Irracionalidad. Una historia del lado oscuro de la razón (Tezontle)

by Justin E.H. Smith

Irracionalidad es un relato ambicioso y cautivante que echa luz sobre la sinrazón en un momento en que el mundo parece haberse vuelto loco. En esta historia de la irracionalidad de la Antigüedad a nuestros días, desde el asesinato de Hípaso de Metaponto en el siglo V a. C. por revelar el secreto de los números irracionales hasta el modo en que las fuerzas de la agresión y el caos han cooptado Internet, Justin E. H. Smith sostiene que la irracionalidad constituye la mayor parte de la vida humana. Desafiando el pensamiento convencional sobre temas como la lógica, los sueños, el arte, la ciencia y la pseudociencia, la Ilustración, los chistes y las mentiras, y la muerte, demuestra que el triunfo de la razón es siempre transitorio y reversible. En un ciclo sin fin, lo racional da origen a lo irracional y viceversa, por lo que todo esfuerzo por establecer las cosas en orden de manera permanente tarde o temprano terminará en una explosión de insensatez. Por eso, es irracional intentar eliminar la se trata de una característica ineludible de la vida.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Psychology, Science, Politics, Logic

Kindle Edition

First published April 2, 2019

About the author

Justin Erik Halldór Smith is professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris. In 2019-20, he was the John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, this was a good book but not exactly perfect. I do think this is an important book, though you might never guess that based on the number of reviews so far. When I first saw it for sale I knew I had to get it because it’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time that so many people claim to be so terribly rational and yet are clearly not. Human beings are not rational creatures and never have been. We have our moments, but they tend to be brief. Reason has taken us a long way, but only because a little goes a long way.

So here we’re taken on a journey through history and current events to explore how some of our most cherished ideas about rationality, such as how the Enlightenment brought it into sharp focus and bequeathed its legacy to the modern world is far from the whole story. Irrationality is baked into everything we do and is always ready to push back when reason threatens to take over. When things get difficult, we tend to trust our gut even when we shouldn’t.

This book certainly is as ambitious as it claims to be in the synopsis. It covers a lot of ground, maybe too much for its length. Some of the chapters could be entire books on their own. It contains a lot of references to philosophers and thinkers through the ages; some that I’ve heard of and some that I’ve barely heard of, if at all. The author seems to take for granted that the reader knows who all these people are. I’ve always fancied myself as having a pretty decent vocabulary, but if you’re no smarter than I am and you want to get as much as you can out of this book, keep a dictionary handy. I felt rather dumb sometimes, though I did get the gist of what he was saying.

There were moments when this book seems to meander and I was left wondering what any of this stuff has to do with his point about us being irrational. Maybe if I was smarter or better educated I would get it, but I thought he could’ve been clearer in places. Still, if you can get past that, it is a fascinating journey and I often found myself not caring if he ever got to the point because I was learning lots of interesting things.

Still, in the end, the point becomes more or less clear. We have always been irrational and we probably always will be, so we might as well reconcile ourselves to that fact, especially since we’re living in a time when this it could come back to bite us. The revolution that is the Internet, coupled with our irrational human nature, threatens to bring democracy and possibly civilization itself crashing down if we don’t learn to make better use of the faculties we have.

The author doesn’t seem to offer any solutions to the problem of a world gone mad, but the implications are clear. Self-awareness is important. We may not be as rational as we thought we were but we are capable of reason. We just need to make better, more strategic use of a few teaspoons of it that we have.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no easy way to digest the madness that is currently transpiring today. This book, or more properly I should say, series of essays since each chapter reads as if it was an independent essay on irrationality loosely tied together by various themes is the author’s process for coping with the madness outside of himself and also within himself (the epilogue attest to that).

There is no doubt philosophy and its foundations are relevant for today and for understanding the disaster that is Donald Trump (the author doesn’t hold back when it comes to the ultimate exemplar of irrationality and those who fall into his cultist nonsense). This author knows how to connect how very smart philosophers from the past thought about thinking about thinking and in the end how rationality will always decay by its own immanent critique of itself.

He starts his story by telling the reader that Jordan Peterson claims to be an heir of the enlightenment, and how Steven Pinker could write a book with the word ‘Enlightenment’ in the title but have no appreciation whatsoever what it meant (I truly despised that book, and that was one of the myriad reasons I reacted so strongly against it when I read it). He’ll invoke Adorno and Horkheimer (authors of ‘Dialectics of Enlightenment’) to show how they (Peterson and Pinker) are not heirs of the enlightenment but only pretenders. Moreover, and this is only my opinion, after I had read ‘Dialectics of Enlightenment’ which is antithetical to the principals of the enlightenment and is one of the founding documents of the Frankfurt School (neo-cons), I felt the bilge of Peterson within that book, and Pinker’s privileged non-identity identity is the only identity that is not an identity nonsense. Regardless, of my feelings, this author does a good job of putting swift nonsense to Peterson claiming to be an heir to any kind of rationality except for irrationality, and to Pinker knowing beyond a tilde about the enlightenment.

A lot of the themes the author had did not really connect with me. That’s okay. I read to get a different perspective. Sometimes he sounded a lot like the old man across the street who didn’t like the new fangled device called the internet which is probably made up of inter-tubes and what not. The author’s right: hate and mimes (he must have used that word a dozen times) take our conversation down to the level of Trump sounding smart in 144 letters or less and therefore exciting the gullible enablers of irrationality. But, I think it’s not the internet that created the hate, the crazy and the irrational, nor was it Trump that created it, the hate has always been there and they feed off of each other’s irrationality. Logic, reason and understanding are hard. Hate is easy. Irrationality needs feelings to feed it, intuition to grasp it, and belief without evidence in order to enable it. Ignorance can only be defeated by knowledge and the internet is the world’s gateway for learning.

