Rational man. Irrational Man: A Short Guide for Communicating with Complex People
INTRODUCTION
In the 90s, in an attempt to instill market behavior in the Russians, they were urged to abandon the use of summer cottages as subsidiary plots. A simple calculation showed that it is unprofitable for the urban population to spend time and effort on the own-hand cultivation of vegetables and fruits, it is much more profitable to spend this time on additional earnings, and buy everything in a store. Suburban subsidiary farming is unprofitable in terms of pure economic calculation. But most Russians do not stop it.
Dozens of similar examples can be given, both from real life and from experimental situations. People far from always perform economically significant actions as rational egoists.
Of course, the examples given have their own unconditional logic - inside a small team it is extremely unprofitable (and psychologically unpleasant) to be a competing egoist, no one will just have to do business with you, and a summer cottage, unprofitable for 20 years in a row, can literally save your life in a situation of food shortages and a sudden economic crisis. The adoption of such decisions is influenced not only by cold egoistic calculation, but also by emotions, cultural and moral attitudes, psychological characteristics of thinking. Moreover, if the mechanisms for making the most profitable decisions are widely studied, for example, in game theory, and the psychological specificity of thinking and the role of “irrational”, emotional components in this are seriously studied by psychology, the role of people's cultural and moral attitudes in economic actions, despite the obviousness the subject of equally serious study is not to this day.
CHAPTER 1. ECONOMIC MAN AND RATIONAL BEHAVIOR
1.1 Economic person
An amazing but indisputable fact: from the time of Adam Smith to this day, in most economic theories and mathematical models, despite their extreme complexity today, the extremely primitive “human model” known as Homo acts as the person making economic decisions Economicus.
Economus has four main qualities:
1. It operates in a competitive market, which implies a minimal relationship with other economic people. "Others" are competitors.
2. An economic person is rational in terms of decision-making mechanisms. He is capable of setting a goal, its consistent achievement, calculation of costs in choosing the means of such achievement.
3. The economic person has the completeness of information about the situation in which he operates.
4. The economic person is selfish, that is, he seeks to maximize his benefits.
It is these assumptions that lead to the fact that economic behavior is regarded as an area free from all that is “human”. As if they were doing business, playing the stock exchange, working and making purchases are not the same people who are motivated by very diverse motives - here is the desire to be safe, and vanity, and excitement, and the need for love and respect, and envy, and struggle for world peace - and some kind of abstract robots. And most importantly - as if in their actions these people are not at all guided by their ideas about what is good and what is bad.
You do not need to have any special knowledge to discern the obvious "attraction" of each item. People rarely act selfishly individually. Even the most cruel and cold-blooded person divides people into friends and foes, applying completely different rules to these groups. And any action "in the interests of the group" is already different from the pure competition of all with everyone. Point 2 on the rationality of all actions is refuted by the whole history of mankind, which is full of fatal miscalculations that cost the lives of millions of people. Even the most experienced military strategists and statesmen constantly make mistakes both in setting goals and in methods of achieving them. What can we say about ordinary people or average businessmen.
The argument about the completeness of information is generally the most odious. A person almost never owns the entirety of information about what is happening around. That is why the mechanisms of our psyche and thinking do not act like a computer, but are able to work in situations of high uncertainty using the so-called heuristic strategies. Far from always correct and logical, and not guaranteeing faultlessness, they nevertheless allow a person to draw conclusions, generalize and predict where any computer would save due to insufficient source data. And if we talk about the situation of awareness in purely economic situations - whether it is an exchange game or corporate intrigues, then the opportunities for access to information by large and ordinary players are simply incomparable, and access to "insider" information is therefore a key resource in these situations.
Maximizing personal gain is also not the only common strategy, not only among people, but also in wildlife. Although we are used to using the expression “like in the jungle” as a synonym for a ruthless struggle for survival, scientists have long known many examples when altruism strategies are used for this very survival of a pack or species by specific animals. There is no need to even turn to examples among higher animals, just look at any anthill. Genetics come to more and more interesting conclusions about the nature of the "altruism genes" that are responsible for animal collaboration strategies.
1.2 Theories of economic behavior
In order to better understand where all this modern "entertaining mechanics" came from in economic science instead of a holistic view of a person, one needs to take a closer look at when the first theories of economic behavior arose. From the 18th century, the ideas of progress and enlightenment began to win the minds of Europeans. Against the background of mysticism and superstition, the ideas of the triumph of the mind and materiality of the world, which can be studied to the end with a compass, microscope and test tube, are exciting and promising. Man is a complex mechanical device that can only feel and think. The soul is “a term without content that does not contain any idea and which a sound mind can use only to vest the part of our body that thinks,” writes the philosopher and physician Julien de Lametri, who immortalized the idea of \u200b\u200b“human machine” in the same name work of 1748. It is not fashionable to be an idealist, it is fashionable to consider a person as a creature led by natural instincts, a desire for profit and pleasure, and a fear of deprivation and affliction.
