” or “reasonableness,” and of course I quickly discovered that “reason” is rationality.

I also learned that both “reasonable” and “rational” are synonyms for “sane,” and obviously that “unreasonable” and “irrational” are synonyms for “insane.” This means the stakes in the game of deciding what’s rational and what isn’t are pretty high: If I can label you and/or your ideas “irrational,” I automatically win, and you go into a padded cell.

Since no one seemed to be interested in defining rationality in a clear and precise way, I turned to the etymology of the word to see if that would offer any clues. And not surprisingly, this led me straight back to ancient philosophy.

The word “rational” obviously derives from the Latin word ratio, originally meaning “reckoning” or “calculating” but also having the same meaning as the mathematical term “ratio,” which refers to a numerical relationship. A month is one-twelfth of a year, for example: 1/12.

The Latin word, in turn, was a translation of a Greek word, because it was the Greeks who first articulated these kinds of relationships. The word that the Greeks used to name a statement about this kind of mathematical relationship is a familiar one: logos.

Modern Christians are familiar with logos because of the famous prologue to the gospel of John. But the standard translation of logos as “word” overlooks the history and wide range of meanings of this multifarious word. At the time John’s gospel was written, logos had a 300-year or more history as a technical philosophical term. It meant, among other things, a saying or aphorism, an axiom, an account or explanation, and most importantly for our present topic, it meant “a proportion” – in other words, the same thing as ratio. And this is why the words “rational” and “logical” are essentially equivalent: because they both refer to proportionality.

Whether you say it in Latin, Greek or English, a ratio or a proportion is a comparison of or relationship between two things: between a month and a year, for example. And this is the root-concept of rationality: the comparison or relating of things to other things.

Under the influence of Aristotle, we have come to understand logic and rationality in terms of statements about reality. Indeed, a significant part of philosophy in the 20th century turned away from attempting to understand reality as such and focused instead on the structure and coherence of statements about reality. But if we look at the fundamental meaning of rationality and logic, we can see that these terms need not apply only to what we say about reality, to “well-formed formulas” about the universe.

On the contrary, any system of comparing and ranking things is, by definition, rational or logical. For example, we can judge our sensory experiences by how pleasant or unpleasant we find them: Getting laid is more fun than a sharp stick in the eye. Or we can rate and rank experiences according to how they affect us emotionally: Praise feels better than criticism.

What we call rationality today, however, focuses exclusively on the kind of verbal formulations I mentioned above. This approach compares statements about reality with each other and ignores the kind of experiential logic we obtain from perceptions and emotions. In general, it labels personal experience as “too subjective” to be worth considering.

I’ve just described, from one point of view, three of the four “psychological types” defined by C.G. Jung: the sensing, feeling and thinking types. Anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory will have some familiarity with these notions: Some people approach the world primarily through their senses, some through their emotions and some through their verbalized thinking processes.

Anyone who has studied the Jungian types or the Myers-Briggs typology derived from Jung will understand that differences of type can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings and miscommunication. Most obviously in our society, people who overvalue verbalized logic tend to dismiss the “lower” kinds of thinking that are based on sensation or emotion. People who lead with their brains, so to speak, are frequently contemptuous of those who lead with their perceptions or emotions.

But those “intellectuals” are also the ones who are most likely to be surprised when, for example, their spouses desert them or their children hate them because of their emotional sterility, their lack of empathy, their insistence on principles over relationships, or just their lack of a sense of fun.

It’s the hegemony of the “thinking” type, of course, that has put our society in its present position where any plausible-sounding argument must be given consideration, no matter how wrong it feels on other levels.

Jung’s types, I think, correspond quite neatly with the ancient Greek – in particular the Platonist – understanding of the inner human being. Plato and his followers believed that we have an “irrational soul” – consisting of an “appetitive” (sense-desiring) and an “incensive” (emotionally motivating) part – and a “rational soul” focused on the logos. (The Greek word for the reasoning faculty was dianoia, literally “dual mind,” which highlights their understanding of the fundamentally dualistic nature of rationality.)

The fourth of Jung’s types is the “intuitive.” This is a word that is subject to serious misunderstandings, not least because there is a sort of industry that has cropped up in recent years that purports to teach people how to use their intuition. Jung defined intuition as the propensity to understand the wholeness of a situation all at once, without analysis. It’s not “gut feeling,” which is more like the sensing function, nor is it that vague stomach-turning feeling that if I do this, someone who’s important to me might disapprove; that’s emotion.

Intuition, rather, is Jung’s version of what the ancient philosophers called the nous, another untranslatable term. To the ancient philosophers, however, it’s clear that this was the “highest” part of the human being, the direct link to the divine. Unlike the “rational soul,” which must analyze things step-by-step and part-by-part, the nous grasps the whole as a whole, non-dualistically.