They say ‘love is all there is’. Bertrand Russell will say ‘love without knowledge is dangerous’ since, for example, during the Bubonic plague having everyone pray together in a church was based on love and lack of the knowledge of the danger of bringing people together in close quarters where a flea could feast easier and that made love without knowledge foolhardy. The author points out that Trump has neither love nor knowledge giving us the worst of all possible scenarios. (I’ll even say it’s impossible for a ‘narcissist’ such as Trump to be capable of love since a narcissist is not capable of seeing the other as a human being because they don’t recognize themselves as a human being because their first order desires are all they have. They never reflect on what their desires about their desires are, they just act without reflection).


This book overall does not shy away from bringing up thinkers from either the recent past or the far away past, and will tell you why they are still relevant today. In the end as the book ‘Enigma of Reason’ makes clear and for which this author favorably cites and for which he mentions in detail that book will say that Reason is a label that we attach for our reasons in order to justify what we have already done or what we plan to do and that is why we think we are rational (the essence of being human according to Aristotle) while all along we can actually be acting irrationally. As Kierkegaard said and who is mentioned frequently in this book, ‘irony is jealous of authenticity’, that is to say, we live in a paradox and we need to find our own meaning for ourselves the best way that we can in spite of the contradictions that ensnarl us.

[Wim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a wonderful and humane book. I enjoyed it up to the last sentence

It’s central thesis is: irrationality is as potentially harmful as it is humanly ineradicable, and that efforts to eradicate it are themselves supremely irrational—

The book illustrates irrationalities in all type of situations and maintains how difficult and not always needed to remain rational

For me it was also a deeply philosophical, moral and human book. No technical terms, no big theories but focus what makes us fragile and for which we should feel humility and gratitude

[Joseph · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately this book could have used a more narrow survey of how irrational we are in all aspects of our lives since history is so rich with examples. The risk of having a philosopher provide a guided tour through our individual & collective irrationality is using an academic approach that focuses exclusively on logic as a fundamental tool to propel the narrative. This would engender mass defection from a general audience and gratefully Smith doesn't. Although there are a lot of philosophers referenced, it’s not densely written, and thankfully there is not a lot of academic jargon. The problem is, with no limits to enforce a structured narrative, the perspective is unfocused as it ranges throughout history without a clear authorial vision. Here is an example found on page 186:
“The mass slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 was, surely, an outburst of irrationality;
and irrational, too, is the everyday functioning of bureaucracy, such as the notorious DMV, that
allows its agents to exercise their gentle sadism behind the safe cover of rules, and of the way
things are done and long have been done.”

Within the same paragraph the author also references the Second Amendment, free speech activists and the Enlightenment. Let’s ignore (although it’s hard), the profound insensitivity of using the genocide of a population in the same sentence as the bureaucratic inanities of a government office. Waiting in line and following rules is of a lesser degree of irrationality than systematically erasing a population of people. Although the rest of the book is not as egregious in its examples, it’s a mess of unfocused observations that doesn’t really lead to a profound examination and understanding of how irrational we are. A good portion of the contemporary references have more of a political analysis behind them rather than examining how cultural, neuroscience, behavioral economics may explain our irrationality, which might help us to better think about how biases contribute to irrational behaviors and hence improve our understanding and give us a potential approach to not only reduce our individual irrationality but help create structures that minimize the consequences of large scale, group thinking that can perpetuate mistaken beliefs that lead to harmful actions. It therefore is disappointing to see a quite learned, occasionally humorous, and opinionated author miss the mark in trying to walk us through such an important topic.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an easy listen. It's very dense and academic and the thesis wanders all over the place and it's hard to keep track of the main narrative. However, the premise of the book is fascinating. Basically, we praise the rationality of humans, but what makes us human is our irrationality (as we typically define such things). The end of the book veers towards the political and how both sides of the aisle have irrational beliefs. That was the weakest portion and it felt the least academic and supportable to me because it seemed to be just a rehashing of the common storylines you hear all the time.

[Rhys · Rating 2 out of 5]

Breathless and bewildering.

There were moments in this book when the author settled in on an interesting narrative, though overall it was never clear what was being said about the rational and what would be considered irrational. Or at least, it was never consistent.

As an example, we seem to bounce from a rational justification of human reason and human exceptionalism, to a critique of 'species exceptionalism' when it comes to his panning of Judith Butler. And the cost of three pages of 'Anglerfish sexual dimorphism' seems to be a 'terrible exchange rate' for simply saying that most animals are born with certain parts. For Butler to say "there is no concrete sexed body without constructed human categories to interpret it" is more understandable and, perhaps, more rational than rambling about Lamprologus callipterus.

The author dismisses postmodernism as irrational, though it seems to be a fair critique of the loss of grand narratives in the age of consumerism and neo-liberalism; he dismisses Badiou based on a lecture he remembers going to in 2015; he doesn't seem to like modern art; he sees communism as an irrational exuberance, and left-leaning bloggers as Maoist party-poopers exercising a cultural revolution of prudishness. He then shares this: "Or is it rather something that is of service only as a stereotype deployed at a great distance, either in space or in time, or perhaps as a conceit that one might use within a given culture by screening out everything that does not conform to it?" In short, as I read Irrationality, I felt that the 'dialectic of the dark side of reason' was mostly in the author's head.

This is not to say that there were not some interesting points, like: "The tables have turned, and dramatically, since the dawn of the twenty-first century. Today it is often the right that is engaged in reckless stunts, while the left, typically, urges caution and hesitation, and top-down enforcement of this moral outlook" (p.195), which begs further exploration. And Smith's criticisms of social media as a frightening fount of irrationality are well argued. And I even liked the exploration of Heidegger's authenticity of Being-towards-death.

I think the book simply tried to pack too much in. In that respect, it was Zizek without the laugh-track.