Equally rational and selfish are people in the writings of most theorists of economic thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Adam Smith, autonomous individuals are driven by two natural motives: self-interested interest and a penchant for exchange. At John Stuart Mill, people are led by a desire for wealth, and at the same time an aversion to work and an unwillingness to put off until tomorrow what can be consumed today. Jeremy Bentham considered a person capable of arithmetic to maximize happiness and wrote: “Nature placed a person under the control of two sovereign rulers: suffering and joy. They indicate what we should do today, and they determine what we will do tomorrow. As the measure of truth and lies and chains of cause and effect rest at their throne. " Leon Valras saw man as a maximizer of utility based on rational behavior. In the 20th century, the theory of games grew on the basis of these ideas - a branch of mathematics that studies optimal strategies in processes where several participants are fighting to realize their interests.
It should be noted that an understanding of the limited understanding of man in the economy as a mechanistic rational subject existed in the past. Even the classic John Mill nevertheless recognized the influence of national characteristics on the economic person and wrote that in the countries of continental Europe "people are content with lesser money profits, not so dear to them in comparison with their peace and their pleasure." In the writings of the representative of the German historical school of economic theory of the 19th century B. Hildebrandt, man "as a social being, is primarily a product of civilization and history. His needs, education and attitude to material values, as well as to people, never remain the same but, geographically and historically, they are constantly changing and developing together in all the education of mankind. " Thornstein Veblen believed that people in economic actions are not driven by rational calculation at all, but by the desire to improve social status, which is far from always rational and depends on the cultural and historical context. Veblen in a sense can be considered the ancestor of the current theories of prestigious consumption in marketing.
However, supporters of the "anthropocentric economy" have always remained in the minority, and the idea that the economy is a field in which the main motive of people and organizations is to maximize their profits, regardless of what kind of people and organizations what country they are in and what worldviews they share.
1.3 Rational economic behavior
Even if one does not refute abstract theories, then at least asking them many unpleasant questions became possible with the accumulation of experimental experience in psychology. The mechanisms described in game theory are far from always realized in real life situations.
First, the rational decision-making is greatly hindered by the very structure of the human psyche. So, back in the 60s, psychologists found evidence of the surprisingly powerful influence of situations on people's actions, the effect of "flies and elephants", where the fly is a rational motive and the reasons for the act or decision, and the elephant is a momentary situation. We are all familiar with this effect. In one of Conan Doyle’s stories about Sherlock Holmes, the great detective explains to Watson why he didn’t add to the list of suspects a lady who was obviously very nervous when answering his questions — she simply had a powdery nose. The most insignificant detail, said "by the arm", the intonation of the interlocutor, a sudden change in mood can often affect a person’s behavior, outweighing all rational and long-considered arguments. Explaining their actions, people often do not analyze at all, but try to find explanations that they and others will like, and even analyzing, tend to take into account precisely those arguments that confirm their initial position, they consider events with which they personally to be more likely met.
The amount of accumulated data on such “deviations” from “normality” eventually became impossible to overlook. The fly of irrelevant errors turned into an elephant - a simple man who could not be easily explained, and in 2002 the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to economist Daniel Kahneman for showing that "human decisions naturally deviate from the standard model." Kahneman wrote that "in the decision-making process, subjects ignore the most basic principles and rules underlying the theory of rational choice." Instead of calculating their benefits, people simply follow habits and traditions, ignoring probabilistic cranes, choose reliable tits in their hands, underestimate the possibility of a negative outcome in “familiar” situations (“professional mistake”), as a rule, they are ready to take risks only in order to avoid trouble , and not for winning.
You can recall the famous stories about reckless behavior of Russian merchants. Everyone knows the stories about the shocking enlightened Europeans of cigarette smoking from cigarettes. And here is another eloquent example of "irrationality" - the legend of how the Moscow Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 named after him was built. N. A. Alekseeva (known as the "Kanatchikova Dacha"). In 1894, fundraising for construction took place on the initiative of the mayor of Moscow N.A. Alekseeva. One of the wealthy merchants told Alekseev: "Bow to my feet at all, and I will give a million to the hospital." Alekseev bowed, and the hospital was built. And how many millions are spent today in order to amuse self-esteem, and not to rationally increase capital? It seems that just all the modern marketing technologies of a consumer society with its image products and prestigious consumption disprove the existence of Homo Economus. On the contrary, “human”, playing on irrational desires and aspirations, has become a key commodity in consumer markets.
1.4 Collective Interest
It is curious that even within the framework of the formal logical theory of games, one can refute the thesis of the rationality of selfish individualism.
One of the most famous in game theory is the Prisoners Dilemma. Figuratively, its essence can be described as follows: - the police catches two criminals, A and B, for a minor offense. There is reason to believe that in reality they are gang members guilty of more serious crimes, but there is no evidence. If one prisoner testifies against another, and he remains silent, then the first is released for helping the investigation, and the second receives a maximum term of imprisonment (10 years). If both are silent, they are sentenced to a minimum term of 6 months. If both testify against each other, they receive 2 years each. Each prisoner chooses to be silent or testify against the other. However, none of them knows exactly what the other will do. In this game, if a player cares only about himself, it is always more profitable to betray, but if the players have a common interest, then it is more profitable for them to cooperate.
