Irrationalism

IRRATIONALISM. - A term whose meaning is not easily pinned down, given the many senses it has taken on in the history of philosophy and especially in modern and contemporary thought. In an absolute sense, it condemns itself: a pure i., or a philosophy as a "system" of the "irrational," in fact reduces itself to the "rational" systematization of the "irrational," that is, to an irrationalism rationally demonstrated! Therefore, every form of I. presupposes, at bottom, the use and the value of reason. As such, it has almost always a necessarily limited scope and aims precisely at affirming: a) that there is something (real or ideal) that is not reducible to (or that resists or surpasses) properly rational activity; b) and that consequently rational activity is not the whole of spiritual activity, but only a part of it. It is evident that, if instead such partiality of reason is excluded, every irrationalistic element ceases, inasmuch as reason comes to identify itself with spiritual activity and with the real in its entire extension, with nothing remaining foreign to it. Such, p.

(Ist. Enc. Catt.)

for example, is the panlogism of Hegel (v.) or of other forms of absolute idealism, where the irrational also ceases as "supra-rational" knowledge, that is, belonging (like 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 field of activity not reducible to reason. For example, for ancient and also modern Stoicism, the "passions" are irrational; for modern rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) sensations are not reducible to the clarity of reason; for the Enlightenment, history is the domain of the irrational, because it escapes every exhaustive systematization and does not establish necessary and universal relations between events, which remain outside calculation and predictability, in the realm of the uncertain and the obscure, etc. But these philosophies, precisely because of their rationalism, devalue the irrationalistic elements and regard them as an inferior activity, a lowest grade that must be surpassed or from which one must free oneself. To speak therefore of "residues" or of a "presence" in them of i.[irrationalism] is improper and inexact. Likewise it is erroneous to say that those philosophies are irrationalist in an absolute sense (for example, those of Bergson and in part of Blondel) which, without denying the value of rational knowledge, include the latter in a form of knowledge superior to it and more comprehensive than it (recently one has been able to speak of a Bergsonian "intellectualism" [Husson] and a Blondelian one [Dumery]); similarly, intuitionism (v.) is not to be confused with i.[irrationalism], otherwise, in this sense, even Platonic idealism would be i.[irrationalism], to cite an example, since it not only admits the original intuition of ideas, but exalts (Phaedrus, 224 a-256 b) ἔξως as μανία or delirium, superior to the "mediocrity" of reason. All these are necessary clarifications, given the equivocalness of the term i.[irrationalism] and given that, at bottom, it is not possible to reduce the whole activity of the spirit to purely rational activity in the strict sense, and given further that the real itself, in its concreteness, is not entirely transcribable in terms of pure rationality; not to mention the essence of God and of Revelation, which belong to an order that transcends that of natural reason.

It must further be noted that often reason and rationalism are devalued not as such, but insofar as they are identified with a determinate use and meaning of reason itself, that is, insofar as a limited or restricted scope is given to the terms (for example, Pascal has statements that may seem to be a total devaluation of reason, but in fact they are so only of Cartesian reason or of the 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 mind the scientific and positivist intellectualism of the second half of the last century, etc.); or else, even without going as far as devaluation or condemnation, one assumes the term reason with a precise meaning and calls irrational whatever is not reducible to it. Thus, the ancient mathematicians (for example, Euclid) consider reason (λόγος) as the "calculating" faculty, capable of reaching absolutely exact conclusions; consequently, for them, whatever escapes calculation is "irrational" (ἄλγος). In order that one may speak of i.[irrationalism], in the proper sense of the term, it is necessary not only that a form of knowledge (or a reality) be admitted that is different from or superior to or irreducible to reason taken even in its whole meaning (and not in a restricted or limited one), but also that validity be denied to reason and that it be considered contrary or opposed to another (or other) form of knowing, a true obstacle to be eliminated and, in its structure, deformed relative to the structure of reality. I.[irrationalism] in this sense is proper to contemporary (post-Hegelian) philosophy, where it has assumed a multiplicity of meanings and an extension that has no counterpart in any other epoch of the history of thought. One may even say that what has been defined as the "revolt against reason" is one of the characteristics of speculation of roughly the last century, in the course of which activism and vitalism have claimed and exalted all that is spontaneous, immediate, instinctive and, in a word, irrational in man and in the universe. To the "philosophies of reason" there have been polemically opposed (and this must be taken into account as extremist positions reacting to the extreme rationalism of-

Hegelianism, scientism, etc.) many forms of so-called "philosophies of life."

