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.

Just Gimme Some Truth

“Pilate said to him, Are you a king? Jesus answered, You say I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.
“Pilate said to him, What is truth?” (Jn. 18: 37-38)

This passage from the Gospel of John (chapter 18, verses 37-38) has been on my mind a lot lately, maybe because of the inexcusably prolonged presidential campaign, maybe because I’ve had to spend a lot of time the past few years dealing with marketing and PR people.

In John’s book, Jesus doesn’t answer Pilate’s question. In fact, Pilate doesn’t actually give him an opportunity to answer; it’s a truly rhetorical question. Here we have an upper-class Roman interrogating a Jewish laborer-cum-holy-man and not wanting to bandy words with him; as a presumably well-educated man of his time, Pilate has heard or read the extensive philosophical discussions of “truth” and isn’t interested in hearing some backwater crackpot’s views on the subject.

And in any case, John already has given us the answer: “Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (Jn. 14: 6) In brief, Jesus himself is truth, but the overly worldly Pilate can’t see it even when it stands directly in front of him.

A Zen teaching known as the “Flower Sermon” presents, I think, a similar message: One day, the Buddha sits before his disciples and instead of launching into the expected sermon simply holds up a flower. The disciples don’t understand, they scratch their heads and whisper to each other, “What does he mean?” Except for one, Mahākāśyapa, who just smiles.

The lesson in both cases, I think, is this: Truth is what really IS. Or put another way, every real thing is true, is a truth.

Where untruth enters is in any attempt to describe or explain what is. Whenever we venture beyond the actual object and start trying to give an account of its nature or causes or relationships or meanings, we run the risk of getting it wrong, of falling short, of misrepresenting reality. It isn’t necessary to attribute this to deliberate deception or plain stupidity, either; as Plato and his followers emphasized, every representation of a reality is, so to speak, less real than the thing it represents.

Such a representation, account, explanation or description was referred to by Platonists as a “logos.” Many modern Christians are aware of that word as meaning simply “word,” because of the standard translation of the opening verse of the same Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

But that translation conveys nothing of the many implications the word “logos” would have held for John and his readers. By the time his book was written (late first or early second century), “logos” had been in use as a technical philosophical term throughout the Greek-speaking world (which included most of what we now call the Middle East) for a full four centuries at least. In Platonism, it especially referred to the expression in physical reality of an inexpressible “higher” reality: Just as a spoken sentence is an incomplete expression of a thought, a person or a dog or a tree is an expression of (so to speak) God’s idea of a person or a dog or a tree.

Another way of translating logos might be “narrative,” in the sense in which that term is used by social science types nowadays: a description of life and the world that we believe explains “the way things are,” that gives us a sense of how to fit into this complex and often confusing universe, and that helps us justify our choices and goals.

For example, the much-discussed “clash of civilizations” between the Christian (or post-Christian) West and the Muslim East might better be described as a “clash of narratives.” Similarly, the “culture wars” within American society could also be said to be a conflict between or among narratives. In both cases, I think this way of looking at it helps explain the frustration and exasperation felt by people who can’t understand why their opponents can’t see the point, why they “just don’t get it”: because both sides are looking at their narratives, not reality.

It was the ancient Greeks, of course, who invented formal logic, and I think they were impelled to do so by their own democratic traditions: They saw the risk of their institutions being hijacked by demagogues and sophists who could sway public opinion with untrue but emotionally stirring speeches about the issues. They realized that good decisions depend on good information, and saw the need for a reliable way to separate true statements about reality from untrue ones.

That analytical apparatus still exists, naturally, but judging from the blatant falsehoods so widely stated in our time – by the media, the marketers, the lobbyists, the lawyers and of course the politicians – our culture leaders obviously are confident that few of us have the time, the knowledge or the will to use it – or to “bear witness to the truth.”