A successful strategy in this game was considered “eye for eye” (tit-for-tat) - do not betray the first, but then always answer the opponent the same if he betrayed - betray, if he is “friends” - “be friends”. But it turned out that this is beneficial only when everyone plays for himself. Otherwise, the cooperation strategy presented in 2004 at the 20th anniversary of the repeat dilemma competition concluded by the team of the University of Southampton from England is more successful. It is based on the interaction between the programs in order to get the maximum score for one of them. The university put up 60 programs for the championship, which recognized each other by a number of actions in the first 5-10 moves, after which they began to "play the game" - one program always collaborated and the other betrayed, which gave maximum points to the traitor. If the program understood that the opponent was not Southampton, she would continue to betray him further to minimize the opponent’s result. As a result, the programs of the University of Southampton took first three places in the competition.
Thus, formal proof was obtained that, in the presence of collective interest, an integrated strategy based on competition and cooperation, as well as the principle of separation of “friend or foe”, has advantages, that is, cooperation with “friends” and competition with “foes” , compared to purely competitive strategies.
CONCLUSION
Why do these theories have any meaning for us? Does it really matter what ideas the leaders of the era of “machines and steam” shared, and what beautiful constructions mathematicians build, describing abstract competing players? Unfortunately, theorists are guilty of launching “viruses” of supposedly simple ideas into the ordinary consciousness of people. No need to read Adam Smith to know that "business is business." However, talking about the fact that only personal good is the way to the common good, the adherents of these theories forget that super goals can be achieved only as a result of cooperation and willingness to work not only for personal gain. You can’t fly into space, study the ocean and look for a cure for cancer based on only the immediate tasks of profit. Moreover, this is even harmful, as it can lead in the long run to economic shocks and changes in established markets.
Another sad consequence of such ideas is the atomization of society. Because it is possible to compete rationally and ruthlessly only with "strangers", because even criminals do not belong to "friends" like that. The “economic man” is all the more successful, the fewer around him those whom he looks at as people, and not at abstract competitors. Therefore, clanism and nepotism flourish here - albeit in such primitive forms, but still people prefer to be with someone. A small collective or group united by common interests is a serious obstacle to the ideas of universal competition, "the war of all against all."
But it is not only a matter of limited theories of economic man. The idea of \u200b\u200bextra-morality of economic activity, taking out of the brackets everything except profit and rational calculation, is much more dangerous than it seems at first glance. Hypocrisy, deceit and small betrayals that occur daily in large corporations, because, as you know, they earn money here, and do not do charity work. "Hackwork" instead of culture. Why are you so poor if you are so smart. Accustomed to this reality, it is easy to justify everything with some abstract rules of the market, where there is no room for reflection, what is good and what is bad.
True, history knows at least one example of where to go along this road. When in 1961, Hannah Arendt arrived in Jerusalem for the trial of the main Holocaust performer Adolf Eichmann, she was struck by the ordinariness and ordinaryness of this man and his arguments, subsequently calling her book about this "Banality of Evil." Unlike theory, in life indifferent decisions - because "it’s so accepted", "it’s just work" and "we are not like that - such a life" - lead not only to abstract personal gain, but to very real troubles. And treating other people simply as a means of “winning” is the main trouble of the entire modern economy.
"People can pursue their own interests without fear that this will harm society, not only because of the restrictions prescribed by law, but also because they themselves are products of restrictions arising from morality, religion, customs and upbringing." And this is not a quote from some utopian philosopher, but the words of the founder of a market economy - Adam Smith. His followers threw out such ideas about moral and educated entrepreneurs from their theories as unnecessary. As Milton Friedman stated briefly and clearly two centuries later, the firm's sole duty to society is to maximize profits. How in real life not enlightened entrepreneurs behave, but real "economics", Russians know firsthand. Moreover, in the market they are fighting among themselves in the struggle for consumer wallets, not only competing entrepreneurs are fighting among themselves. Here is a fresh example from this series. Workers at a locomotive depot in Moscow fought with traumatic weapons with their potential rivals, who were heading to the depot to get a lower salary. As a result, four people were injured. Competition in all its glory.
These theories still tell us about their dead mechanical models, although the everyday practice of modern economics itself proves that the ideas about a person who were embarrassed and astonished at the balls of a gallant age are, to put it mildly, somewhat outdated. Isn’t it time to follow the advice of the aforementioned La Mettrie: “A sage should dare to speak the truth in the interests of a small circle of people who want and know how to think. For others who are free slaves of prejudice, it is just as impossible to comprehend the truth as frogs learn to fly”?
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Issue No. 112.
Stepan Sulakshin: Good afternoon friends! Let me congratulate you on the May holidays, on the occasion of the Great Victory, and together with you go to our new working semester. Today, as planned, we bring to the discussion, to comprehend the meaning of the term, category, the concept of "rational". This is an interesting example, because it allows you to see the classic multifunctionality of humanitarian terms, when there are semantic loads of the same word equivalent for different contexts. Vardan Ernestovich Baghdasaryan begins.
