RATIONALITY AND IRRATIONALITY IN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

(In my book, this entry follows The Mystery Of Things, posted on this blog on January 20^th, 2011, as the first item in the eponymous mega-entry. The reference in the next paragraph is made to this fact.)

Objectively this entry comes too early in this section. But subjectively it is so closely related to the mystery of things that it is indeed inconceivable to place it anywhere in isolation from the previous one. Now, is the mystery of things a rational concept, or an irrational one?

I say that despite the allegedly clear delineation of rationality from irrationality, the actual dividing line is a hard one to draw. Let us take the perfectly “mystical” relationship between energy and mass in physics, for an example of a diffused dividing line, throwing in the even more mystical notion of the speed of light, for good measure… Could this extraordinary relationship have been any more mystical before Einstein made it rational through his celebrated formula? How many rational scientific discoveries of the past hundred years or so would have seemed totally incredible, and irrational at best, to earlier science? How many utterly irrational concepts will become scientifically rational to the scientists of the future?

This is not to say that a thousand years from now science will totally invalidate the existence of irrationality and turn even God into a rational concept. There exists a qualitatively significant divide between rationality and irrationality, and the above noted intrusion of the former into the alleged domain of the latter has been merely a quantitative re-demarcation of the border. This is where we need philosophy rather than science to tell us where enough is enough. Paradoxically, science is of little help if at all in distinguishing incorrigible irrationality from potential rationality. It is only through a purely philosophical analysis that we can access the concept of the mystical, irrational, transcendental. Where science is limited, philosophy is unlimited. It cannot invade the domain of the unknowable of course, but it can certainly posit its objective existence better than science can…

But what about mathematics, an enlightened reader may argue? Isn’t it true that mathematics can do the job I am now attributing to the authority of philosophy? To which I respond with this earthshaking proposition: mathematics is much closer to philosophy than it is to science! In fact, I can go even further to suggest that mathematics is indeed philosophy, rather than science. This statement is so important that I intend to create a separate entry about it, titled Mathematics As Philosophy, which is coming next. Meanwhile, as promised, we shall return to the subject of rationality and irrationality later in this section.