Rationality, in contemporary discourse, is often characterized as believing the right things for the right reasons or, more succinctly, as possessing “justified true belief.” In a sense this is fair, as it is clearly part and parcel of rational living to arrive at beliefs which are justified and true. Yet a danger lurks in defining rationality solely by recourse to its intellectual endpoint, in glossing over or denying that it is fundamentally a process or mode of being. The concepts of knowledge and rationality thus mix indiscriminately in the minds of many, fostering an insidious confusion: A rational person is thought to be one who believes the right things rather than one who thinks and acts in a rational way.
This distinction, which may seem trite at a glance, is crucial. The overwhelming majority of people, and especially intellectuals, come to accept that certain beliefs are the right ones, the true ones. The injunction that these be “justified” will be presumed accounted for by some authoritative consensus in academia. They will then, straightforwardly enough, determine a person’s rationality by assessing how closely their thoughts and actions mirror the relevant “right beliefs” they’ve come to accept. This has the benefit of expediency, of requiring no genuine effort to understand why someone believes or acts as they do. It spares us considering how some dissenting claim or activity could be valid. But it proves fatal to a genuine assessment of whether or not some person, argument or claim is reasonable.
Rationality, or lack thereof, is only gleaned by an honest and charitable analysis of how certain claims or beliefs were arrived at, or how certain actions were justified, and how well those ideas function in the uncaring complexity of the world. We discern its presence or absence by understanding and interrogating a given rationale or process, and paying close attention to the results it brings. We cannot discern if a notion or theory is rational if it’s not a veteran of many battles. Sometimes the most superficially fearsome and imposing warriors are the first to lose their nerve and flee, or die foolishly.
When we cease to approach dissenting ideas in this spirit we are no longer being rational ourselves—we are being dogmatic. It is no evidence of rationality that someone ascribes to what we currently think true, and it is no proof of irrationality that someone disagrees with those beliefs, even if the divergence proves extreme. The same could be said for actions. To hold up our profoundly incomplete grasp of the world as the arbiter of sensibility is thinly-veiled megalomania, not rationality. It reveals a mentality born only of hubris, sloth or a deficient imagination.
The consistent and thorough exercise of logical principles, which safeguard us from the many intellectual pitfalls we are prone to, is rational. It is immensely helpful to think and operate with these error-divesting, falsehood-flagging principles in a state of continual and fruitful activity. That this can sometimes lead to places that seem fanciful, strange, or downright impossible is precisely why this understanding of rationality is so important; it is sometimes the strange, unexpected notions which revolutionize our understanding of what “justified true belief” would actually be like.
Further, rationality is not a binary, yay or nay attribute. Nor is it always obvious to intelligent, educated persons. It comes in degrees and often takes forms that cocksure intellectuals are incapable of discerning. The culling, cohering and refining of the intellectual process is the natural complement of our animalistic, wordless, worldly wisdom. This primal, battle-scarred, implicit knowledge is the wellspring of all wholesome intellectual activity. Rationality is born from the balanced and complementary interplay of our intellectual and animal faculties, where intellect is akin to a discerning sculptor who shapes and rearranges the clay of primal intuition and practical experience, thereby making explicit, articulate and crisp what was formerly implicit, incommunicable and ill-defined.
The core of the rational is to foster the survival and flourishing of a particular agent enmeshed in and relating to a broader reality. It has a negative or restraining aspect concerned with avoiding both fatal mistakes and non-fatal errors which prove to be fruitless, or too painful and costly. However, some degree of error is actually preferable, so long as it can be learned from and does not prove disastrous. A steady stream of endurable and educational errors will keep a process fleet-footed and discerning. There is nothing rational in wholesale error-aversion, which engenders fragility and fixity. We need only avoid ruinous and unproductive errors, while maintaining a certain psychic poise, for the beneficent and fertile facets of failure, error and oversight to reveal themselves. This insight is woven into the fundamental form and fabric of all that lives and moves in this world. It is the core logic of living, evolving systems.
Yet this individual utility is just the root of the rational, not its fullest expression or culmination. Higher planes of rational activity are found in an extension of the scope of our cares and concerns, absent any loss of potency or reliability. That is, ascending the scale of rationality, we integrate practices and principles that benefit both ourselves and our myriad allies and associates. As the circumference of our care and concern widens beyond our own limited self interest, so too do the demands on our rational faculties, for we must then account for a far greater share of reality than before. This may necessitate the alteration or rejection of principles and practices which worked effectively in a more narrow scope. What is good for us changes when what we love changes. The apotheosis of rational activity encompasses not only our own success in navigating the vagaries of fate, but that of all we cherish as well.
The rational also has a positive or generative aspect which, while dependent upon the robust and reliable functioning of the negative, is indispensable. It fosters the increase and expansion of the capacities, coherence and enjoyments of the agent. The positive aspect is concerned with aspiration, the desire for attainment or fulfillment above and beyond the mere avoidance of suffering, injury and death. One does not make music merely by avoiding discordant and unpleasant sounds; we must also learn which notes to play, and in what relation and sequence they sound most melodious and captivating. To avoid catastrophe is the bedrock of the rational, but we mustn't forget that foundations are for building upon. The positive phase makes possible a consistently directed, efficient, teleological transformation over time.
A further element of great importance: The ability to entertain and charitably assess alien or contradictory beliefs. As Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without believing it.” That this capacity has become disturbingly rare in this age of emotional epilepsy could not escape any observant person, and we cannot claim to be rational without it. In fact, a true paragon of rationality is better able to articulate and argue for competing positions or claims than even their brightest proponents. They not only outdo their opposition in utilizing and defending superior ideas, they outstrip them even as champions of the very ideas they combat. They possess an ideal mixture of playfulness, creativity and rigor in things philosophical, formalizable, scholarly or scientific.
This auto-dialectical brilliancy is the crowning jewel of intellectual virtue, the surest sign of a fully ripened analytical faculty. It is the mentality a courageous, erudite philosopher might develop after decades seasoning in experiment, dialogue and error. That it is no guarantee of wisdom, that it can lead to a kind of disingenuous gamesmanship of intellectual discourse, is noteworthy. Even the most brilliant and broad-minded can make elementary errors, and often do so precisely because of their adeptness at weaving compelling narratives and formulating eloquent arguments. As George Orwell astutely noted, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” This does not detract from the beauty, potency and importance of a masterful intellect, but serves as a warning to those who would make it their godhead.
To be rational is not to believe “the right things” or to articulate intricate theories which impress cloistered academics. Rather, it is for one’s thoughts and actions to become, in the course of time, less wrong, less fragile, rigid or discordant. It is to become more robust, adaptable, antifragile, coherent and comprehensive, to more fully master the vicissitudes of life and identify the fundamental patterns undergirding our ever-changing world. Rationality is a holistic, richly involved, adaptive process which must work—and the more reliably a process works, the more fruitfully it responds to the myriad strains and stresses of life, the better it safeguards us from fatal error, the broader its efficacy, the longer it endures, and the more it proves a sound and suitable foundation for our higher aspirations, the more rational it is.