Vardan Baghdasaryan:There are various forms of cognition and thinking. There is rational thinking when a person draws some knowledge from his life experience. There is artistic thinking, figurative, largely intuitive, there is religious cognition, and finally there is rational thinking, and basically it is logical. On the rational thinking is built, in particular, the phenomenon of scientific knowledge.
Those who are engaged in age-related psychology and physiology, age-related evolution are well aware of when, at what stages, what component of human thinking needs to be developed. This is clearly effective thinking, it occurs in a person at an early age, and then thinking is already clearly figurative.
It is no coincidence that methodologists say that for certain age categories illustrative material needs to be introduced. It is effective in high school, it is well accepted for presenting material, since it correlates well with developmental psychology. And finally, abstract thinking, which must be accentuated to be introduced in high school, in higher education, when thinking is already built on logic, when schoolchildren, pupils, students are already offered schemes, models, and this component develops accentuated.
In the same way, you can look at the history of mankind, because evolution is well written before the formation of man, anthropogenesis before the formation of civilization. But after all, with the formation of civilization, with the formation of states, evolution has not stopped, it does not stop today.
But why did the West initially prevail over other cultures in geopolitical, geo-economic rivalry? And here, trying to answer this question, we come to the rational phenomenon. The rational, logical thinking with which the West came out, on the basis of which science and technology could develop, the right managerial technologies were built, and gave the West a historical advantage.
The famous French philosopher and anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl in his writings spoke of the so-called pre-logical thinking in relation to archaic communities. The thinking of modern man is basically logical. The left hemisphere of the human brain is responsible for logic, and Levy-Bruhl wrote that in modern man, the left hemisphere is more developed.
The man of archaic communities perceived the world differently. Here, intuition played a greater role, a projection onto certain mystical components, and so on. The perception of the world, of reality, was significantly different from the perception of the world by modern man. Then the evolutionary phase occurs - the development of the left hemisphere consciousness, which is not adequately described in textbooks on anthropogenesis. And just the historical breakthrough of the West, what is called the modern period, was associated with the formation of rational thinking.
If we talk about the success of the Soviet Union, then we can recall how much attention was paid to the scientific, logical component.
And when they try to say that the Soviet Union won due to something else, and that the logic of rational thinking did not play a significant role, this is fundamentally wrong, since the cult of science and science in the era of the Soviet breakthrough was very important.
Today's breakthrough made by China and India can be traced even to various school and student olympiads - the Chinese and Indians win these olympiads. But we traditionally perceive China, India and the East as a whole in some kind of intuitively mystical vein, and the significance of the rational factor is unprincipled for them today.
So, we determined that the historical success of the West, the genesis of the rise of Western civilization is associated with the rationality factor.
But now begins the period of the offensive on the rational, an attempt to disavow the very fact of the rational from various perspectives. The phenomenon of cognitive weapons is not only a phenomenon of the modern world, it has developed even earlier, and the first contrast - the rational is opposed to the spiritual. A rational person is supposedly a person who thinks in terms of economic pragmatism in the spirit of Adam Smith, and a spiritual person is something else. Hence this fundamental substitution, which was introduced.
It is clear that the rational does not contradict the spiritual. We can recall many thinkers, religious theologians who built rational systems. As a result, a substitution was formed: on the one hand, a rationalist, a bourgeois, on the other - a spiritually centered person, and the religious tradition, mysticism, was as if in such a dichotomy. The Slavophiles thought: “We do not need logic, the logocentric system in which the West is developing. Let's live on the basis of feelings, mysticism, intuition, something else. Our strength lies in faith, but not in logic. ”
And this is a fundamental substitution. It seems to be, yes, an appeal to the Russian-centric factor, but at the same time a fundamentally wrong path - the path of archaization, the rejection of that force and component, which, indeed, could play an important role in the geoeconomic and geopolitical confrontation.
The second direction, which arose in the late XIX - early XX centuries, associated primarily with the names of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, a challenge in relation to rationality - the will, the will to live. Will is contrasted as some kind of intuitive psychoenergetic principle, it is opposed to "ration". That is, if we discard the "ration", you can go to intuition.
Nietzsche wrote: "Another generation of reading people, and the capacity for creativity will end." Again, the false opposition of will and rationality. All this relied on undermining the factor that played a fundamental role.
The next attempt at undermining is Freud and the direction associated with it. Let's analyze. There is a subconscious, and logic is unimportant, “rational” does not matter. Everything is formed in the subconscious, and the conscious sphere is just a sublimation of some instincts. The logical, rational "intelligent man" is humanized and transformed into a set of analyzed complexes.
Next comes the direction of postmodernism. It is difficult to interpret otherwise than a project. One of the main figures of postmodernist discourse is Foucault. Let me remind you that his key research is the “psychiatric phenomenon”. The psychiatric client was initially perceived as something abnormal.
