Being Rational Versus Being Reasonable

Rationality is what keeps us sane in the messiness of life. Being able to stay rational through a difficult time, or just for as long as a simple argument, is a sort of safety vest we can wear to not drown in our fears and anxieties.

Yet, despite its appearance, rationality brings with it two big problems:

1. Rarely do we know what rationality is.
2. Rationality can become a cage for insanity.

I often noticed in my office how rationality ends up being associated with the voice of those who are more assertive, bossy, or even bullying in a conversation. Those who are emotionally wounded are considered irrational because their answers consist of emotional reactions, such as tears or broken sentences.

For this reason, let’s examine these two points more closely to see if we can find a healthier alternative to rationality.

The habit of being rational

In this short reflection, I will play the devil’s advocate in considering the shadows of rationality. In philosophy, rationality seems to be a self-evident truth with which we come in contact while exploring a certain topic or observing a given aspect of reality.

This means that per se rationality is a procedural activity and not necessarily a quality that belongs to one interlocutor. It might happen that in a conversation between two individuals, both the "emotional" and the "rational" can arrive at rational conclusions even if the procedure to get there was not necessarily logically articulated.

We tend to associate rationality with a quality belonging to someone—we would say "that person is rational" or "I consider myself a rational person" because rationality points to the procedural way of thinking that as Dewey explained is connected to habits (How We Think, 1910). As Dewey noticed, thinking is that process in which we fill the gaps and make present what is in front of us but does not have words yet. To think, we need to leverage habits; that is, we need to use what we already know and associate it with what we do not know yet. In doing so, habits are our necessary allies to help us figure out something that is not understandable to us.

For this reason, it happens that rationality becomes the quality of someone more than the property of what we observe and try to explain. Those who habitually think through a certain process and are used to winning more arguments become, with time, the rational ones. They are those who understood the process and what habits to leverage to get there.

This does not mean that they are the unique holders of rationality—maybe even using the category rationality and irrationality on people is not so farsighted. I believe that rationality is more the character of what we try to grasp rather than the persistent quality of an individual that either makes or does not make sense.

Three forms of rationality

James—another pragmatist philosopher—defines at least three forms of rationality: absolutist, structural, and calculative. Believing that it is possible to achieve an absolutely rational decision or believing that there is a rational structure that underlies the universe is, according to James, irrational and a counterproductive simplification of facts:

"Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say under such circumstances, 'Do not decide, but leave the question open' is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth." (William James, "The Will to Believe," in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York, 1979), p. 11)

Rationality for James seems to be a calculation or a procedure that we set in motion because we believe it is fit to achieve something:

" ... to develop a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fit to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all of our thought distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice" (William James, "Pragmatism," as published in a recent collection, William: Writings 1902-1910 (The Library of America, 1987), p. 506)

Being rational in an argument versus being reasonable

Hence, being rational in an argument does not mean that you need to be good at articulating your thoughts or able to make more sense than others. If things were that simple, people who do not master the language or have problems expressing their ideas would be always wrong and irrational. Being rational means being reasonable, that is, being able to use your reason in a way that fits the process you are undertaking at that moment.

Let’s use the example of a partnership where the husband tends to react to an argument with tears while the wife tends to react with detached and well-organized sentences. Common sense would say that the wife is the rational one in the couple because she can still reason. It is true that she can reason but her way of reasoning is not "reasonable" because she is not capable—like her husband—to find a language that is appropriate for the conversation they are having.

They both probably need to make little changes in their attitudes so they can encounter each other in the middle and devise reasoning that is a better fit for the argument they are having. She might have to understand how her husband is feeling and he might need to make an effort to express in words what his emotions are.

Being rational can be as unreasonable as much as being emotional.

The cage of rationality

In his beautiful book, Reason and Existenz, the existential philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers warns us about the risks of rationality and its impulsive nature.

Rationality often points to a heavily ethically charged way of making sense of the world that puts us in front of dichotomies that do not help our spirit.

To give an example, a woman might think that it is rational to become at peace with the idea that either she can have her career or her family; trying to get both is irrational. Or a person who grew up in a hostile environment might develop the rational dichotomy according to which people who are nice to her are often trying to fool her because there are no gratuitously kind people in life.

These are just a few worldviews that underlie the way we think of life. According to Jaspers, these dichotomies arise from moments in which we lived through case limits in our lives and we had to form an idea about the world that makes sense for us. With time, this habitual idea becomes the rational framework with which we used to explain events occurring in life.

Yet, as we can easily see from these two examples, remaining faithful to these dichotomies would feed a gloomy view of life that is all but rational. Sometimes what we take for granted as rational in our mind is strongly fed by emotions and passions that we need to bring to control. The dichotomy of either/or arises exactly from our need to fall again into chaos. To use the example above, I am a woman. I don’t want to be miserable. I must choose whether I want a career or a child.

This "rational" statement might come from the sense of anguish felt when looking at the model set by the family or the cliques presented by the media. According to Jaspers, to achieve a healthy life we should be able to harmonize the dichotomy as much as possible into a fluid way of thinking.

To conclude, I would say that being reasonable more than being rational is important in life; that is, being open to the complexity of reality as it presents itself at the moment and making a choice to keep your habits as open and flexible as possible. In doing so, we need to overcome our fear of drowning in the messiness of life and losing control of what we think we know.