Jul 14, 2006 existentialism vs.rationalism: perspective on an old debate on religious truth Yesterday's post opened a pandora's box of interesting discussion regarding truth and ikkarei emunah, and the volume of comments leads me to wonder if some of you sleep with a keyboard by your pillow: ) I just wanted to step back a little and offer.
I have no grounding in philosophy, but I have just this minute been reading a few articles about existentialism. I was confused by its apparent rejection of rationalism. I understand that this arises from the belief that people make subjective and irrational choices.
But I don't see why this leads to a conflict with the concept of rationalism itself. Surely an appreciation that people are irrational does not make the world itself irrational? Is it not possible to believe in existentialism while also believing that we live in a rational world, subject to universal laws? Existentialism is mostly incompatible with Rationalism goes a little deeper than believing people make irrational choices.
It holds rather more broadly that the world itself is an irrational place, and the only meaning in the world is that which we give it. Rationalism says that people are primarily rational and derive meaning from reason, while Existentialism says that meaning is personal. Example: A grandfather dies. One grandson says he dies because his heart stopped beating. One says he dies because God willed it. One says he died because a lifetime of smoking and eating unhealthily.
One says he died because he failed to pray to the great Cthulu for mercy. Clearly, for each grandson the death carries a drastically different meaning. Existentialists say that each grandson is just applying his own meaning to a random, absurd act of the world.
In fact, say that to try to constrict meaning to some set of rational rules the world must follow prevents finding meaning in freedom. This is pretty much in direct contradiction to, which would claim that most people should rationally derive the true meaning of an event given the undeniably true structure that defines the world. Basically, there was a reason of death that fits into a larger structure, and most people should be able to act understanding this structure.
Existentialism does not deny all laws Just because Existentialism denies that there is a grander meaning to the whole world, it doesn't deny that some things and laws are universal and true. This is, and this is where it starts to get weird.
Existentialists acknolwedge that some things are true, and that truths carry limitations. If you do not have legs, that is pretty much an undeniable fact. And the limitation of not being able to walk on the beach is a pretty strict one. Nobody denies that.
What they do contest is that facticity doesn't have to follow reason, or remain constant. With enough science, or prayer, you may one day in the future grow legs and walk again. The facticity has changed. The important thing is that there is not necessarily a pattern to it. The value one places on facticity is purely free. You do not have legs: this is a fact. What this means: is entirely up to you.
It's not so much that rationalism would be one option among many to choose how to assign meaning, it's that a rationalist would try to stick to one model or method that was 'true' and not think of herself as giving meaning to the world, but rather spend their time and efforts looking for meaning already in the world. Existentialists would indeed see this as 'inauthentic', and also inherently limiting and likely to cause angst and despair when inevitably parts of the model fail to give meaning. – Jul 21 '15 at 15:30. Existentialism and rationalism are basically different orientations towards the world.
Existentialism is among a wide family of philosophical approaches that might loosely be called irrationalist because of a general disbelief in the whole idea that the world can be fully conceptualized in a way that makes consistent objective sense. Existentialism in particular emphasizes subjectivity, and individual experience and personal choice. In principle, one could potentially take your middle road, and take an existentialist approach to human nature, and a rationalist approach to the universe. You would in that case, however (at least to my knowledge) be an innovator.
In general it seems that thinkers who believe the universe is rational have advocated for rationalizing human nature, while those who gravitate to existentialism in the human realm have viewed that as decisive for the universe as well.
Challenges to epistemological rationalism At first glance the claim of that knowledge must come from sense experience seems obvious: How else could one hope to make contact with the world around one? Consequently, rationalism has been sharply challenged—in the 19th century by the empiricism of (1806–73) and in the 20th by that of the, among other movements. Mill argued that all a priori certainties are illusory: Why do people believe, for example, that two straight lines cannot enclose a space? Is it because they see it as logically necessary? No, it is because they have experienced so long and so unbroken a row of instances of it—a new one whenever they see the corner of a table or the bordering rays of a light beam—that they have formed the habit of thinking in this way and are now unable to break it.
A priori propositions, Mill claimed, are merely statements of very high generality. This theory has now been abandoned by most empiricists themselves. Its that such statements as “2 + 2 = 4” are only probably true and may have exceptions has proved quite unconvincing.
The rationalist’s rejoinder is that one cannot, no matter how hard one tries, conceive 2 + 2 as making 5, for its equaling 4 is necessary. But is also universal. Neither of these two characteristics can be accounted for by sense experience. That a crow is black can be perceived, but not that it must be black or that crows will always be black; no run of perceptions, however long, could assure us of such truths. On the other hand, a priori truths can be seen with certainty—that if a figure, for instance, is a plane triangle within a, its angles must and always will equal two right angles. One of the most challenges to rationalism came in the 20th century from such logical positivists as the Oxford empiricist (1910–89) and (1891–1970), who had been a central figure in the, where this movement first arose.
Unlike Mill, they accepted a priori knowledge as certain; but they laid down a new challenge—the denial of its philosophical importance. A priori propositions, they said, are (1) linguistic, (2) conventional, and (3): (1) They are statements primarily of how one proposes to use words; if one says that “a straight line is the shortest line between two points,” this merely reports one’s definition of “straight” and declares one’s purpose to use it only of the shortest. (2) Being a definition, such a statement expresses a convention to which there are alternatives; it may be defined in terms of the paths of light rays if one chooses. (3) The statement is in that it merely repeats in its a part or the whole of the subject term and hence tells nothing new; it is not a statement about nature but about meanings only. And since rationalistic systems depend throughout upon statements of this kind, their importance is illusory. Ayer, late 1980s. Geoff A Howard/Alamy To this clear challenge some leading rationalists have replied as follows: (1) positivists have confused with verbal definition.
A verbal definition does indeed state what a word means; but a real definition states what an object is, and the thought of a straight line is the thought of an object, not of words. (2) The positivists have confused conventions in thought with conventions in language.
One is free to vary the language in which a proposition is expressed but not the proposition itself. Start with the concept of a straight line, and there is no to accepting it as the shortest. (3) Some a priori statements are admittedly analytic, but many are not. In “whatever is coloured is extended,” colour and extension are two different concepts of which the first entails the second but is not identical with it in whole or part. Contemporary rationalists therefore hold that the a priori has emerged victorious from the empiricists’ efforts to discredit such knowledge and the positivists’ attempts to trivialize it.