[Yupa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bastano poche pagine per capire che quella dell'irrazionalità è un mero pretesto e che il suo libro non è affatto una storia, ma semplicemente l'occasione per l'autore di divagare in lungo e in largo, avanti e indietro nei secoli e nei continenti, dalla prospettiva micro a quella macro, in maniera poco rigorosa ma piacevolmente rapsodica, per parlare sì, certo, di razionalità e irrazionalità, ma soprattutto per dire la sua su argomenti i più disparati. C'è davvero un po' di tutto in questo libro: dall'antropologia alla storia culturale, dalla filosofia (ottima e abbondante) all'attualità più stretta e spicciola, che sia la presidenza Trump (il libro è del 2019) o l'imporsi dei social media.
Ma soprattutto, c'è davvero tanta intelligenza, la capacità di fare sempre una mossa sorprendente per sparigliare le carte che pone sul tavolo, di fare un delizioso passo indietro rispetto agli oggetti osservati per cercare di guardarli e farceli vedere sempre da un'altra prospettiva, un'altra angolazione, sino ad allora impensata, forse impensabile. Ed è così che la razionalità e l'irrazionalità di tutti gli àmbiti che i libri attraversa le vediamo poggiare su basi incerte, forse, chissà, solo una questione di punti di vista più che di definizioni strette e rigorose. E, infine, nel libro c'è anche tanta chiarezza, perché se l'autore dimostra di avere un'ottima mente nell'approcciare anche gli argomenti più ostici, non si rifugia in linguaggi oscuri o ragionamenti contorti, ma anzi è sempre attento a mantenere limpida la sua scrittura, a coinvolgerci nelle conclusioni (non troppe) nei dubbî (per fortuna davvero tanti) che scaturiscono dalle sue pagine, sino alla fine.

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is easy to feel the world has gone crazy. But was it ever different? Irrationality provides a timely reflection on the cyclic nature of reason and unreason. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2020...

[Dan Graser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many thinkers and pundits these days identify themselves as rational, as if anyone would overtly identify otherwise, and seek to take up the mantle of "The Enlightenment," even though when pressed, most have little idea as to the historical meaning of that period in Western thought let alone the philosophical depth required to understand it. As such, they have notions of what it means to be rational or enlightened in a modern sense and assume no one will do their homework. This assumption is apt in our current age of digital stupidity as the more people are exposed to ideas, the more ridiculously stupid and irrational ideas they embrace as rational merely because they confirm their pre-existing notions.

This work from Smith has a very noble goal, that being to expose who often those with all of the best rational inclinations frequently engage in irrational and unenlightened practices, the two-fold result of which being either calamity for themselves and others as well as the realization that we are not rational creatures 100% of the time and the imposition of pre-fabricated rational structures on our lives will never have a uniformly positive outcome. He sums this up well at the close of the work:
"The thesis of this book - that irrationality is as potentially harmful as it is humanly ineradicable, and that efforts to eradicate it are themselves supremely irrational - is far from new. You did not need to hear it from me. It has by now been perfectly obvious for at least a few millenia. The dual case, however, against mythologizing the past, and against delusions about our ability to impose a rational order on our future, always benefits from being made afresh, as evidently what has been obvious for a few millenia nonetheless keeps slipping back into that vast category of things we know but do not know."

While there is much to enjoy here, Smith's frequent purposeless tangents make for every uneven reading that strains the attention of the reader and the cogency of his subjects past the breaking point. His chapter on the Enlightenment is very much the highlight for me as well as the discussion of the "many sides" of the Charlie Hebdo crisis. But quite simply, this would have benefited from a good deal more editing.

However, when he does levy criticism he smacks the nail firmly on the head, when describing the "puffed up" nature of our current President's manner for instance:
"St. Paul wrote in the First Letter to the Corinthians that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Trump lacks both knowledge and love, and what he is inflated with, one suspects, is something more like that miasmatic air by which the bullfrog asserts its existence in the middle of the bog."

[Joonas Suomalainen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deducting one star for "Nintendo Playstation". Unacceptable.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting and thought-provoking, but a bit too wordy. I also found some of the concepts he laid down as basis for an argument to be arguable, and not necessarily factual.

[Dave Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an easy read, but if you ask me it's an absolutely necessary read for anyone interested in the human experience. Author Justin Smith takes many common assumptions about rationality to task, with a particular focus on the West and its often blind allegiance to englightenm era rationalism.

If I could sum up the main thesis of this book in a comletely inadequate fashion, I might say this:

1. We are all irrational
2. A degree of irrationality is necessary for making sense of life in light of death
3. Alghough not limited to, because of the larger narrative that the West embodies in terms of this shift from old to new worldviews, and its notion of progress as placing themselves (ourselves) as the pinnacle of advanced society, bringing the Western narrative into focus is a necessary part of engaging the problem and limitations of reason and rationality in light of the fact that we are all irrational and irrationality being a necessary part of human function.
4. A major part of the problem with the West and the Enlightenment is that in its love of reason and rationality it ignores the problem of rationality and worse yet uses irrationality in a negative way to judge others (and other cultures and worldviews) as irrational,
5. In light of the West operating in this way, it leads to a dangerous form of irrationality that they (we) then embody ourselves while believing we are above irrationality

This failure to recognize ones own irrationality is where the danger comes from. And it is both willed for ignorance and unintentional ignorance born from the basis of our modern, Western society. This helps to explain, more specifically, how it is that America finds itself where it is today.

If I am honest, this book brought up so many trigger points for me. This reminded me of what I encountered back when I used to not hold to any notions of faith. Much of what Smith brings to light are fundamental and often irreconcilable notions about what makes life meaningful. Once you realize that we all are at our core irrational beings, and that to true freedom of the will is at least in some part an illusion we operate by simply by necessity, so many of the moral assumptions we make in the day to day about what holds value and what is important and what has given meaning becomes muddied and less than concrete.

One chapter that hit hard is the final chapter about death, which is where he brings his whole argument full circle. In truth, it is becuase of the truth of death that we then do what we do to make sense of life. And we do all sorts of things to make sense of life that are irrational, and this is something we even often know. Love by nature is an irrational concept. It is not something that makes inherent sense on a rational front. And certainly once we get past the mechanics of love, there's no real or true ideal or rule that love must follow on a moral front, only social expectations. And this holds all sorts of implications when it comes to making decisions big and small. We are far less free from social constructs than we allow ourselves to dwell on, and we work on assumptions that govern our society that are constructed precisely to allow us to live life as if we are free, something we willingly accept despite knowing the truth to the contrary.

