Order - Chaos
Perfect - Flawed
Precise - Vague
Machine - Human
Solid - Liquid
Stasis - Motion
Defined - Undefined
Known - Unknown
Procedural - Creative
Conventional - Novel
Unity - Plurality
Simple - Complex
Perfect - Imperfect
Thinking - Intuition
Masculine - Feminine
Pathological rationality - that is, rationality unbounded - believes it
can account for everything on its own terms. Its quest to explain - to
make sense of things - is necessarily unending: a search for the bedrock of a bottomless pit.
Rationality can fill in part of the picture, but to flesh it out further
we must use alternative methods of explanation. Rational objects, therefore, are not 'full' objects; they are approximations, always lacking something.
The rational attitude is outward-looking, towards the object. It seeks to impose direction, logic, sense, and cohesion; to hold things still long enough so that they can be seen. Through reason we perceive
things.
The irrational attitude is inwards-looking, towards the subject. It is destructive in relation to what is already known - of norms - in that it seeks alternatives, and looks for what has been overlooked, or left out, and so transcends borders and explodes categories - but creative in a broader sense. Through irrationality we perceive the world between things, outside of things: we perceive
everything else.
Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that the rational must be subordinated to the spiritual. Others, according to their religious traditions, use different words such as 'sacred' or 'the needs of society' or 'respect for nature'.
[James Goldsmith]
The Trap, p. 186
It is a fundamental error to try to subject our own fate at all costs to our will. Our will is a function regulated by reflection; hence it is dependent on the quality of that reflection. This, if it really is reflection, is supposed to be rational, i.e., in accord with reason.
But has it ever been shown, or will it ever be, that life and fate are in accord with reason, that they too are rational?
The further we go in the direction selected by reason, the surer we may be that we are excluding the irrational possibilities of life which have just as much right to be lived.
[
C.G. Jung]
The Essential Jung, p.155
In short, one may say anything about the history
of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination.
The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks
in one's throat.
And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually
happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational
persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all
their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light
to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live
morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very
people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer
trick, often a most unseemly one.
Now I ask you: what can be expected of
man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon
him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that
nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him
economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but
sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and
even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some
nasty trick.
He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire
the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to
introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is
just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain,
simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary--
that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of
nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to
desire nothing but by the calendar.
And that is not all: even if man really
were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural
science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable,
but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude,
simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive
destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his
point!
He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse
(it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals),
may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is,
convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key!
If you say that all
this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and
curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would
stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go
mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!
I believe in it, I
answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing
but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!
[Fyodor Dostoevsky]
Notes From Underground
When Neo awakens to the 'real world', he does not realise that what is seeing is paradise.
The
world of the machines may look horrifying to human eyes, but viewed
objectively it is a paradise: a harmonious, perfectly
balanced eco-system; the summit of technological progress.
In this sense Agent
Smith is the real hero of the piece, seeking to eradicate those forces that threaten his utopia. Human beings are like a virus, and it is our irrationality - our inexplicable propensity towards chaos - that makes us virulent. The only way that this contagion can be made safe is to channel it into a place where it cannot do any harm: into the virtual world of the matrix. Meanwhile, in the absence of chaos order reigns supreme. The world of the machines is rationality taken to its
reductio ad absurdum, the kind of totalitarian purgatory that inveitably results when you dispense with one half of a binary; when Yang beats Yin; when rationality conquers irrationality.
Neo looks out at paradise and is horrified.
He
wants his games, his imbalance, his imperfection, his
irrationality. He wants to be human.
This is the unfortunate truth that lurks on the periphery of every utopian vision:
that none of would really want paradise if we knew what it truly meant.
Irrational
I use this term not as denoting something contrary to reason, but something beyond reason, something therefore, not grounded on reason.
The irrational is an existential factor which, though it may be pushed further out of sight by an increasingly elaborate rational explanation, finally makes the explanation so complicated that it passes our powers of comprehension, the limits of rational thought being reached long before the whole of the world could be encompassed by the laws of reason.
A completely rational explanation of an object that actually exists (not one that is merely posited) is a Utopian ideal. Only an object that is posited can be completely explained on rational grounds, since it does not contain anything beyond what has been posited by rational thinking. Empirical science, too, posits objects that are confined within rational bounds, because by deliberately excluding the accidental it does not consider the actual object as a whole, but only that part of it which has been singled out for rational observation.
Although the irrational as such can never become the object of science, it is of the greatest importance for a practical psychology that the irrational factor should be correctly appraised. Practical psychology stirs up many problems that are not susceptible of a rational solution, but can only be settled irrationally, in a way not in accord with the laws of reason. The expectation or exclusive conviction that there must be a rational way of settling every conflict can be an insurmountable obstacle to finding a solution of an irrational nature.
[C. G. Jung]
Psychological Types (1991), p. 454-5
[...] all chains of definitions must start with
undefined terms, whose meaning can be exemplified but not defined.
All definitions, so-called 'operational definitions' included, can only shift the problem of the meaning of the term in question to the definining term.
Thus the demand for definitions leads to an infinite regress unless we admit so-called primitive terms, that is undefined terms.
