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.

Reasonably Irrational

I’ve been trying for some time to heap scorn on one of the central tenets of orthodox economics, namely the concept of the “rational investor.” Anyone who follows the markets can see quite clearly that investors behave irrationally at times, or have we forgotten the dot-com bubble? But the theory remains firmly in place, not because economists are stupid or because they’re deliberately trying to mislead people, but because the whole structure of mainstream economic theory would collapse without it.

Put simply, economists believe that economies and markets function efficiently because people naturally choose the courses of action that are most likely to give them the greatest benefit. In this obviously naive belief, economists are clinging to the ideas of those theorists of the so-called Age of Reason, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, who laid the foundations of our modern political and economic systems. For Locke and Smith and their like-minded contemporaries, “reason” alone is sufficient to guide all human life and unlock all the mysteries of existence, while “unreason” is all bad and a great impediment to our progress as individuals and as a society.

In particular, the thinkers of the 18th-century “Enlightenment” – many of them Deists, including a number of the founding fathers of the United States – identified “unreason” with traditional and “emotional” forms of religion. After all, they were keenly aware of the violent upheavals of the 15th and 16th centuries, when partisans on both sides of the Reformation engaged in repeated and vicious wars to promote or defend their theological positions.

These cutting-edge 18th-century opinions still hold sway with a large number of contemporary thinkers. Richard Dawkins, for example, in “The God Delusion,” voices the opinion that religious belief persists in our time mainly because of bad parenting (i.e., parents teaching their children religion), and if only we could rid ourselves of this irrational belief in the supernatural, the world would quickly enjoy unprecedented peace and harmony.

The main problem with this whole line of thought is that it takes into account only a small part of the human psyche while denying and devaluing the rest.

This was already the response of the Romantic movement, which followed close on the heels of the Enlightenment and celebrated the emotions and fantasies that had been swept out of the tidy Neoclassical worldview of Locke and Smith. The Romantics restored “irrationality” to a place of value and usefulness, perhaps even giving it too high an estimation; these swings of the pendulum do tend to carry to extremes.

It’s a bit ironic that the rationalists of the Age of Reason looked to ancient philosophy for support for their arguments, because the ancients actually had a much more balanced view of human psychology. In particular, Plato and his followers clearly delineated the psyche into an irrational and a rational part, and though they did argue that the rational soul should rule the individual psyche, they contended that the psyche as a whole should aim to serve a higher, super-rational level of being. (To be technical, this “higher level” is called nous in Greek and is translated generally as “spirit” or “intellect,” depending on the inclinations of the translator; neither term really works very well, in my opinion.)

There are many, I’m sure, who will find it absurd to accord any value to irrationality. But consider: Are our sense-perceptions rational? Of course not; they simply report the facts of our environment to our emotions and our thinking. What about instincts? No, but they're pretty useful in keeping us from starving to death and so on.

What about emotions? Well, as Carl Jung pointed out, there is in fact a kind of emotional logic, which is why he defined "feeling" as a "rational function": We can rate and rank and judge things according to how they make us feel, good or bad, better or worse. And that kind of evaluation seems pretty important to our well-being. But in our modern worldview, dominated by the belief that “rationality” consists entirely of verbal or numerical logic, it doesn’t make the cut.

And let’s not forget the importance of irrationality in creativity, in making breakthroughs. Logical analysis just breaks things down or connects one existing thing to another; it doesn’t produce anything new.

However, ignoring or denying the existence or importance of these things doesn’t make them go away; instead, it simply sweeps them under the mental rug, into the unconscious – something else a lot of contemporary thinkers like to pretend is nonexistent. And from their lurking-place in our mental shadow, they can feed on our basic appetites and drives, and grow large and powerful enough to dominate us now and then, causing all sorts of embarrassing problems and bloody conflicts.

In addition, there’s a tendency toward the thoroughly unproven and frankly rather smug belief that “we” – that is, the intellectual inheritors of the Western (specifically, the Northwestern European) worldview – are the only really rational people, while “they” – all those mostly darker people in the rest of the world – are irrational (“medieval,” “emotionally volatile,” “politically immature,” etc. etc.) and therefore in need of our benevolent (of course) guidance (or the firm hand of a dictator chosen by us).

It scarcely needs to be said, but I’ll state that I don’t think “we” are as rational as some of us like to believe, nor are “they” as irrational. And in any case, I think we need to practice irrationality to some extent. You might say that the problem isn’t that we’re irrational, it’s that we just aren’t very good at it.