Today, in today's large discourse, what was considered abnormal ceases to be so, and here it is - the ongoing substitution. There is no logic, each has its own logic. The mental hospital becomes normative in the interpretation of postmodern and Foucault. Why all this, where does all this lead?
To answer this question, I will refer to the experience of the school. In fact, what is the exam system today? Thanks to this system, a person learns how to think logically, rationally. It would seem that the volume of classes that falls on schoolchildren is very large, and at the same time, since the school does not teach cause-effect relationships, it does not teach thinking in a rational way, through a large amount of unrelated knowledge this is rational, "Ratio" is undermined. As a result, a school graduate, despite the large amount of workload that falls on him, is less capable of logical, abstract, rational thinking.
Why is all this, what is it connected with, is there any kind of design in this? Indeed, the evolution of man was associated, inter alia, with the development of his intellectual and rational abilities. And now a project is being fixed - a project of dehumanizing a person in order to deprive him of a rational beginning, to repress this rational principle.
It is clear that if the rational is suppressed, and the intuitive, instinctive will prevail, it will no longer be a person in the real sense of the word, it will be a herd, and this herd will be much easier to manage. That is why the question of the rational, of the "ration" comes out, in fact, to the question of the evolution of mankind.
Vladimir Leksin: Vardan Ernestovich spoke in detail and in detail about evolution and all sorts of zigzags in the understanding of the word "rationality" and everything connected with it, but I will try to dwell on some definitive points, which is very important right now.
A few years ago, a very good Moscow publishing house published an amazing two-volume, it is called "Rationality at the Crossroads." Now this topic - the topic of the crossroads - is very actively developing in many political, cultural, philosophical works, both Western and Eastern. This topic is especially actively developing in China, and in our domestic works this crossroads becomes, as it were, the main topic of discussion, moving away from what is mind, reason, rationality, and so on. But this is important enough.
Rationalism is a philosophical and worldview attitude that all the true foundations of being, our behavior, knowledge, and ideas about the world are based only on reason. And here an amazing philosophical, political science and, at the same time, physiological definition of “mind” arises from theological studies.
In the City of God, Augustine said very clearly that religion must be freed from everything that cannot be the subject of a reasonable explanation, and this will be rational. That is, this theological rationality as a liberation from everything that excludes an explanation from the point of view of the mind is a very serious point.
In the same work, Augustine began to contrast reason with reason as the lowest level of knowledge. Reason - this is a type of mental activity that is associated with the identification and fixation of certain abstractions, that is, some initially conceptual provisions that only allow you to make complete true knowledge about the subject.
This tradition came to Kant. Kant said that his own mind is the desire to master the subject of thinking through certain rules. That is, reason operates in the system of habitual rules, ideas, and here any flight of thought, any deepest descents into the depths of the subject become impossible. And it is possible that what he called it the lower stage of the mind, the lower stage of knowledge, is very important for us. I think that we now live more in the world of reason than in the world of reason.
Kant wrote that the mind rises above the sensual, over emotions, over something random, and he tries to discover the truth, first of all, in facts. He wrote two very famous books - “Kritik der Reinen Vernunft” and “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft”. The second book is devoted to practical reason, and it is considered the most read of all Kant's books.
Kant's book on practical reason answers the most important question, and our center asks this question - what should I do? What should I do from the point of view of the main values \u200b\u200bof the modern world, bearing in mind the system of knowledge about what is good and what is bad. Here, deontology is one of the main foundations of this business. With Kant, this goes through 2-3 pages in this famous book of his. It would seem that this is the simplest thought, but for us it is now very important.
I must say that the ideas of the highest rationality of everything that happens are ideas mainly of the XVII-XVIII centuries. Almost all of them were built on the works of famous philosophers Descartes, Malbranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, who were then considered almost the gurus of the intellectual world.
At the same time, the fundamental foundation of classical rationalism was formed — the achievement of an absolute, unchanging truth of universal significance. This is the Leibniz formula. This is such a very brief definitional code of the concept of “rationality”, but it is very significant. I must say that a huge number of misconceptions is connected with the fact that people were guided by this principle, but this is another question and a separate topic for reasoning - where our mind takes us, and even more - where our mind takes us.
Let me get back to where I started, that the topic of rationality now appears in most cultural, sociophilosophical, philosophical, anthropological, and political studies. There is a tendency to evaluate, for example, the development of culture by the extent to which there is a sign of rationality with the introduction or, conversely, a decrease in the rational. They begin to evaluate the degree of democratization of society by how rationally people approach everything. By the way, one of the indicators of the so-called democratization scale is the level of civilization, the effectiveness of social institutions, and here the criterion of this rationality itself is important. Pay attention, I said how reasonable, and not reasonably, people approach everything.
Here we need to recall our recent history, and what we all see now. This morning, EuroNews again sounded the topic of Ukraine, where it was said that the West acts rationally in relation to all this, it acts “wisely” as it should. And indeed it is.