In the chapter on death the author offers a powerful argument to demonstrate how this works, navigating the dangerous question of whether something like suicide is rational or irrational thought. There is no good or true answer to this question, which is precisely where I came to when I did not believe in God. There are in fact plenty of good and rational reasons to commit suicide, and it is precisely my willingness to give myself to the irrational that allows me to choose not to do this.

This was what plagued me once upon a time, and what was triggered with this book. When I know that everyday when I get up I have to actively choose to lie to myself to find worth and meaning in my day, how do I reconcile this? This is especially true when it came to making sense of the fact that my rejection of religion was based on the fact that it was irrational, a delusion, something that was ignorant of the facts. A part of what the author does is deconstruct this mindset so as to show that I was doing something no less rational than the religious. Thus all of this perception about the age of reason elevating us to some higher form of rationalism is a functioning lie, a delusion in its own right. It's simply not true, and by and large we know its not true.

Where the author steps outside of the thesis to make particular assertions is in suggesting that whatever irrationality is (and he takes his time in defining it according to history), and whatever rationality is, there is a real danger when we assume ourselves to be rational creatures that irrationality can be turned into something dangerous. And America is used as a case study for this which we can see and understand in real time. We can look at what happens when we pretend we are rational at the expense of the irraitonal and somehow know intuitively that what this leads to and creates is something that is not good. And we know its not good because it is at its heart dysfunctional. It keeps us from being able to necessary live as irrational beings.

I am not doing this book justice at all here, I know. The breadth of argument he unoflds from chapter to chapter is impressive and inspired. But suffice to say that it really landed for me in a big way. When he does things like dismantles the cliche of "everything in modernation", which is at its heart an irrational statement, I found myself saying YES! Or his very obviously highly charged opinions on the internet and the damage it has done to rationality and irrationality hits on some stand up and cheer and well established points, especially where it uncovers the work modern society is doing in dismantling diversity (even as it pretends to be doing the opposite). And much of what he says actually does a lot of work in recovering religion from grips of rationalism and the dark side of reason.

I would say proceed with caution in regards to the process this book represents. I read another book recently on a similar topic called Predictably Irrational, and a part of what reading these books does is expose just how predictable and controlled we are as a species. Once you are confronted with the stuff you already intuitively know, making senes of life on the other side can be a challenge. There is a reason irrationality teaches us to filter irraitonality in rationalistic terms. We need to be able to step out our door and function according to accepted assumptions about what is meaningful and what is important. Without that we would collapse. The problem is when you come face to face with the fact we lie to ourselves everday, and in the West often in the name of reason, and have to reconcile this with the choices we make, when our mind begins to expose these assumptions for what they are. That's where I came to. Faith became a part of my answer, but that might not be an acceptable journey for everyone, and thus questions like the rationalism of something like suicide can actually begin to make a lot of sense. it depends on how able you are to then step back out into the world and reenter the game.

[Michael Baranowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of reason, but I'm not convinced that it's everything its most ardent advocates claim. In Irrationality, Justin Smith takes a deep look at the limits of reason - or at least the limits of humanity's ability to rely solely on reason. It's one of those books that's not only fantastic in its own right, but that had me making note of a bunch of other books to which the author referred.

[Felipe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actualización: ya lo digerí!! En resumen: una perspectiva fresca a la irracionalidad y a la lógica. Muy interesante.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Leí este libro con saltos entre capítulos y en el tiempo, por lo que mi review viene más por el lado de lo que recuerdo y el sentimiento que me deja haberlo terminado, más que una review analizando qué tan bien logrado está el hilo conductor, ese de la irracionalidad, a lo largo de todo el libro.

Dicho lo anterior, es bueno y quizás uno de esos libros que se van a quedar en mi biblioteca el resto de mi vida, sólo porque creo que siempre encontraré una buena excusa para volver a revisar algún fragmento. Si bien el libro se trata sobre la irracionalidad (propuesta por el autor como el verdadero vehículo de la humanidad, en contraste con la premisa cartesiana del humano como ser racional que pretendió dirigir gran parte de los proyectos modernos y modernistas), adquirí nociones de muchos otros más conceptos y autores. El capítulo dedicado al humor hace una lectura sumamente interesante a partir de la filosofía que le ha dado la espalda. Igual de bien elevada es la lectura al fenómeno de la ilustración y su supuesto universalismo, útiles para comprender el surgimiento de la ideología como campo de estudio fallido, un encumbrado racional que llegó a los talones. El capítulo sobre la internet es agridulce, divertido y pertinente en un libro que trata el tema de la irracionalidad. A ratos, el autor me pareció tendencioso: es muy abierto a analizar a Trump y a criticar acertadamente su personalidad y carácter, pero cuando se trata de Obama es algo más tímido y se limita a ser neutral o elogioso (de nuevo, puedo estar pasando por alto algún que otro pasaje, pero digo esto tras revisar el índice onomástico). El primer capítulo interesado más en la historia de la lógica y su recepción en la antigüedad, igual de interesante e ilustrativo.

Lilia Mosconi hace un destacable trabajo en la traducción y notas, siendo estas últimas apropiadas para entender la intención del autor con determinados conceptos. La dosis de estas intervenciones es más que correcta, sin opacar las notas originales del autor.

Cuento con la versión impresa: el trabajo editorial está bien logrado, como es típico de la casa. Buena elección tipográfica, buena diagramación y buen tratamiento de notas. Lo menciono especialmente porque para este tipo de libros densos en información, es necesario un buen diseño que invite a leer y no intimide. Se nota el trabajo profesional, el tiempo y cariño invertidos en producir un buen producto. Hasta incluyeron un colofón.

4/5 sólo porque aún no termino de digerir el libro y no he considerado lo que plantea de forma panorámica. Puede que en unos meses más me anime y lo haga, y entonces el puntaje cambiará. En general, un muy buen libro, muy bien informado y muy bien diseñado. Recomiendo conseguirlo impreso.

