Irrationalism
Irrationalism is a philosophical movement that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, advocating for the exploration of knowledge beyond the confines of reason. Its proponents emphasize the significance of emotion, instinct, intuition, and willpower, aiming to uncover a deeper understanding of human experience. This movement arose as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on logic and rationality, challenging the notion of reason as the ultimate authority. Influential thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche contributed to this field, with Schopenhauer depicting the world as inherently discordant and calling for transcendent forms of perception to find meaning amid suffering. Nietzsche, on the other hand, critiqued the illusions of logic and rationality, proposing that human instincts drive behavior beneath societal constructs. Irrationalism also laid groundwork for existentialist philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre, who grappled with the incoherence of human existence. In contemporary contexts, irrationalist ideas have resurfaced within various philosophical movements and social phenomena, highlighting the ongoing relevance of emotions and subjective experiences in understanding reality.
Irrationalism
Irrationalism is a branch of Western philosophy that seeks to transcend reason by exploring the impact of emotion, instinct, intuition, and willpower in search of what its proponents believe to be a higher, more complete form of knowledge. The movement reached its height during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it is considered by academics to be a reaction against the perceived infallibility of logic that characterized the so-called age of reason in the eighteenth century. Irrationalism also grew from other nineteenth-century intellectual and artistic movements, including romanticism, the ground-breaking psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, and the pioneering work of Charles Darwin in the field of biological evolution.
Arthur Schopenhauer has been cited as a representative example of nineteenth-century irrationalism, and the influential German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche embraces some notions that can be classified as irrationalist. Irrationalism also helped inform the work of highly regarded existentialist philosophers, including Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.
Background
The Age of Reason, which dominated Western intellectual discourse during the eighteenth century, was part of a broader movement known as the Enlightenment. While the Enlightenment does not have a universally agreed-upon starting point, historians generally accept that it began during the seventeenth century with unprecedented advancements in a wide range of fields, including science, philosophy, and the sociopolitical sphere. During the Enlightenment, practically every concept that had long governed the assumptions of everyday life was questioned and interrogated through the prism of reason and rationality. The movement continued throughout the eighteenth century and ultimately proved to be a crucial transition from the religion-centered, hierarchical Middle Ages to the democratic secularism of the modern era.
The Enlightenment was, at its core, driven by reason and logic. Reason and logic came to hold ultimate authority and were vaunted as the keys to a golden age of human progress. Many leading philosophers of the era, such as Francis Bacon and René Descartes, valued reason, observation, and methodical rationality above all other systems of thought.
Yet, an undercurrent of resistance against these ideas began to form even before the Enlightenment ended around the turn of the nineteenth century. The Scottish philosopher David Hume was a prominent skeptic of empirical notions of truth, while Immanuel Kant built on Hume's ideas to mount a formidable intellectual challenge to the hegemony of reason.
The artistic and literary romanticism of the nineteenth century effectively captured the pushback against the dominance of logic and reason. An antithesis of rational thinking, romanticism celebrates the subjective, emotion-driven nature of human experience. Concurrently, Freud's novel theories of psychoanalysis and psychological development plunged the origins of the conscious human experience into murky territory. Darwin's theories of evolution, presented in his seminal 1859 work On the Origin of Species, effectively upended all previous understanding of human development. These influences steered philosophers to consider the possibility that reason and logic, which are by nature confined to an observable world governed by complex and increasingly unclear underlying forces, were not as infallible as they had seemed a century earlier.
Overview
In forwarding his interpretation of the universe as an inherently irrational place, Schopenhauer encapsulated the irrationalist worldview. Drawing on the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato as well as the earlier work of Kant, Schopenhauer reorganized the Platonic and Kantian conceptions of the universe as a place that supports order and rationality into a philosophy that effectively challenged such notions. For Schopenhauer, the world is a place filled with ceaseless discord, and as a result, the human condition is inherently pained and troubled. Schopenhauer advocates transcendent forms of perception as the key to finding meaning, fulfillment, and personal tranquility, which, for him, are the only viable ways to address the otherwise unsolvable problem of human misery. In essence, logic and reason have limits in their applicability to an illogical and irrational world.
Not usually considered an irrationalist himself, Nietzsche forwarded the idea that human experience is guided by a driving, instinctive force with origins beyond reason. Nietzsche viewed the codes of human existence that ostensibly operate on the level of logic and rationality, such as social conventions and systems of law, as illusory distractions that try but ultimately fail to conceal humankind's dark, self-interested instincts. For Nietzsche, logic and rationality are tools that human beings use to try to mask and distance themselves from these underlying drives. Nietzsche followed his ideas to their conclusion by developing a controversial set of alternative values that celebrate the pursuit and acquisition of power and champion the autonomy of the individual spirit.
Irrationalism also exposes and interrogates the inherently incomplete nature of the observable world, giving heightened value to previously discounted aspects of the human experience, such as emotion, instinct, and the power of the will. Similar concepts are also found in a related branch of ethical philosophy known as intuitionism, which seeks to synthesize things that exist outside of empirical cognition, such as subjective insights and seemingly innate concepts of right and wrong. Prominent adherents of this school of philosophy include Richard Price, Friedrich Schelling, and Henri Bergson.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, irrationalist principles found new life in the work of existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. As a philosophical system, existentialism embraces the incoherent nature of the human experience and effectively abandons efforts to try to apply sense and reason to it. Existentialists view humanity's understanding of itself as incomplete and claim that the scientific and empirical approaches of fields including biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology are only capable of providing partial answers to the questions philosophers have been grappling with since the age of classical civilization. A highly influential philosophical and cultural movement, existentialism, was a key driver of the move toward the fragmented worldviews of postmodern thinkers that continue to define the cultural and intellectual environments of the contemporary era. In the twenty-first century, new forms of irrationalism can be found in philosophical movements, including posthumanism, vitalistic new materialism, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology. Irrationalism can also be found within the context of broader social movements, such as the resurgence of religious fundamentalism in some areas, as well as skepticism regarding science, specifically climate change and vaccines.
Bibliography
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