IRRATIONALISM. – A term whose meaning is not easily definable due to the many senses it has assumed in the history of philosophy, especially in modern and contemporary thought. In an absolute sense, it condemns itself: pure irrationalism or a philosophy as a “system” of the “irrational” reduces, in fact, to the rational systematization of the irrational, that is, to an irrationalism rationally demonstrated! Therefore, every form of irrationalism fundamentally presupposes the use and value of reason. As such, it almost always has a necessarily limited scope and precisely aims to affirm: a) that there is something (real or ideal) that is not reducible (or contradicts or surpasses) to properly rational activity; b) and that, consequently, rational activity is not the entirety of spiritual activity, but only a part of II. It is evident that, if such partiality of reason is excluded, every irrationalistic element ceases, since reason comes to be identified with spiritual activity and with the real in all its extension, leaving nothing foreign to II.
(Note from Enc. Catt.) (13th century).
For example, it is the panlogism of Hegel (q.v.) or other forms of absolute idealism, where the irrational ceases even as “supra-rational” knowledge, that is, belonging (as the content of Revelation) to an order that transcends natural reason.
On the other hand, there are rationalistic philosophies (or philosophical currents) that admit a sphere of activity not reducible to reason. For instance, in ancient and even modern Stoicism, the “passions” are irrational; in modern rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz), sensations are not reducible to the clarity of reason; in the Enlightenment, history is the domain of the irrational because it eludes any exhaustive systematization and does not permit necessary and universal relations between events, which remain beyond calculation and predictability, in the realm of the uncertain and obscure, etc. But these philosophies, precisely because of their rationalism, devalue irrationalistic elements and consider them inferior activity, a lowest degree that must be surpassed or from which one must be liberated. To speak, therefore, of “residues” or of the “presence” of irrationalism in them is improper and inexact. Likewise, it is erroneous to say that those philosophies (e.g., of Bergson and in part Blondel) which, without denying the value of rational knowledge, include the latter within a form of knowledge superior to and more comprehensive than it are absolutely irrationalist (it has recently been possible to speak of Bergsonian “intellectualism” [Husson] and Blondelian “intellectualism” [Duméry]); similarly, intuitionism (q.v.) should not be confused with irrationalism, otherwise, to cite an example, even Platonic idealism would be irrationalist, since it not only admits the original intuition of the Ideas but exalts (Phaedrus, 224 a–256 b) the *éros* as *mania* or frenzy, superior to the “mediocrity” of reason. These are all necessary clarifications, given the ambiguity of the term “irrationalism” and the fact that, fundamentally, it is not possible to reduce all spiritual activity to pure rational activity in the strict sense, nor is the real itself, in its concreteness, entirely translatable into terms of pure rationality; not to mention the essence of God and Revelation, which belong to an order transcending that of natural reason.
It must also be noted that reason and rationalism are often devalued not as such, but insofar as they are identified with a particular use and meaning of reason itself, that is, insofar as the terms are given a limited or restricted scope (for example, Pascal has statements that may seem to be a total devaluation of reason, but in fact they are only directed against Cartesian reason or pure *esprit de géométrie*; some anti-Hegelians combat reason and rationalism precisely because they identify them with the reason and rationalism of Hegel; Bergson is anti-intellectualist because he has in view the scientific and positivist intellectualism of the second half of the last century, etc.); or, even without going so far as devaluation or condemnation, the term “reason” is taken with a precise meaning, and what is not reducible to it is called irrational. Thus, ancient mathematicians (e.g., Euclid) consider reason (*logos*) as the “calculating” faculty, capable of reaching absolutely exact conclusions; consequently, for them, what eludes calculation is “irrational” (*alogos*). In order for one to speak of irrationalism in the proper sense of the term, it is necessary not only that a form of knowledge (or a reality) different from, superior to, or irreducible to reason—even taken in its full meaning (and not restricted or limited)—be admitted, but also that the validity of reason be denied and it be considered contrary or opposed to another (or other) form of knowing, a true obstacle to be eliminated and deformed in its structure compared to the structure of reality. Irrationalism in this sense is characteristic of contemporary (post-Hegelian) philosophy, where it has assumed a multiplicity of meanings and an extension not found in any other period of the history of thought. Indeed, one may say that what has been defined as the “revolt against reason” is one of the features of speculation in roughly the last century, during which activism and vitalism have claimed and exalted whatever is spontaneous, immediate, instinctive—in a word, irrational—in man and in universal life. To the “philosophies of reason” have been polemically opposed (and this must be taken into account as extreme positions that react to extreme rationalism) various forms of so-called “philosophies of life.”
Their immediate origins are to be found in German Romanticism (Schlegel and Novalis), in the theory of evolution, and in biological doctrines. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in different ways, may be considered the two masters; subsequently, their influence was joined by that of Kierkegaard. Schopenhauer’s “will,” the metaphysical root of the world, is present in every being of nature as a blind and irrational principle that wills for the sake of willing, without an end: it has no object, it is pure irrationality. But whereas Schopenhauer considers the will “unhappy,” so much so that to live and to endure life is, beyond being an evil, also a crime, Nietzsche exalts the irrational and intuitive forces of life as the “Dionysian” happiness of life itself. Nietzschean vitalism, in certain respects, represents the maturity of some Romantic currents and one of the salient stages of the revolt against irrationalism against rationalism of every age, whether Greek, Cartesian, Kantian, or Hegelian. To the “concept” (of Socrates, the “corrupter”) and to the Idea (of Hegel), Nietzsche opposes Life, which bursts forth in antithetical directions, expanding infinitely: in a world that has discovered itself to be infinite. The “will to power” proper to the “Übermensch,” in a certain aspect, is the violent, cruel, barbaric, and primitive drive of instinctive life and raw passions against the frigidity and the stifling straitjacket of reason. The antitheses do not resolve themselves into a synthesis (Hegel), but intensify in collision: history is not the rational unfolding of the Idea, but a process of clashing and irrational forces.