[Cezar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why Trumpism makes sense from a historical (ir)rational perspective

[Mostafa Shalash · Rating 3 out of 5]

مهم مهم ولطيف جدًا ويفهمك أن أغلب وأهم الأحداث في التاريخ نتجت عن اللاعقلانية وليس العقل كما يدعي البعض
قراءتي للكتاب على الأخبار اللبنانية
https://al-akhbar.com/Kalimat/274843

[Mahima · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 … Long winded and repetitive way of defending the idea that humans are more irrational than we are rational, that modern conditions are irrational and therefore our thoughts and actions will be irrational, and our short human lives might not have too much purpose.
Simply to spend so many chapters arguing that so much of our arbitrary rules are irrational (and rightly so, I appreciate the commentary on gender and race perception, and the kind of person Donald Trump is) almost invalidates the human experience in that, yeah, they are irrational, but that’s just the kind of society we live in. We can accept that it’s irrational and honestly quite frustrating and barriers to living a happy life but after a certain point it felt as though he was almost making fun of “woke” because we’re all too woke to really argue or take a stand for anything… because we’re all going to die eventually, so anything we take a stand for won’t even be worth it in the long run because we’ll be dead… I mean, I can see the point. I think this book was well done and I was pondering on it often. But slightly fell short in its ability to present next steps in terms of changing our mental framework regarding life decisions and the concept of rationality.

I would recommend. But I would argue if our human lives are so short and our death is guaranteed, wouldn’t you want to take a stand for what you believe is right? Wouldn’t your goal to be to make the world a better place, even if it means you won’t be there to see it?

[John David · Rating 3 out of 5]

In fifth-century B.C. Greece (or so the legend goes), the philosopher Hippasus was drowned by his Pythagorean brethren for divulging a critically important secret. A key tenet of Pythagorean philosophy was that all numbers were rational (that is, could be expressed as a fraction of two integers). Hippasus was credited (rightly or wrongly) for the discovery of irrationality when he found that the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle with its legs measuring 1 had a length of the square root of two … which is certainly not a rational number. This understandably upended some of the corollaries of Pythagorean mathematical rationalism, like that the rest of the universe was just as orderly as all the numbers were. Hippasus chose to divulge this publicly and lost his life as a consequence. With this story of how our notions of rationality and irrationality are so closely tied together Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of history and the philosophy of science at the University of Paris, opens his book.

This theme – that reason and unreason chase after one another as in an infinite ouroboros – isn’t unique to the Greeks. The “Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Horkheimer and Adorno, one of the most influential pieces of philosophy to come out of World War II, describes how “Enlightenment reverts to mythology” – in other words, how thinking based on the rigorous application of reason can become sclerotic and devolve into fascism. Throughout the book each chapter focuses on a topic ranging from dreams and oneiromancy, pseudoscience, and the seething underbelly of Internet culture, Smith discusses how rationality and irrationality each appear to bring about its polar opposite.

Chapter 1 is devoted to logic, a term that sounds like it needs little clarification. But notice how innocent inquiry can quickly devolve into the rhetorically loaded questions of sophistry, as in “When did you stop beating your wife?” The line can be just as blurred in science and the millennia-old issue philosophers of science call the “demarcation problem.” Why were divination and oneiromancy once considered valid ways of arriving at the truth while they are now considered pseudoscience? How exactly does one differentiate between science and pseudoscience, anyway? We can invoke many different criteria to answer this question, like Karl Popper’s desideratum of falsifiability, but sometimes these are only narrowly applicable.

What’s more interesting is when pseudoscience self-consciously tries to take on the trappings of science, as when flat-earthers try their best (bless their hearts) to use evidence to show the earth isn’t round. Smith gets at a real nugget of truth when he suggests the patina of science serves as a cover for a more fundamental issue: that the whole idea is merely a protest against perceived “elite authorities telling us what we must believe,” and is indicative of a breakdown in public trust that results when a substantial portion of the population no longer believes in the value of expertise. Note how whenever you try to scratch the surface in conversation with a flat-earther, you quickly get to the heart of the matter when they aver the all-powerful influence of their bete noire (whether it’s Jews, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergs, or the “deep state.”) The Internet, once vaunted as the great democratizer of knowledge, is now used by social media sites that pay for the programming of complex algorithms that create echo chambers by feeding users’ opinions back to them. This balkanization of knowledge and opinion is likely one of the “logical” ends in a world that displays such thoroughgoing distrust in science and expertise.

I can appreciate the book for what it tries to do in being a broad-based consideration of the topic, but Smith casts his net far too widely. He connects the dots in several convincing ways, like when he convincingly argues for the connection between the dissolution of public trust in institutions with the rise in pseudoscience. The other chapters seem to hang there but are unincorporated into the larger argument. It’s just too discursive and lacks any overarching coherence. Smith has written another book devoted to his criticisms of the Internet called “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning” (forthcoming as of this writing, also from Princeton University Press) that presumably fleshes out some of his arguments more completely. I would love to read other standalone books where he takes a deeper dive into individual subjects. While Smith is a philosopher by training, I hope he takes a closer look at the social sciences relevant to his concerns (there is a daunting amount of research on thanatology, the psychology of conspiracy theories, et cetera), little to none of which he touched upon in this book.

On a superficial level, it makes sense to recognize the tension between reason and irrationality as something uniquely human. We can try to order, inquire, categorize, and hopefully make better sense of the world for it. On the other hand, none of these things stop us from being human and all the messiness that has, does, and always will entail. Smith’s quiet contention seems that our only recourse is to let the two live side by side, doing our best to advocate for reason responsibly (whatever that might mean) without being dogmatic about it (whatever that might mean). Put simply, Smith thinks a kind of fascism rests in rationality and irrationality while humanity, occupying an ambiguous place between the two, relentlessly transforms one into the other while rarely reflecting on the lessons they have for us.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific examination of the many ways people find to forge oddball realities for themselves—often with characteristics that aren’t at all in their best interests. His observation that in several ways Donald Trump is more like Wavy Gravy than Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan has stuck with me.

The reading is a little quiet for outdoor listening, though.

[. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Супер разочарован! На хората на които препоръчах тази книга - НЕ Я ЧЕТЕТЕ, загуба на време е.

Цялата книга беше - get to the f*** point! И накрая взе че свърши..

Авторът е философ - стерилен човек, изглежда без особен опит с истински хора и като цяло безполезен тип, който обаче вероятно се има за велик и всезнаещ.

Изумен съм от ЛИПСАТА на дълбочина на проучването му на хората които коментира, общо взето Майло, Джордън Питърсън са кажи речи неонацисти, също като и Тръмп, ама Тръмп също така е имного глупав и некомпетентен.

Фактът, че спомена измамата в Шарлетсвил, където Тръмп бил казал че нацистите са fine people - КОЕТО Е АБСОЛЮТНА ЛЪЖА, СЪТВОРЕНА ОТ МЕДИИТЕ (В интервюто буквално казва - fine people - КАЗВА - НЕ ГОВОРЯ ЗА НЕОНАЦИСТИТЕ - ТЯХ ГИ ОСЪЖДАМ ТОТАЛНО - (condemned totally)

Трябваше да ме накара да спра дотам и да затворя книгата.

Таквиа хора не могат да ви научат на нищо, защото самите те НЕ МОГАТ НИЩО. Дървени философи, мързеливи да направят един адекватен рисърч.

Колко да е трудно да попаднеш на Скот Адамс, ако ще обсъждаш ирационалността на хората свързана с Тръмп.


Боже вече ще спрра да слушам книги на хора които не разбират от икономика и които цялостно имат стерилен опит - т.е. са типове кат Сам Харис дет основното им занимание е да киснят на дивана и да "мислят".

Тръмп е до голяма степен най-успешният президент на САЩ, ако гледаш данните. И никой не го е обивнявал в расизъм ПРЕДИ ДА СЕ КАНДИДАТИРА ЗА ПРЕЗИДЕНТ. А и всеки от републиканската партия ВИНАГИ Е ОБЯВЯВАН ЗА РАСИСТ по дефолт - от левите медии тъй че не знам защо въобще това се приема на сериозно.

А като се има предвид че в резултат на действията на тръмп (основно рязане на данъци и рязане на безмислени регулации) наравно с растящата икономика - безработицата у черните е РЕКОРДНО НИСКА! Тръмп не само не е расист, а е най-доброто нещо, което се е случило на черните хора в Америка...

Но въпросния философ не би се занимавал с такива лоши неща, като данни, факти или нещо идващо от реалността.

Много по-добре е да се коментира какво бил казал еди кой си също безполезен дървен философ.

Авторът явно не разбира, въпреки че уж се е опитал да напише книга за това - макар, че все още не съм сигурен за какво беше тази книга, освен да ни демонстрира колко много е чел автора - че всички ВСИЧКИ ХОРА ДА ИДИОТИ неспособни на ВСИША ЛОГИКА, които трябва да разичтат много повече не на ЛОГИКА, МИСЛЕНЕ, РАЦИОНАЛНОСТ, а на ЕМПИРИЗЪМ - ПРОБА И ГРЕШКА.

Авторът не е разбрал, че той също като останалите, въпреки високото си вербално IQ също е ирационален идиот през 90% от времето и високото му IQ не само не може да го избави от ирационалността, а го обрича още повече, тъй като има много по-мощен компютър койото да оправдава ирационалните му простотии - да ги рационализира - както всъщност работи мозъка, до голяма степен.

Първо се взимат решения (по интуитивен механизъм) и после се измислят причините (оправданията) за пред нас и другите хора, защо сме взели тези решения.

Това нещо е ИЗЦЯЛО ЧУЖНО ЗА АВТОРА. Е ако беше прочел НЕЩО свързано с реалноста, някоя научна книга за невронауки, психология и пр., вместо КОЙ ФИЛОСОФ КАКВО БИЛ КАЗАЛ щеше да му светне интуитивната лампичка.

Или, ако също така беше комуникирал достатъчно с хора също щеше да забележи, че рационалността почти не съществува - ВКЛЮЧИТЕЛНО/ ОСОБЕНО при умните хора.

Но уви това не е случая.

2 звезди защото я прочетох... Макар и толкова да са му много...

АМан от безполезни дървени философи на тоя свят смятащи се, че именно те са НЕ ИДИОТИ, и именно те са способни на извеждане на истина чрез мислене и анализ, а не чрез емпиризъм, личен опит и проба и грешка...

Как може някой да приема този тип хора на сериозно... А те се приемат от обществото ни най-сериозно. Професор по дървена философия.

[Bry Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was more of a 2 1/2 star read, but I rounded up. At first, I was expecting a work criticising the fetishising of the concept of rationality. The author skirts around this a few times, but mostly he defends it except at the margins. Once I got past the expectation that the book was going to take on post-Enlightenment rationality, I felt there was some decent material. I was then disappointed by the politically polemic ranting about Donald Trump, an editorial conclusion that will ensure this title becomes stale quickly. It's not that I disagree with the sentiment. I just feel that Trump will become a minor footnote in the annals of US history, so why memorialise him here. Perhaps an afterword dedicated to Trump-bashing would have been a better approach.

In the closing chapters, I feel he substantially misrepresented the position of Judith Butler regarding performative gender roles, attributing to her as having defended a position of some performative nature of sexual dimorphism. I am only marginally familiar with Butler's work, but from what I understand, this is not a position she has taken.

[Joe]

I've set this aside for now. The author seems to be coming from a very narrow liberal sensibility, where the bounds of acceptability are what pass for polite conversation in professional circles. Early on he draws an equivalence between the seething mass of Trump supporters and that one time a little bird landed on Bernie Sanders's podium, which the author seems to think led supporters to imbue the campaign with an overwhelming strain of religiosity. The comparison was so absurd that I was fine with putting this one aside for now. One would think that the entry point for an analysis of irrationality as it shapes modern life would be the mage-like field of free market economics and the breed of politics it has created, but whatever.