I remembered how in 1944, the commander in chief of all military and not only military operations in the Soviet Union, Stalin appreciated the activities of Churchill, who said that until the last button was sewn to the uniform of an English soldier, he would not cross the English Channel . So, Stalin said: "Well, well, that’s rational." This is such a dichotomy of what is clever and really rational, correct, and what actually follows from this, and this makes up a gigantic gap, both mental and logical, whatever.
I will give a small excerpt from this two-volume, I really liked this idea. An absolutely amazing person, one of the most famous researchers of the historical-philosophical and philosophical-anthropological world thought, who is no longer alive, said that calls are now being made to restore rationality, which has been largely lost in technogenic civilization, to return rationality and the role of the most important cultural value, to turn again to the mind as that highest human ability, which allows us to understand the semantic connection not only of human actions and spiritual movements, but also natural phenomena taken in their integrity, in unity, in their lively connection with the political life of the state.
It is very important to return the fullness of rationality, which went to the level of some technical techniques. And absolutely biological ideas that everything that is beneficial to someone is reasonable, is probably a very good appeal. Thank.
Stepan Sulakshin: Thank you, Vladimir Nikolaevich. Today we have a very interesting conversation. Of course, I have to join in, support all those illustrations, genesis paintings, which allow me to approach the semantic content of the term “rational” given by my colleagues.
It is very interesting to reflect again, how are we ourselves, in what efforts, by what methods, in what information-meaningful fields are we looking for these very meanings. Obviously, we turn to dictionaries - encyclopedic, specialized, philosophical, and so on. Obviously, we are sorting out connotation pictures known from literature related to the use of this term with its sometimes complex life, gaining a collection of manifestations of the existence of this term in the space of human activity and human consciousness. We analyze our own experience. Different terms have their own angle of life, a piece of the space of being.
Most often, in our dictionary and future dictionary, which we will publish, we look for relevant political, socially relevant terms, but they always, and sometimes to a very large extent, penetrate, live and cling to the usual routine everyday sphere in the life of any person.
There are some borderline semantic zones where this term either looks, or takes root there, or even lives on an equal footing. There are terms that go into highly specialized, professional fields of use, and there are terms that can live, as it were, the life of semantic polygamists.
Today's term refers to the second type. Of course, to a large extent, the main burden is associated with opposing or designating the specifics of human being as a creature not only biological, with emotions, feelings, with instinctive unconscious contours of the reaction of activity, but also with activity based on consciousness, on the mind. And this is the first most important semantic load, concept, this is connotation, a bunch, illustration, some specific disclosure of the most important property of a person, his consciousness and his rationality.
Rational - it means referring to reason, based on reason, on logic as a specific and unique way to implement the process of rationality, reflective, with feedback, relate to the surrounding universe and receive information, process it, use it and implement it in a person’s active activity load.
Here, the subtlety is that in biological nature, animals seem to have a goal, as well as a human, the goal is to live, but in nature unreasonable the animal never sets this goal, does not correct it, and does not activate its activity to achieve it. This feature is inherent only to a person who is rational, that is, appropriate. But a person is not just consistent with the goal, like an animal according to the goal of living, and he has all the instincts designed for this, the person himself sets the goal.
Sometimes a very difficult challenge arises. I will continue the example cited by Vladimir Nikolaevich. While Churchill sewed buttons to the uniforms of soldiers, dragging out the time of entry by the second front in the Second World War, our people fought, made sacrifices.
And there were times when the Supreme High Command set the task of freeing or capturing such and such a city by significant dates - for example, by celebrating the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, by some dates, but what rationality is it? It would seem that military operations, appointments, orders should proceed from the criteria for minimizing losses, maximum effect, due coordination on the front line, and so on.
Many historians, and even more publicists, blame Stalin for the military, even civilizational, I would say, manner of warfare that was characteristic of the Soviet Union in terms of excess losses. In Berlin, representatives of our embassy also told me that it’s hard to imagine the last 300 meters of the war — before the Reichstag, and why it was necessary to raise our ranks of infantry to full height under dagger fire, where they died in thousands, when it was possible to starve them to death, bomb them and etc.
So, the question is: what is rational and what is not? Could the Soviet Union win that war if it acted according to Churchill's rules, and only according to these rules, if this rationality, the Prussian military calculation were used without taking off the human spirit, completely irrational behavior, when they threw their own breasts at embrasures?
Therefore, there is an incomplete semantic load that the human mind and human spirit belong to different spaces of semantic load. Perhaps this irrationality from the point of view of simple, logical, primitive constructions is human affiliation and rationality of a higher spiraling ascending type of rationality.
I will say paradoxically a wonderful thing. Outside of rationality, routine, simple, mathematically verified, a higher order of reason arises, based on sacrifice, on higher meanings, than simply the existence of one’s mortal body or the very “second grade” rationality, namely: rationality, prudence, prudence, prudence and economy etc.
Therefore, look, there is a theoretical semantic load of this category - reasonable, logically verified, calculated, but at the same time there is an independently existing ontological platform for the term being - it is expedient, prudent, economical. By the way, it intersects with a household site.