In contemporary thought, especially German, irrationalism has fermented alarmingly: vast currents of historicism, sociology, and existentialism are deeply influenced by II. For example, Spengler’s historicism (v.)—to cite a few significant positions—rests, as the author of the apocalyptic *The Decline of the West* (Munich 1918), on the concept of the fatality of doctrines and of history as the purposeless manifestation of predestined symbols. “The logic of natural science, the chain of causes and effects, appears to us most superficial; only the logic of the organic, destiny, instinct—whose omnipotence we do not feel in the vicissitudes of things—demonstrates the depth of becoming. What matters is to give man a new vision from which another necessarily arises. Life has no end” (op. cit., p. 152). For Spengler, intelligence is merely a tardy and derivative activity; reason is the crystallization of vital elements (instincts, impulses, passions, values of blood or sense, etc.). Not different are the conclusions of some lesser forms of irrationalism (e.g., Klages’s), of the so-called “German neoromanticism” (Ziegler, etc.), for which reason prevents man from living life spontaneously and immediately in intimacy with nature and from becoming a god; nor from the vitalism of the Spaniard Ortega y Gasset (b. 1883), who, however, does not push these disconcerting exaggerations, even if he exalts the unforeseen, the risky, the barbaric, or, as he puts it, “ascending life.” An enemy of all rationalistic absolutes, Ortega condemns the abstractions of necessary and universal truths proper to rational man, against which he sets the non-intellective “organic man.”
A quasi-religious and Pascalian sense, under the influence of pragmatism and Spanish mysticism, characterizes Unamuno’s irrationalism. Life is action and absolute faith in action, of which reason is the mortal enemy. The reasonings of the latter do not persuade, “because they are nothing but reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is nourished” (*The Tragic Sense of Life*, I, Florence 1922, p. 64). Against logic, even in the face of the absurd, one must have faith—immense, boundless, robust, even to the point of madness—the only faith that possesses an irresistible “redemptive power,” as is read in the *Comentario*. The “ugly logic,” with its deadly and torturing “whys,” poisons the will, drives out generosity, heroism, madness. The world, Unamuno still says in the *Comentario*, “is at one time always what it appears to each person, and true wisdom consists in shaping it according to our will, going out of our minds without any reason, full of faith in the absurd.” Truth is not a logical relation, nor is it obtained by the method of logic, but rather by the “method of passion,” of faith.
Decidedly religious (Protestant) is Kierkegaardian irrationalism, opposed to “speculative philosophy” (which he identifies with Hegelian philosophy) and to objective thought that levels existences and makes them into paragraphs of a “system.” It is not “objective” truth that interests man, but his truth: what matters, as is read in the *Diary*, “is to understand what I am destined for, to see what God truly wants me to do: what matters is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find an idea for which I can live or die” (*Diary*, Aug. 1, 1835, Innsbruck 1923, p. 28). “Not reason, but faith: whoever affirms God objectively does not believe.” “Objective insecurity,” incomprehensibility, the “absurd” are necessary; it is precisely in the absurd that the passion of faith is expressed. An exaggeration shared by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is the religious existentialism of Chestov, always in impassioned polemic against “rational evidence,” the daughter of sin, an expression of “diabolical pride.” Truth is faith, and faith is subjective, believing despite everything, against everything: “The promised land does not exist for the man who knows. The promised land is found where the man of faith has arrived; it has become a promise because he has arrived there: *Certum est quia impossibile*” (*Athens and Jerusalem*, Paris 1938, p. 456). The renunciation of reason and the despair of the man who knows the truth is the state of grace of openness to faith, which Chestov exalts in anarchic tones, with accents in common with the so-called “theology of crisis” of Barth and more direct points of contact with the “religious philosophers” (Soloviev, Berdyaev, Bulgakov, etc.) of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Even contemporary science (especially physics) makes room for the irrational in the sense that there is something of reality that escapes the scientific process and its principles. MEYERSON, EMILE (v.), for example, finds that the principle of identity (the supreme principle of science) at a certain point in its process encounters something irrational, irreducible to the identical, rationally unassimilable. It is not accurate, however, to consider existential relativism and the philosophical and scientific applications made of it as irrationalistic: relativism is not, in the proper sense, any more than are the recent neopositivist or mathematical logical doctrines that have replaced the category of “necessity” with that of “probability” or “conventionality.”
Irrationalism as a denial of the cognitive validity of reason or as a condemnation of rational knowledge, whether in the name of the rights of spontaneous life or in the name of religious faith, is a philosophically erroneous, practically ruinous, and religiously heterodox position. It is not a matter of denying reason to defend concrete life, but of vitalizing it within life itself, so that reason illuminates life and life gives concreteness to reason. Nor is it a matter of affirming faith against reason or reason against faith, but of finding the exact point of active collaboration between the two orders, distinct but not separate, both present in concrete spiritual life, which is more than reason in the strict sense but is not without reason. Defending reason is also defending faith. Often, irrationalism, more than a true philosophical position, is a subjective passionate state or an exacerbated polemical stance.