A more compelling and comprehensive treatment of the vertiginous irrationality governing our society is James Bridle's New Dark Age. And the book Weapons of Math Destruction.

[Mark Broadhead · Rating 1 out of 5]

An apparent philosopher who can't understand Derrida, suggesting that Smith is not very rational, not a philosopher, or just an ignoramus of the highest order. Very dull book till he admitted as much, leaving me with the impression that it was worthless to continue with his platitudes, best saved by himself for his morning showers (and not repeated in print or in company unless he wants to be considered a dunce).

[Jerry Wall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Irrationality in various manifestations and its utility or disutility in our lives.
If Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are gradually chipping away at our ab ility to control our own minds, could there come a point, I ask, at which democracy no longer functions. p. 14
Very few internet users are prepared to justify, or are at all interested in justifying, their political commitments by means of reasoned arguments. p. 17 [neither or most politicians, etc.]
. . . we can no longer pretend we were living in a deliberative democracy, but we had now abandoned even the aspiration to this. p. 18
. . . [no longer] listening to well-reasoned arguments. p. 19
Logic . . . the science of reason. p. 27
Once you've allowed even the tiniest untruth into your argument, well, from there, as the song has it anything goes. p. 34
And we a plagued by rampant confirmation bias: the systematic error of noticing, preferring and selecting new information that reinforces what we already believe. p. 66
[dreams] If it means anything atall then the meaning comes only from the order we impose upon the dream after we wake. p. 98
. . . astrology presented itself as something to believe, something that genuinely helped to make sense of the world and of our place in it, rather than making iut more difficult to do so. p. 136
Flat-earth theory is a threat not primarily because if gets the physical world wrong, but rather because it misrepresents the human, social world. p. 150
. . . since you have allowed falsehood into your argument, you can say whatever you want. p. 164
This is the very definition of illiberalism: to believe that disagreeing with another person's theoretical commitments, while affirming and defending their right to exist and to hold these commitments, is insufficient. p. 220
Disability is the way of all flesh. p. 225
. . . jokes are like little morsels of condensed irrationality.p. 229
. . . humor is the highest expression of freedom and the thing most to be defended in society. p. 230
. . . gelastics (from the Greek gelos, "laughter") p. 231
Pseudologues spin so many falsehoods about their own lives that they no longer seem cognitively able to separate truth from falsehood. p. 243
. . . popular bit of folk wisdom: that we ought to "find a thing we love and let it kill us slowly." p. 273
. . . only children and stunted adults believe that life itself improves with the acquisition of sweet morsels and delightful toys. p. 275
Rather, it (globalization) was driven in no small part by a search for luxury goods: spices, silk, coffee, tobacco, sugar, and many other commodities Europeans naturally did not know they needed until they knew they existed. p. 277 !!!!!
Everything about upscale restaurants is absurd. . . . p. 281
. . . recognizing that they are going to die, and they conclude from this, rightly or wrongly, that they would do better to die for something. * * * . . . Kieslowski announced he was going to do when he retired from filmmaking, to sit in a dark room and smoke. p. * * *
. . . . every response to the specter of mortality can be criticized for its irrationality. * * *
. . . There is nothing to praise, nothing to condemn, nothing to criticize, but it is all ridiculous ; if you just think about death. p. 283
Thomas Browne Pseudodoxia epidemica of 1646 . . . the epidemic of popular false beliefs of his revolutionary age. p. 288
. . . paradox of the present age . . . totality of human learning is more accessible than even (easily accessible with a special device we carry in our pockets, nonetheless false beliefs are as epidemic as ever. p. 288
in writing this book . . . I closed my Facebook account (a plague on humanity worse than any drug). * * * true self-help is . . . thoroughly working through everything that is good, everything we love, in what we also hate and wish to be free of: all the delirium and delusion, the enthusiasms, excesses, manias, mythmaking, rhapsodies, stubbornness, and self-subversion that make human life, for good or ill, what it is. p. 289

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up in a rationalist tradition. In this way of thinking, the Greeks taught us about reason and mostly got it right. They were rediscovered in the Renaissance and taken to the next level in the Enlightenment. If you put your mind to it, any problem could be solved. That was the basic approach to everything. If a problem could not be solved through reason, it was either because we hadn't figured it out yet or because it was metaphysics, so that you might get an answer through faith or speculation, but those answers were a waste of time: they were not even wrong. The world where I grew up was barely touched by Modernism, much less by Post-Modernism. And, heck, most importantly, I was really good at being rational. I was much better at rational analysis than almost anyone I knew. It got me A's in school. It helped me to get along with people and make my way in the world. When people were irrational, it was easy to blame on ignorance or emotion. So if it worked so well for me, surely it had to be right.

I knew that there were bona fide intellectual and spiritual traditions that were non-rational or even anti-rational, but until I was well into adulthood, I dismissed them. Not worth wasting my time on. Now I see it differently.

As Mr. Smith points out, rationality turns out to be a tiny island in a vast sea of the irrational. Even in the most rational areas of human thought there are problems, from Zeno's paradoxes, to the Pythagorean distress over irrational numbers to Bertrand Russell's barber who shaves everyone who does not shave himself to Goedel's uncertainty theorem which tells us that there are true statements that cannot be proven true by any system of axioms and algorithms. When you move beyond abstract math and logic it gets even worse. So much of science does not quite work as advertised. It is incredibly useful and interesting, but imperfect and incomplete. And then of course, once you step into human society, chaos reigns, not just because it's complicated and we are all a little bit nuts, though both are true. There are also active agents of chaos, who get their power from the irrational and who thrive on it as much as I used to thrive on the rational. Oh my! Let me go back to my childhood!

The real weakness of this book is that it doesn't do enough to point us in the direction of learning how to live well in an irrational world. I understand that it does no good to try to have a reasoned discussion with an LOL Nothing Matters MAGA person. It does less good to get angry at them and rant back. Either one only plays into their hands because, after all, LOL Nothing Matters. I'm not ready to bury my head in the sand. So how do you harness the power of irrationality while not at the same time abandoning integrity and all of the good things that we have gotten from rationality? I hope that there is a way to do that, but I didn't find that answer in this book. I'll keep looking and thinking. Maybe I'll come up with a rational solution. Hope springs eternal.

