On Rationality

I have had a love-hate relationship with math. I didn’t care for it as a kid; I hated it for how it was imposed on me, but I loved its simplicity when I grew up. Every answer is either right or wrong. There is certainty, rationality, and beauty in math. Of course, this is only the math I had touched, and things become more complex and greyer the deeper one dives into the topic; even math is no exception to ambiguity and “we don’t know”—well, at least not yet. What I loved most was being able to put things into equations: clear systems of push and pull, cause and effect, outcomes, consequences, etc. This is not only true for math but also for any subject that involves scientific thinking and rationality. I am a creature raised on these belief systems, and I have integrated them well within myself. I like to think of myself as rational—not because that is how I am, but because I realise how irrational I can be. I understand that even my awareness of my irrationality only goes so far, but it is the process of trying to determine the rational, my loyalty to the value of rationality, that defines me as someone who is rational. Rationality is a kind of madness. To assume that my chosen path of epistemology is obviously superior, and to blatantly reject other paths simply because I do not understand them, is itself irrational. If I am being honest, I don’t really know how to exist outside the framework of rationality.

I think this is where I brush up against the limits of rationality. While I am a sucker for the elegance and charm of that which is rational, I can't help but notice that my beloved framework doesn’t explain everything. Turning my face the other way doesn’t work when these events occur from within. Profound experiences, feelings—I can deny them in other people. But in myself? Feelings, esoteric experiences, spirituality and mysticism confound me. I can’t prove them out of existence, but I can’t prove them into integration either.

Maybe everything really is just hormones and physiology. An appetite for ambiguity is helpful because complexities appear when one tries to determine the exact cause and effect. It is like tugging at a pair of tangled earphones; more effort is counterintuitive to sorting the situation. Or maybe it’s more like the weather: you can never truly model it because of entropy. These explanations are a few of the many I have come up with to try to make sense of it all. They assume that there is a problem, a situation to be ‘solved’, a system that can be modelled. I am a schizophrenic vulture circling over a carcass that exists only in my imagination. I believe I have yet again neatly placed myself in the confines of rationality. The efforts in meaning-making feel futile. Can I ever really know? Can teeth bite themselves? Can Taylor Swift experience herself in the Eras Tour?

Perhaps not…. Yet?