But there is another fun reproduction of semantic platforms - this is a mathematical platform. The fact is that the rational is a number, just a special type of numbers. It is defined as a fraction - m / n, where m and n are integers.
That is, rational numbers in mathematics are called integers or fractional-integer fractions, and irrational - numbers that are in the interval.
Why is it invented, for whom is it even important, who uses it in their lives or in humanitarian applications? Nobody, nowhere and why. But there is a rational number. This once again illustrates the significant need very carefully and carefully for oneself, for dialogue, for scientific research, for scientific presentation, to load the term in your context with an exact meaning that helps you understand yourself, understand the universe, and your neighbor understands you.
Here is such an illustration today, very, in my opinion, classical, methodologically and methodologically interesting. Thank you for our communication today. For the next exercise we take out the word, which is now probably one of the most frequently used in the socio-political discourse and dictionary - “referendum”. All the best.
Irrationality as a quality of personality - propensity for behavior that cannot be comprehended and explained by reason, which clearly does not obey the laws of logic, which evaluated as "superintelligent", "counterintelligent."
When the Master noticed that the visitor’s faith was too irrational, he pompously answered: “That's why I believe that my faith is irrational.” “Perhaps it is better to say: I believe, because I myself am irrational?”
“Darling, is it true that love is an irrational feeling?” - Truth. - Then tell me something like that, very, very irrational ... - Mmm ... Nuuu ... Ah, here! The root of minus one divided by zero.
Indeed, love and mercy are irrational. Love, tenderness, affection, grace does not require rationality:
The mother of a soldier sentenced to death came to the emperor Napoleon and asked for pardon. “He is convicted of justice,” the emperor said sternly. “I did not come to ask for justice, but for mercy.” “Your son did not deserve mercy.” “Sovereign,” the mother said quietly, “mercy is not deserved; Therefore, I ask for forgiveness. These words deeply touched the heart of Napoleon, and the offender was forgiven.
Grace is higher than justice. Justice is rational and conditional. In contrast to justice - the ability in a divine way to impartially follow the truth, truth in their actions and opinions; act legally and honestly; mercy is irrational. Grace depends solely on the one doing mercy. Grace is that which is irrational, based, as in the case of Napoleon, on a whim, a whim. Justice, rationality fall under the jurisdiction of the law. And irrational, what is it? This is a lack of concern for the law. It is irrational. The irrational is not amenable to calculation, regulation, law. It does not follow the laws of logic and cannot be comprehended by reason.
An irrational person behaves, from the point of view of rationality, unreasonably, his behavior is focused on achieving goals without a thorough preliminary assessment of the current situation and existing opportunities. Irrationality implies for the most part a rash manifestation (thought, idea, feeling, decision, act) of a person based on a sensory or intuitive impulse.
In most cases, an irrational person perceives the surrounding reality and models decisions outside the logical justification of the advantages of some decisions in relation to other possible solutions and does not focus on a previously developed action algorithm (instruction) in his activity. Most often, irrational behavior rests on a person’s faith in a positive result with almost complete misunderstanding of what exactly means and methods will achieve the desired result.
The principle of irrationality protects a person from destructive criticism of his own motives when he avoids careful preliminary and informed modeling of his actions and actions, including the assessment of prospects based on existing experience. Irrational behavior uses the resources of the subconscious, finding the necessary answers and solutions spontaneously and involuntarily in the process of active activity.
Irrational jokes.
A man sits on the coast of the Nile and catches fish. The heat is terrible, stuffiness, hell, and even the fish is not caught ... An hour sits a man, two sits, but the fish is not caught. Suddenly a crocodile (K) pops up and so the peasant (M) sympathetically asks: (K) - What, hot? (M) - Yeah ... (K) - Stuffy? (M) - Yeah ... (K) - (with hope ...) Maybe then you will be redeemed?
Two chickens are lying in a store on the counter, one of ours (Russian) and the other one imported (American): The import one looks at ours and says: “Look at me, though I’m all GMOs, but I’m lying so fat, in such a beautiful package, well plucked and you are so thin, not plucked, blue. And ours answered her: - But I died of my death !!!
Irrationality - Incomprehensible behavior. Psychologist Victoria Kolosova writes: “Irrational behavior is an action aimed at obtaining a result without predetermined actions and evaluation. Such behavior does not have previously meaningful options for the development of a situation, question or task. Usually it is associated with a spontaneous manifestation of feelings, emotions that irritate or, conversely, dramatically calm thoughts arising from an emotional outburst. Usually such people are able to see reality beyond its logical explanation and with the advantage of some arguments to others. They focus on actions without pre-prepared action algorithms, called “life instructions”. Most often, such behavior is based on the belief of the person himself in a good result of the work performed, with a complete practical misunderstanding of how the required result was nevertheless achieved. Sometimes people have only one explanation - the favor of fate.