And this is the great error of rationalism: It ignores the importance or the meaning or even the existence of the wholeness of anything and everything. And by denying the validity of other kinds of understanding, it obstructs our wholeness as humans. A whole human being has access to all the resources of the soul and spirit, from sense-perception to emotional judgment to verbal analysis to that mysterious opening through which inexplicable insight flows. Closing off any of these ways of understanding reality is an act of self-amputation.

Name-Calling

Are you rational? Am I? Is anyone? Have you made judgments about who or what in our society represents rationality or its opposite?

These are important questions because of the high value we place on rationality in modern society. Indeed, if we can label something as “irrational,” we end the discussion: If you’re irrational, or what you believe is irrational, I can safely disregard anything you say; I don’t have to make any further argument.

This attitude reflects what I’ve referred to as “hyper-rationalism,” by which I mean the belief that the only way to understand anything in an accurate way is by means of rationality, whatever that is. It’s an attitude that has been with us for a fairly long time now, arising in the late 17th century and really gaining the upper hand in the 18th – the so-called “Enlightenment” or “Age of Reason.”

Those names reflect the widespread self-understanding of the noted thinkers of those times, their belief that they had advanced immeasurably from their predecessors of only a few years before: the religious “enthusiasts” and “fanatics” who had made the Reformation such a vicious, bloody mess. (The novel Q by “Luther Blissett” conveys a vivid impression of the violent craziness of the period, despite having been written by a committee.)

But in more recent times, we’ve seen how the application of an insistent rationalism can produce results that are equally or even more catastrophic; for example, in the Soviet Union, or in the whoring of science in general to political (think atom bomb) or economic (think psychological pharmaceuticals) purposes and interests.

We continue, however, to regard rationality as the supreme standard for judging ideas, worldviews, lifestyles; everything, in fact. I’m not convinced we really believe in it at this point, but we’ve found it useful for a long time as a justification for imperialism, both domestic and foreign, so it’s a bit hard to let it go.

What I mean by that is the claim that northern Europeans and their descendants in North America are the most rational people on Earth (which is justified ipso facto by the fact that we’ve succeeded in gaining control over almost everyone else), while all those other, darker-skinned or intellectually pre-modern (i.e., religious) people are “emotional” or “politically volatile” or just plain “backward,” so it’s incumbent upon us to guide them toward a better understanding of reality, a better approach to politics, and of course to a more efficient and remunerative exploitation of the natural resources buried under their feet.

This is precisely the attitude that led to the United States’ policies of “gunboat diplomacy” and support for “banana republics” (Latin American nations that were bribed and/or threatened into becoming nothing more than plantations for gringo landlords). We told ourselves that “those people” were incapable of creating stable societies and governments for themselves, so they needed our help; but our “help” consisted of making sure they never created stable societies or governments for themselves, because then they might be able to enforce demands for realistically adequate compensation for the labor and resources we were exploiting.

The same sort of thing has gone on in other parts of the world, of course; for example, the Middle East, where American and British oil companies (including one called British Petroleum) were interfering (and browbeating their own governments into interfering) with the political process in such countries as Iran and Iraq. The average American may not recognize the name Mossadegh any more than Allende, but the people of Iran and Chile haven’t forgotten.

So now we hear Americans asking, “Why do they hate us?” And the answer we get from the mainstream media and the corporate-owned talking heads who pose as experts, is simply, “Because they are irrational, backward people.” When in fact a rational examination of the past behavior of the United States and the United Kingdom is certainly likely to provoke distrust at the very least.

I’m quite fed up, frankly, with the tossing around of “rational” and “irrational” as labels, without deeper examination of such claims. Beyond international politics, the “clash of civilizations,” it’s also a factor in the so-called “culture wars” within the U.S.: “New Atheists” such as Dawkins and Hitchens happily hurl the “irrational” label at all religious believers willy-nilly, in the same way political and economic hegemonists use it to label the countries they want to dominate.

There are two angles of attack against this (mis)use of the idea of rationality. One is of course to argue the specifics, i.e., that the particular idea(s) or people labeled as rational or irrational are inaccurately so labeled. The other is to argue that rationality/irrationality as a concept is wrong, or at least so seriously misunderstood as to be useless. If the latter view is correct, it presumably makes it likelier that the former criticism will also be true.

It probably will come as no surprise that I believe the latter view is indeed correct. I’m convinced that almost no one who upholds rationality as the sine qua non of belief, thought, behavior, has any clear idea of what rationality really is. So what is it?