Featured in The Map Is Indestructible by O.G. Rose
Coda V
Considering Further that “The True Isn’t the Rational”
We can be correct relative to premises that are false, seeing as rationality is relative to a worldview (truth) that is “nonrationally” (not irrationally) obtained to make rationality possible. Is it rationality we use before we are rational about it? Rationality would have us think so, and so we can end up entrapped, unable to see over the eyes through which we see. It ultimately seems rational to overestimate the effectiveness of thought, for it seems to make rationality more rational. On this point, society seems almost designed to make us overestimate the effectiveness of mere thought, for society is designed with thought, and what is designed by thought is that which will naturally make thought more rational (and keep in mind that thought is what makes rationality possible, versus simply luck that isn’t even thought of as “luck”). We might be socially primed into the mistake of “autonomous rationality,” but so we are (also) primed by rationality itself: the limits of rationality are itself, and hence rationality strikes itself as limitless, always translating what it “bumps against” into rational terms (rightly or wrongly). A mistake of the Enlightenment may have been conflating “the true” and “the rational,” and perhaps that is the mistake, the seeds for which are found in rationality itself.
I
The true is against which the rational is organized and achieves definition as itself. Rationality is more a means than an end, and its end is actuality, but what constitutes actuality depends — all while if anything seems like it shouldn’t be contingent or pluralistic, it’s truth (perhaps history repeats because it is rational?). Hence, by the very “experience of rationality” itself, we can be primed to think that those who don’t think like us either mustn’t listen, think, be good, and/or miss the best premises. Or we must think we’re wrong, but we must still at least think we’re right about thinking we’re wrong…
To highlight the indivisible relationship between “truth” and “rationality,” it could be said that every truth and its corresponding rationality composes “a rational set” (of many). In one set (say Set A), “wants” might be a valid variable by which to orientate rationality (“I want ice cream; therefore, it is rational to go buy it”); in another, “wants” might be considered a non-variable and too subjective (Set B). In another set, “emotional intelligence” might be considered a variable that rationality should take into account (Set C); in another, “beauty” might be considered valuable but unintelligible (Set D). Which set is the most rational? A, B, C, or D? Why? Keep in mind that there are potentially infinite sets, one in which both “wants” and “beauty” are considered variables of rationality, one in which neither are considered, another in which both variables are present but “beauty” considered more important than “wants” — new sets can arise based on the order in which variables are stressed — and so on.
If I decide to live according to Set A, am I more rational than the person who lives according to Set B? How do I determine this, one way or the other? Whatever way I conclude such, the process will arguably be a new set itself (say Set Aa). If I use Aa to choose A over B, by what structure of logic did I decide to use Aa and not Ab, Ac, Ad, etc.? It would seem a new set would be created Aaa, then Aaaa, then Aaaaa — ad infinitum. In other words, it would seem I would need rationality to determine which “set of rationality” to ascribe to, the act itself of which would generate another “set of rationality,” and so on. To avoid this regression, it would seem I would have to use something other than rationality, but what else could I use that itself I wouldn’t decide to use thanks to rationality (which leads to another ad infinitum problem)? Perhaps nonrationality…? But how do I even think about that? Can I? Perhaps not — perhaps there is only “surprise.”
Besides, who sits down one day and “decides” to live according to Set A as opposed to Set B, C, D, etc. (which seems impossible unless someone knows all possible sets)? It would seem rather we just “find ourselves living” according to Set Q versus Set Y (“thrown” into it, to allude to Heidegger), and only retrospectively do we then convince ourselves that we “chose” A as opposed to B, especially when faced with social pressures to act like we have reasons to live like we do. The problem we face before “sets of rationality” seems to be a problem we all overlook. Rationality is not what we think: there seems to be a field of battle where rationality could be at war with itself. If rationality through “totalization” and avoidance has figured out a way to avoid this battle, are we better for it? Or are we instead only less prepared for our present moment, when it has turned out that this battle could not be avoided forever?
II
“Being true” and “being rational” are distinct, as are “correspondence” and “coherence,” and because of this distinction we can spend our whole lives rational and coherent and yet still live a falsity. What is to be done? Can we ever be free of merely moving around versions of coherence? Perhaps we could use our maps precisely trying to reach the point where they break, as aligns with what Javier Rivera noted in his point that signifiers are at their best when we use them so that they can fail and break. We need to identify with Christianity to find the best point at which it fails, with Capitalism, String Theory, etc. to do the same. But even if that were true, we are at risk, for the moment we think that the “true idea,” it is now vulnerable to being incorporated into our ideology in a way that helps convince us we are “impersonally following” the idea while “just happening” to do it in a way that helps preserve our map: for example, we voice the idea to help convince ourselves we do it when we don’t, or say it to get others to make their signifiers we disagree with fail, and so on. To even say, “the map isn’t the territory,” is instantly then looped into the map (pleasurably, for understanding is pleasurable, we learn from C.S. Pierce); to say, “I don’t have freedom,” feels like agency; to say, “Capitalism is a failure,” feels like a mission statement.