[Anin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the authors attempt to move beyond an obsession with the politics of the moment. J. E. H. Smith, however, does not seem to be aware of the research on the Internet which shows most of the content is generated by a tiny number of users and most links point towards mainstream media articles. Further evidence suggests that such activity may be generated by national interests, and much of the so-called irrationality on the Internet may be generated through the clash of propaganda generated by different territorial interests. This content is then read by the majority of web users - who do not produce content themselves.

It is very similar to what existed before the Web. So the Web itself cannot be seen to be source of new thoughts and behaviours, rather it is reproducing what was already being imagined (see Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’). Fortunately, although attempts may be made to manipulate such imaginings (so they become tightly territorialised) there is also plenty of research that demonstrates that readers/audiences will always add their own interpretations taken from the thoughts generated in other realms of their lives. The possibility for generating new thought would end if we allow nationalised technologies to mediate every aspect of our lives (e.g through widespread use of AI for decision-making, the internet of things, smart cities, etc). We also have to carefully evaluate technologies that claim cosmopolitanism, as most technologies are produced and maintained in particular territories. Our communication technologies seem to be operating in a similar way as animal communications which are used to define and protect territories. If we ever want to go beyond being flocks, swarms, or packs of humans we would need to deliberately reimagine our technologies and the territories they represent.

Justin.E.H.Smith also provides a weak reading of post-modernism. He mentions several post-modernists, post-structuralists (e.g Derrida), and feminists (e.g Judith Butler) and quickly dismisses them, rather than carefully evaluating their work. Derrida realised that it is the untrained (or in the case of academics - lazy) mind that accepts what it reads. He, therefore, deliberately writes in a way that creates resistance in the reader and forces them to continually question what they are reading. I have to wonder whether Justin.E.H.Smith has taken much time to properly explore Derrida’s works, particularly those from his later, political, phase. Derrida is by no means an original thinker (he didn’t pretend to be), but he has a strong understanding of the history of thought – both the so-called rational and irrational. He understood that we are imagining space-time(s), as do many contemporary physicists and cognitive scientists.

[Lorenc · Rating 2 out of 5]

TLDR: This is a good primer on how to think about rational and irrational choices we make in our individual lives and society, but the author fails in his purpose as a guide to "history" most likely because of the political slant he tries to impart to everything.

The concept is very interesting and the author sets up a good framework for thinking about rationality and irrationality. There are some gems here and there, especially in diagnosing certain failures, e.g. the failure of the elites to lead and their total failure to understand why they fail. (By the way, if you want a better understanding of this, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell's "Intellectuals and Society".) When considering why someone might be opposed to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the author considers all opposition irrational, without any mention of the rational opposition based on the expectation and analysis that it could not achieve what it intended. (I will avoid here a long discussion of whether these opponents were (are) right or wrong, as irrelevant to the author's failure.)

The author misses the point in a lot of what he says and sometimes it is such a glaring miss that I am inclined to think that he makes choices that enable him to link everything to Trump's election, instead of serving the reader in the purpose implied by the title (A History...). He completely misunderstands Paul and misquotes the Bible, misidentifies Erasmus and thus misrepresents his (Erasmus's) ideas, and so on.

Just one obvious example to illustrate my point: I am not sure when I first read the Odyssey, but it was before 5th grade for sure. I cannot believe he can talk about Odysseus (Ulysses) both wanting to go, and not wanting to go to the Sirens' call. Even as a young reader I could tell that Odysseus does not want to go to the Sirens' call, does not want to die, but still wants to hear the song. So he finds a way to "enjoy" the song without the consequences; he decouples the song, listens but does not act, hears but does not obey. His choice is entirely rational.

In conclusion, read (or listen to) this book if you are interested in the philosophical framework, but do not expect to learn anything applicable to everyday life.

[Marcus Haugen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this one while I was trying to calm down from the coffee I just drank. I was at my brother's failing coffeeshop business trying out new coffee prototypes. I guess initially, he was trying to lean into this whole "hydration trend" everyone is all into now and adding extra water to his coffee for all the people who love to drink a whole bunch of water and hoping maybe people would even order whole big bottles of his coffee water and pay him a whole bunch. of money. The whole "drink more water" thing is so stupid to me, to be honest. Our bodies are mostly water, why are we so obsessed with getting more? What about eating a bunch more meat and bones if we barely have any of that? Or eyeballs, that makes up a tiny part of your body. Anyway these hydration-obsessed people actually revealed their hypocrisy cause they didn't like the watery coffee and said some pretty mean stuff about my brother's shop -- mostly on yelp and stuff but sometimes to his face too. Anyway, he took the feedback and so he has no more watery coffee but now he's trying out his "oops all beans" coffee which is like a paste basically and that stuff was what messed me up. This book was good.

[Terry Croyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erudite, expansive, and at times enlightening, but the intended audience can only include about 1/2% of our population. Some of the chapters, for example the one that touches on the subject of elder discrimination, are very spot on. A shame, then, that the over-arching political nature, in my opinion, stood out as incongruous with the stated intellectual premise. The politics were also repetitive and glowingly one-sided (as if one of the political poles is so much more rational), and, since the author implied that there are no educated conservatives, he is preaching (and he does get preachy) to a very small choir which, by default, already shares his views. But, I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to challenge their world view as well as their vocabulary.

[مريم القحطاني · Rating 4 out of 5]

Divination, in short, is an ancestor of computation. Both are projections of how the future might be. The latter sort of projections are based on rigorous data crunching that takes into ample consideration how the world has been up until now. The former sort also look at the world in its present state, how things have settled into the present moment—how tea leaves have arranged themselves, how the heavens have turned, whether the birds are taking sudden flight or staying put in the fields. They do so, generally, in a piecemeal and impressionistic way, and read past and present signs from one domain of nature into another, or from nature into human affairs, in a way that strikes us today as unjustified. But the shared ancestry is unmistakable. - Golden!