If rationality is right, I should also be wrong

I've long sought to be rational, but I've recently found that I also want to be irrational. Rationality has its benefits — you get to know the truest possible nature of reality, you get to be right about stuff — but it seems to take you only so far. And, yeah, I know what you're thinking: "Woah, slow your roll, new ager." But hear me out. I'd agree that rationality is infinitely good at accomplishing what rationality can accomplish, which I suppose is a tautology. But the more I consider irrationality, the more it, too, seems to offer.

When I think about people I admire, whose lives and careers I respect like whoa — and I think about them a lot — I face the unavoidable conclusion that almost all of them are, in some respect, irrational. Worse, the very actions I admire them for taking are irrational. I thought rationality was pretty sweet until I realized that all my heroes, and many of my friends' as well, got famous by being irrational.

It isn't rational to pull a steamship over a hill in the forbidding Peruvian jungle. It isn't rational to write hyper-erudite live theater in the 21st century — or, for that matter, the 20th. It isn't rational to make albums out of just overlapping loops of stuff. It isn't rational to put long-form, black-backgrounded conversation on television. It isn't rational to write a 1079-page novel, 100 of whose pages are footnotes. It isn't rational to travel around the world doing art happenings. It isn't rational to start computer companies in a recession. It isn't rational to simultaneously act, direct, paint, write poetry and host comedy shows. It isn't rational to write poems in DNA. It isn't rational to write insane novels about obese survivalists and men living in cardboard boxes. It isn't rational to simply up and relocate to Japan in 1963. It isn't rational to secretly run a wire between the Twin Towers and walk across it. It isn't rational to walk away from internet tip culture when it's paying you handsomely. It isn't rational to spend six years and pretty much all the little money you have on a surreal 16mm black and white nightmare.

Rationality has done a lot for me. But clearly, if I'm going to take it to the next level, I have to be irrational.

Comments

[JT]

Seems like a rational plan.

[Sean]

You might be working with a conception of rationality that's a bit too focused on the individual. Social notions of rationality seem quite comfortable with letting a thousand Herzogian flowers bloom.

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[Chris]

The examples you provide are almost entirely art, or the situations of art. I'd argue that rationality and art make about as much sense together as editing and dancing. In large part, art is about exploring relations in ways that no one has ever done before. The friend of art is random shuffle and experimentation, not rationality. So I think you're drawing a bit of a false dichotomy. It's just not a mode where rationality applies in any sensible way.

Now rationality turns out to be quite useful for most other modes, be it the basics of checking a bus schedule to the more complicated applications of math.

But you're really just making a statement that you prefer an artistic mode to a rational mode. That's fine. Just don't spend excessive amounts of time in either. Turning rationality completely off tends to make life rather unpleasant, in my estimation, since you need a certain amount of cause-and-effect reasoning to save money for material comfort and preserve health. But that certainly doesn't stop some from making life fully about art, and forgetting to pay bills or brush their teeth. On the other hand, I would find a life of complete rationality rather flat.

[Health News]

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[dorm furniture]

Rationality requires a belief in some degree of objectivity, a concept I find disquietingly fluid. Thanks for your thoughts.

[Wilmayxi042]

Earlier this week I was watching the news. In LA a high school student got a prank text from an unknown number. The text said that it was from god and it told the student to kill 3 people. The student killed 1 of the three and got close to killing the others. This shows some people will kill in gods name even without any proof the order came from god

[essays]

I think and it's a proven fact that being rational is a must for every situation you are engage in. BUT... You can't deny also that sometimes the situation you are into in can lead you being an irrational too. BOTTOM LINE: It's still a case to case basis, anyway.