Their immediate origins are to be sought in German Romanticism (Schlegel and Novalis), in the theory of evolution and in biological doctrines. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in different respects, can be considered the two masters; later to their influence was added that of Kierkegaard. The Schopenhauerian "will," the metaphysical root of the world, is present in every being of nature as a blind and irrational principle, which wills for the sake of willing, without any purpose: it has no object, it is pure irrationality. But while Schopenhauer considers the will "unhappy," so much so that to live and to endure life is not only an evil but 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 of i.

against the rationalism of every age, Greek or Cartesian, Kantian or Hegelian. To the "concept" (for Socrates the "corrupter") and to the Idea (of Hegel), Nietzsche opposes Life, which bursts forth in antithetical directions, which dilate to infinity: in a world that has discovered itself to be infinite. The will "to power" proper to the "superman," in a certain respect, is a violent, cruel, barbaric and primitive revolt of instinctive life and of the passions in their natural state against the frigidity and the Nessus-shirt of reason. The antitheses are not composed in the synthesis (Hegel), but are made white-hot in the clash: history is not the rational unfolding of the Idea, but a process of contrasting and irrational forces.

In contemporary thought, especially German, irrationalism has fermented alarmingly: vast currents of historicism, sociology and existentialism are profoundly influenced by it. For example, the historicism of Spengler (v.), to cite a few significant positions: the author of the apocalyptic Decline of the West (Munich 1918), rests on the concept of the fatality of doctrines and of history as the purposeless manifestation of predestined symbols. "The logic of natural science, the chaining of causes and effects appears to us as superficial in the highest degree; only the logic of the organic, destiny, instinct, whose omnipotence we feel in the vicissitudes of things, demonstrates to us the depth of becoming. What matters is to give man a new vision from which another necessarily springs. Life has no purpose (op. cit., p. 152). Intelligence, for Spengler, is nothing but a late and derived activity; reason is the crystallization of vital elements (instincts, impulses, passions, values of blood or of the senses, etc.). Not different are the conclusions of some minor forms of i. (for example, that of Klages), of so-called "German neo-Romanticism" (Ziegler etc., for which reason prevents man from living spontaneous and immediate life in intimacy with nature and from making himself God), of the vitalism of the Spaniard Ortega y Gasset (b. 1885), who however does not go to these disconcerting exaggerations, even if he exalts the unforeseen, the risky, the barbaric or, as he says, "ascending life." An enemy of all rationalistic absolutes, Ortega condemns the attractions of necessary and universal truths proper to "rational man," to whom he opposes the non-intellective "organic man."

An almost religious and Pascalian sense, under the influence of pragmatism and Spanish mysticism, has the i. of Unamuno. Life is action and is absolute faith in action, of which reason is the mortal enemy. The rationalists 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, an immense, boundless, robust faith, to the point of madness, the only one that has an irresistible "redemptive power," as one reads in the Comentario. "Clumsy logic," with its deadly and tormenting "whys," poisons the will, extinguishes generosity, heroism, madness. The world, Unamuno says again in the Comentario, "is at one and the same time always what it appears to each person, and true wisdom consists in shaping it according to our will, going out of our senses 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 by the "method of passion," of faith.

Decidedly religious (Protestant) is the Kierkegaardian i., averse to "speculative philosophy" (which it identifies with the Hegelian) and to objective thought that levels existences and makes of them so many paragraphs of a "system." It is not "objective" truth that is of interest to man, but his truth: what matters, one reads in the Diary, "is to understand what I am destined for, to see what God properly 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, 1 Aug. 1835, Innsbruck 1923, p. 28). "Not reason, but faith: whoever affirms God objectively, does not believe." "Objective insecurity," incomprehensibility, the "absurd" are necessary; precisely in the absurd is expressed the passion of faith. An exaggeration of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche together is the "religious existentialism" of Shestov, always in passionate polemic against "rational evidence," daughter of sin, expression of "diabolical pride." Truth is faith and faith is subjective, it is believing in spite of everything, against everything: "The promised land does not exist for the man who knows. The promised land is found where the one who has faith has arrived, it has become a promise because one has arrived: Certum est quia impossibile" (Athènes et Jérusalem, Paris 1938, p. 456). The renunciation of reason and the despair of being able to know the truth is the state of grace of openness to faith, of which Shestov makes an anarchic exaltation, which has 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.

Contemporary science too (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 (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 correct, on the other hand, to consider Einsteinian relativity and the philosophical and scientific applications that have been made of it as irrationalistic: relativism is not i. in the proper sense, just as the recent neo-positivist or mathematical logical doctrines are not, which 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 position, practically ruinous and religiously heterodox. It is not a matter of denying reason in order to defend concrete life, but of vitalizing it within life itself, so that reason may give light to life and life may give concreteness to reason. Likewise, it is not 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 and both present in concrete spiritual life, which is more than reason in the strict sense, but is not without reason. To defend reason is also to defend faith. Often irrationalism, rather than a true and proper philosophical position, is a subjective passionate state or an exasperated polemical attitude.

Michele Federico Sciacca