In thoughts and conclusions, as in all other global laws of this world, the rule of conservation of energy applies. Thinking in a stereotypical way is often beneficial: less effort and time are needed. And well, if the acquired knowledge in childhood is correct, then a person solves the problem in the right way. But if knowledge is irrational, then a person is less fortunate. The main factors why such thoughts interfere with proper thinking: they are spontaneous; lead a person away from his main activity; often work in unnecessary situations; cause anxiety and irritability. The faster a person gets rid of illogicality in his thinking and actions, the sooner negative events will stop happening in his life, the psyche will strengthen, and his functional activity will improve. Irrationally is wrong for a sane person. ”
Here is a striking example of irrational behavior:
In the waiting room a woman. He looked about 45 years old. Not a model, not at all. Satin skirt, knitted sweater. On his feet worn shoes. In the hands of a bag of the same material in the same condition. - Hello. Please advise me. I want to conduct a genetic examination of the paternity of my child. “Do you have doubts?” How old is the child? - 15 years old, daughter.
An interesting movie ... That is, for 15 years the lady had no doubt who the father of the child was. And then she slipped on her. Although what only in life does not happen. Maybe some kind of war, my father disappeared during the collapse of the USSR, something else ... And then he showed up. Well, he wants to reunite with the child. However strange. The lady has an engagement ring. - Do you want to confirm paternity for your husband? - No. I want to establish paternity and sue child support for my biological father. For all 15 years. “Hm ... And is your husband written on the father’s birth certificate?” - Well, yes ... - Does he know about your doubts? - Well, no ... - Your husband refuses to support a child? - No, that you, he loves her very much! - That is, with a living husband who legally recognizes himself as the father of your child and does not give up his duties, do you want to prove that your daughter’s biological father is another man? - Well, yes ... - As I understand it, the biological situation has sharply improved in the biological father? - This .. well .. well yes. He opened a company, repairs cars. He bought a jeep, built a house, got married. So now, this lokhudra will receive everything, and to me means nothing? “Do you know that if you prove that the biological father of your child is another person, then your husband can, in turn, sue you to recover the funds spent by him for the maintenance of someone else’s child?” - Oh ... But maybe? Oh, I'm sorry, I’ll go ... Fussyly runs away from the room, the door is swinging in a draft ...
Irrational joke:
There is a man in London with a boot on his head. A policeman stops him: “Why are you with a boot on your head, sir ?!” - I always walk on Wednesdays with a boot on my head! - Good, but today is Thursday! - God, then I look like a fool !!!
Peter Kovalev 2015
And finding a rational person, Weber does not say that a person is a rational or rational person. He only claims that “modern man, a child of European culture” is rational.
It is not generally rational and not by virtue of a certain law, for example, the law of the gradual rationalization of culture. It is rational as a result of constellation of factors.
Weber man suffers from that rationality (or experiences it as fate), which Weber himself calls formal. Formal rationality as rationality “for nothing” (I need the most need to), rationality in itself, taken as an end in itself can be understood in contrast to the rationality of the material, rationality for something (I need something for…)
Formal rationality is what, according to Weber, distinguishes a traditional society from a modern one. In a similar look, according to Gaidenko, the mark of Marx is clearly visible
And seeing modern man as rational, Weber will be forced to explain exactly this, such a person, in particular in his study of the influence of Protestant ethics on the formation of modern Western capitalism.
Modern capitalist society. On the concept of capitalism.
This has already been said in relation to man; the same can be seen in Weber's discussion of capitalism - Weber does not discuss what capitalism is in essence.
Take "Protestant Ethics ...". There Weber introduces “capitalism” (1) as
ideal type, (2) as found in reality and (3) it is not assumed that there can be no other.
In the "Protestant Ethics" the concept of modern capitalism is introduced, which is clarified in the opposition to "traditional capitalism." (And, by the way, in the "Protestant Ethics" such a dichotomy is given, which lies precisely in the framework of the problem of modernization.)
And in the future it will really turn out that capitalism may still be some kind. So, later, in the preface to the “Sociology of Religion”, Weber will talk more about adventurous capitalism, introducing the axis “adventurous-western” at an angle to the axis “modern-traditional”, thereby setting the continuums of “capitalisms”.
In the preface to the Sociology of Religions, discussing the fate of the West, Weber gives the concept of capitalism
Here we will call “capitalist” a housekeeping that is based on the expectation of profit through the use of opportunities sharing i.e peaceful (formally) acquisitions.
Crucial to all of these types of acquisitions is accounting capital in cash, whether in the form of modern financial statements, whether in the form of the most primitive and superficial calculation.
That is, the emphasis is on calculating profits. Further, Weber writes that “To determine the concept, it is only important that economic activity really focused on comparing income and costs in monetary terms, no matter how primitive this may be. ". But the indicated capital — incomes and expenses (albeit calculated in money) —this is not quite the capital of Marx. At Marx, capital is by itself moving value, Weber’s capital is value between two people.
Marx does everything to get rid of people. He introduces capital as the “regulatory structure of social structure” 27 and displays all human relations in derivatives. Weber is doing everything to return a person, but it’s hard for me now to say whether it is possible to get rid of a person by trying to build the ideal type of capitalism.