[Karl Popper]
The Open Society and its Enemies, p. 59, 276
Imagine trying to describe a brook. A running brook is never the same. New water flows past, working away, little by little, at the banks. From moment to moment it is a different brook. To talk about a brook we have to find a constant aspect of it.
To perform any rational operation concerning the brook we must consider it unchanging, treat it as if it were the same.
Language and rational processes both hold experience constant.
To behave rationally, one uses categories formed in the past. "I'll meet you at the brook we went to yesterday." We can map its course as of today, measure its acidity at a certain point. Each time we treat it as the very same brook.
An artist or writer, however, might choose not to hold it but simply to experience the dynamic nature of the brook, to sit by it and become open to its "brookness."
We call this approach mindful or intuitive; it bypasses old categories and rational thinking.
The dancer Isadora Duncan, whose art is by definition motion and change, said, "If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it."
Out of an intuitive experience of the world comes a continuous flow of novel distinctions. Purely rational understanding, on the other hand, serves to confirm old mindsets, rigid categories.
"It is by logic that we prove. It is by intuition that we discover," said the mathematician Henri Poincaré.
In dealing with the world rationally, we hold it constant, by means of categories formed in the past. Through intuition, on the other hand, we grasp the world as a whole, in flux.
[
Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.116, 117
Even when faced with clearly complex problems that undergo fundamental changes while being solved (“diagnosis equals intervention”), these heirs of the Enlightenment insist on reductionist thoroughness in hope of full knowledge and perfect prediction.
But, as Evans & Reid note: “Reason imagines nothing. It cannot create and thus it cannot transform. [...] It is not made for opening up new worlds, but enabling us to survive present ones.”
[Rasmus Dahlberg]
'Resilience and Complexity: Conjoining the Discourses of Two Contested Concepts',
Culture Unbound, Vol. 7, p. 554
Ernest Renan […] expressed the famous idea that logic excludes - by definition - nuances, and since truth resides exclusively in the nuances, it is “a useless instrument for finding Truth in the moral and political sciences.”
So the reader can see how the ancients saw naive rationalism: by impoverishing - rather than enhancing - thought, it introduces fragility. They knew that incompleteness - half-knowledge - is always dangerous.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 256-7
In Kant's terms, man could view himself under two different, even contradictory aspects - scientifically, as a “phenomenon," subject to the laws of nature; and morally, as a thing-in-itself, a "noumenon," which could be thought of (not known) as free, immortal, and subject to God.
Here the Humean and Newtonian influences in Kant's philosophical development were countered by the universal humanitarian moral ideals of Rousseau, who had stressed the priority of feeling over reason in religious experience, and whose works had made a considerable impression on Kant, reinforcing the deeper roots of Kant's sense of moral duty coming from his strict Pietist childhood.
[Richard Tarnas]
The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 350
Like his fellows in the vanguard of the Enlightenment, Rousseau argued with the weapons of critical reason and reformist zeal. Yet the progress of civilization they celebrated seemed to him the source of much of the world's evil.
Man suffered from civilization's corrupt sophistications, which alienated him from his natural condition of simplicity, sincerity, equality, kindness, and true understanding. Moreover, Rousseau believed religion was intrinsic to the human condition. He contended that the philosophes' exaltation of reason had neglected man's actual nature - his feelings, his depths of impulse and intuition and spiritual hunger that transcended all abstract formulae.
[Richard Tarnas]
The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 312
It is no different with the faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content nowadays, the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations - a "world of truth” that can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason.
What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this - reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity: that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon.
That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do research scientifically in your sense (you really mean, mechanistically?) - an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more - that is a crudity and naiveté, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy.
Would it not be rather probable that, conversely, precisely the most superficial and external aspect of existence - what is most apparent, its skin and sensualization - would be grasped first - and might even be the only thing that allowed itself to be grasped? A "scientific" interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning.
This thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based as on a ground floor.
But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world.
Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a "scientific" estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is "music" in it!
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Gay Science, 373
According to Lévinas, ontology by its very nature attempts to create a totality in which what is different and “other” is necessarily reduced to sameness and identity.
This desire for totality, according to Lévinas, is a basic manifestation of “instrumental” reason—the use of reason as an instrument for determining the best or most efficient means to achieve a given end. Through its embrace of instrumental reason, Western philosophy displays a destructive and objectifying “will to domination.”
Lévinas claims that ontology also displays a bias toward cognition and theoretical reason—the use of reason in the formation of judgments or beliefs. In this respect ontology is philosophically inferior to ethics, a field that Lévinas construes as encompassing all the practical dealings of human beings with each other.
Lévinas holds that the primacy of ethics over ontology is justified by the “face of the Other.” The “alterity,” or otherness, of the Other, as signified by the “face,” is something that one acknowledges before using reason to form judgments or beliefs about him. Insofar as the moral debt one owes to the Other can never be satisfied—Lévinas claims that the Other is “infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign”—one’s relation to him is that of infinity.
In contrast, because ontology treats the Other as an object of judgments made by theoretical reason, it deals with him as a finite being. Its relationship to the Other is therefore one of totality.
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I don't want to go and do 'Liar' again, because I can do it very well. I can probably sing it better now than when I wrote it. You're better at it when you get old, in a way. You get grey and then you get good. But what would that say about me?
