Four Groups

We are not all rational, some of us are of course irrational, it all depends on our attitude…

I came across a post by Stowe Boyd who was talking about something written by Suw Charman. In essence, the posts seemed to introduce a debate of people as rational or not rational.

We are not rational beings. None of us. We like to think that we are, we like to point to logic and reason as our cornerstones, but still, we are not rational. We are emotional, passionate, illogical beings, and the sooner we realise it the better.

While of course this always a good starting point, from my own perspective, I’d just like to add that in my own mind, there is a healthy split between those that, given their psychological attitude, are rational, whilst others are irrational. As an attempt to try and clarify my thinking, have a browse of these extracts I’ve taken from Jung’s Psychological Types (1921).

Rational

“The rational is the reasonable, that which accords with reason. I conceive reason as an attitude whose principle it is to conform thought, feeling, and action to objective values. Objective values are established by the everyday experience of external factors on the one hand, and of inner psychological facts on the other. Such experiences, however, could not represent objective ‘values’ if they were ‘valued as such by the subject, for that would already amount to an act of reason. The rational attitude which permits us to declare objective values as valid at all is not the work of the individual subject, but the product of human history.” (Jung, 1921, p. 458)

Irrational

“I use this term not as denoting something contrary to reason, but something beyond reason, something therefore, not grounded on reason. Elementary facts come into this category; the fact for example, that the earth has a moon, that chlorine is an element, that water reaches its greatest density at four degrees centigrade etc. Another irrational fact is chance, even though it may be possible to demonstrate a rational causation after the event. The irrational is an existential factor which, though it may be pushed further and further out of sight by an increasingly elaborate rational explanation, finally makes the explanation so complicated that it passes our powers of comprehension, the limits of rational thought being reached long before the whole of the world could be encompass by the laws of reason.” (Jung, 1921, p. 454)

Attitude

“For us, attitude is a readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way. The concept is of particular importance for the psychology of complex psychic processes because it expresses the peculiar fact that certain stimuli have too strong an effect on some occasions, and little or no effect on others. To have an attitude means to be ready for something definite, even though this something is unconscious; for having an attitude is synonymous with an a priori orientation to a definite thing, no matter whether this be represented in consciousness or not. The state of readiness, which I conceive attitude to be, consists in the presence of a certain subjective constellation, a definite Combination of psychic factors or contents, which will either determine action in this or that definite direction, or react to an external stimulus in a definite way.”(Jung, 1921, p. 415)