If there is one thing that is overrated in the modern way of life, it’s the practice of being ‘rational.’ As an illustrative example, let’s take a type you must know: that one-dimensional character that for whatever reason has identified rationality as the correct and therefore only mode of being in the world, and as such conducts their life squarely inside the confines of logical deduction; inside that secure bubble of risk-averse, calculated, rational behavior. They view life as a connected string of propositions, and the point of it is to figure out the optimal path through. As a result, their life-choices are as optimal as they are expedient. You can almost see it on their walking style: the translation of a body in space with a mechanistic flair, cold eyes fixated with intent on getting from A to B as fast and efficiently as possible. The scenery of life has no bearing on their choices, the people around them merely objects to be avoided or used. What’s more, you can almost be sure they don’t know how to dance: the idea of rhytmically flinging your limbs to music appears positively obscene to them.
That’s a caricature, I’m aware. This person scarcely exists, yet I’m sure you know someone that sort of fits the bill, because people embodying the gist of the above are not rare. They might even pride themselves with the label ‘rational,’ although people might reserve other words for them. What’s clear is that they’ve stepped over some invisible threshold and they’re often utterly unaware of it.
To be sure, to say that someone is being rational is often to pay them a compliment, but it can just as often be used as derision (think of calling someone too rational). The reason for this, I think, is that people have a correct intuition for what rationality actually means. The rationalists – if that’s what we should call them – on the other hand, has taken the term to its logical extreme and are merely sequentially executing the rational commandments, as it were, because that’s what follows, logically, when you do.
So what does being rational actually mean? Although no modern dictionary will give it away, the hint is in the name: the root of the term is ratio, which pertains to a relationship between things. In other words, a balance. The rationalist is in no way balanced, and that is his whole trouble.
Yet, the character persists. You could even argue that the worldview of his kind has increasingly taken over the culture. And it’s no mystery: the culture embraces the rational industry of science and reason above all else (arguably at the cost of all else). Indeed, it’s easy to get drawn in when it’s the water in which you swim. Or perhaps more correctly: it’s difficult to get drawn out of the water in which you’ve swam all your life. The air outside is cold and scary and, paradoxically, you’ve lost the ability to breathe in it. Like the sad characters in Plato’s cave, the ascent to the light burns their eyes, so they return to the safety of the cave.
The lure of the rational game is that it’s simple. It follows from a few axioms and all the decision trees can be deduced logically and with arbitrary precision, resulting in the stilted but simple life of our familiar rationalist. It’s all black and white. Behavior is purely binary: rational or irrational.
Being outside of this game is difficult. It’s a place where no clear answers exist. It’s where people exist with all their ambiguities and arbitrary behavior. It’s cold, not with calculating logic, but with immense existential suffering. It’s warm, not from the certainty of your deductions, but from the unforgiving illumination of the Sun. It’s the borderland between the real and not-real, time and not-time, life and not-life. It’s the place from which we derive the sacred; art; love; a zest for life. It contains our history, culture and tradition. It’s the well from which meaning springs. It’s why dancing makes sense.
But there’s no use revolting against rationality by fully embracing its opposite. That would be making the same error as the rationalist, only in reverse. What is needed, again, is a balance. This balance can be achieved by something we can call wisdom. Wisdom, construed in this way, is enacting the proper relationship – the proper ratio – between the rational and irrational; knowing when and to what extent one applies which mode of being depending on the context. Thus, knowing when to open up your mind to the irrational will make you more rational in the proper sense of the word.