Everything we say and do that acknowledges the shortcomings of maps can be incorporated into maps, and to assure otherwise seems like it would require an ever-present human element to assess the “qualitative difference” between the “quantitatively identical” statements “the map is indestructible” (not map-absorbed) and “the map is indestructible” (map-absorbed). An emphasis on “quality” seems important, as Leibniz would agree with, but how do we determine quality without thinking about it and so quilting it into our coherence? Must we diligently “remember” the precise moment of encounter, surprise, and “break” in which the quality was originally felt (a “clearing” like Heidegger sought to get at Being, the background of (our) intelligibility itself)? Is there a way in which “memory” can be distinct from “rationality” as a means to “keep in mind” the unique quality that suggests a(n) (essential) human presence and “space between/outside” maps? Is this why “memory” was such an emphasis in classical thought, and why an age of information technology that threatens memory could be dangerous, even though writing and the internet could at the same time make possible a profound and powerful “creative forgetting” (as discussed by Dr. Loncar at Theory Underground)? Is the fullness of thought in creativity only possible in the context of a threat to the memory thought requires for its fullness? But what precise “memory of quality” is so important for us not to forget? An encounter? Beauty? Possible delusion?
III
The negentropy and “useable energy” of a map is thanks to it not being the territory, which suggests that constraints generate order and that we can find “usable energy” precisely where we’re at risk of being ideologically trapped. Also, without a territory, a map would lack authority and “practical proof” it was indeed an effective map, and yet if correspondence was impossible, from where do we derive this sense of authority and justification? (“A sense of the qualitative?”) The more our map seems like the territory, the more we can feel like we have agency and enablement in our map, and yet maps can’t be territories, and so our sense of agency must always be negotiated: we must be “coming up short” or we’ve lost our mind. Is madness a gift of agency? Is freedom found in losing control? (In the surprise? The encounter? The work of “faithful presence”?) Perhaps a form of it, but a freedom which we don’t have the freedom to understand, master, or share. Is that freedom? Is madness freedom?
How can we be free if the map isn’t the territory and it not be in the spaces where the map breaks from the territory and risks madness? If conspiracies are completely wrong (as we’ll discuss), perhaps that makes them a source of greater freedom (and hence why there can be incentive to enter them)? Unless that is we aren’t free if we are random, but then freedom is found in the moments of “break” (perhaps of “inter-categorical monsters,” as Dr. John Vervaeke discusses), at least to the degree we are “prepared for” and can “correspond with” the break. Freedom is a matter of moments, and how we act in those moments changes the meaning of the time outside of those moments, as either extensions and manifestations of our freedom or our lack of it. The opportunities in which we must determine the meaning of our lives are not evenly distributed (as Thomas Jockin has noted), but what might be more distributed are the implications of those opportunities. We are “always free” if in the moments of “break” we prove able to rise to freedom’s occasion — and can remember so acting.
IV
A world where fools defend the truth and geniuses defend lies — it’s possible, and realizing this is even possible can make thinking a mystery to us again (and a horror). Considering St. Augustine, nobody does anything that they knowingly think is irrational or false, as no one does what they think is bad (to them). Everything humans do is that which they necessarily think is rational, true, and good for them to do (“good to see happen”). If a person is trying to do something irrational, then it will be rational for that person to do the irrational: they won’t actually be attempting irrationality. This all being so, it’s possible that geniuses are led to error rationally, as fools could be led to truth rationally as well. What then is thought? What is it we do when we think? (“Position” ourselves? For what?) Does thinking help us pick a “being true” or does it only complete and defend a “being rational” (that might or might not be false)? Does thinking help us “be true” or only “be rational” (only defend ideology)?
A person experiences a “being true” not so much as a “being true” but as “the way things are,” and this can contribute to ideology preservation. We don’t readily experience what we think as “what we think,” but as “what is.” Also, those who believe rationality is bad must use logic to make this claim (though it is not wrong that rationality is incomplete, unable to ground itself). Every truth is “a self-evident truth” (“evidently true to the selves to which the truths are evident”) and truths ‘inform reason but are not its product’ but necessarily feel like such.¹ A rationality that isn’t constrained by a truth is a thought, and yet truths are not rationally grounded only rationally understood. Rationality is made meaningful by things like faith, feelings, and other threats to rationality that make rationality possible. Also, we must think of what we disagree with as “irrational,” for we wouldn’t think like we did if we thought it was “rational’. And yet other people, according to different premises, are in fact rational relative to their premises. Hence, the experience of “other views” hides us from the rationality of those views, by how we necessarily experience them as irrational (according to ourselves).² And an individual “being true” can emerge within a collective “being true,” and that “being true” can be situated in a national “being true,” and so on. And the larger “being true” will influence the formation of the individual “being true,” all orientated and justified by (a) “being rational(s)” along the way…Wheels within wheels within wheels…
So, are we stuck? If we don’t “think thinking anew,” easily. What are the consequences of a failure to rethink thinking? “Totalization,” for one (then “multiplication”), bringing us to a consideration of Benjamin Fondane.
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Notes
¹Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York, NY: Viking Compass Edition, 1969: 193.
²“The Phenomenology of Argument,” we could call it, contributes to the challenge of “living together” and ideology.
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