I struggled with this line at first. How is the real rational, when we are always still figuring out what reality is?

It now makes perfect sense to me, so I'm sharing my view on it, and encouraging a friendly discussion on the matter. Here's my view on it.

The world as we know it is structured by human concept. Even if there is a structure beneath or above our human concept, this itself is still just a human concept. Human concept is all the structure we have and are ever going to have, it seems to me.
We cook up gods and theories and philosophies, and this is the intelligable structure of the world. And we cannot speak or think outside of structure, also known as ratio, also known as rationality.
I just got David Foster Wallace's book on infinity. It's good stuff. And it's a good example. We can cook up a concept like infinity only by negating our concept of the finite. We can't think infinity and we can't think the unthinkable. But we can put a minus sign in front of anything.

In the begining was the word (logos).
Logos the rational order of the universe from the Greeks.
Personally, of course, I think the universe is inherently rational and ordered.
That human conceptions did not impose order and reason on the world but discovered the reason and order on which the universe is based (transcendent truth). We discover truth we do not invent it.

I struggled with this line at first. How is the real rational, when we are always still figuring out what reality is?

.

I struggled with this line at first. How is the real rational, when we are always still figuring out what reality is?

It now makes perfect sense to me, so I'm sharing my view on it, and encouraging a friendly discussion on the matter. Here's my view on it.

The world as we know it is structured by human concept. Even if there is a structure beneath or above our human concept, this itself is still just a human concept. Human concept is all the structure we have and are ever going to have, it seems to me.
We cook up gods and theories and philosophies, and this is the intelligable structure of the world. And we cannot speak or think outside of structure, also known as ratio, also known as rationality.
I just got David Foster Wallace's book on infinity. It's good stuff. And it's a good example. We can cook up a concept like infinity only by negating our concept of the finite. We can't think infinity and we can't think the unthinkable. But we can put a minus sign in front of anything.

I can see where you're coming from, and after everything I have said on the forum, can't possibly disagree with it. But there is something to be considered, which is that reality itself, as in stuff that actually happens, is often irrational, unexpected, inexplicable, and downright confounding. So that needs to be remembered as a counterbalance to the beautiful idea of the True the Beautiful and the Good. Actually I was reading earlier this week - it might have even been here on the Forum - that some prominent disciple of Pythagoras came up with a proof of an irrational number ( the root of the length of something) and this was such a scandal that he was murdered. The whole idea of irrational numbers was a real problem. This says something important about the Greek model.

Nevertheless, this realisation of the rational as the beautiful, and all its implications, is great and something which I am sure many have lost sight of. Even though it is an ideal, and as such, is unnattainable, its place needs to be respected and restored in Western culture.

I'm not sure if you mean that we actually structure the universe through our concept. While this is true with the disclaimer "as we know it" I find that my concept of the world-universe is structured by my perceptions of the world-universe. Maybe I mis understand, but I think I am on the other side of the fence on this one.

To put "The Real is Rational" is imo a over simplification of things.

I don't think irrationality exists.

Doesn't it? People are frequently irrational and do the most confounding things for no good reason. Hazards, accidents, and chaos exist and regularly erupt. There are things about life that are completely absurd, and things happen that should never happen. I think this too has to be accomomodated doesn't it? How do you accommodate that?

The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe,
that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our
language is misunderstood. The whole sense of the book might be summed
up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and
what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.


Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather--not
to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able
to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the
limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be
thought).

I think he means we MUST pass over in silence.
NOT that we SHOULD. We can't think what cannot be thought. Period.
For me, the thinkable is the rational. And all that we call real, we are thinking about. THe real is necessarily rational as only the thinkable can be thought on, discussed.
There is no outside to rationality, not any intelligible outside.
Of course qualia are a complicated issue, but so far as they are intelligible they are rational.

. It seems to me that the irrational cannot exists.
---------- Post added 04-07-2010 at 12:12 AM ----------




.

Thanks for your reply. Allow me to be more precise. When I say the "real is rational," I mean rational not in the mathematical sense, which is probably the source of the word, but the logos-sense or logical sense.

To say the world is irrational is an act of irrationality. Just as infinity is actually itself a finite concept. I don't think irrationality exists. I would say that we have a rational set of the not-otherwise-rational. But that we still have a set for it, else we could not think it. It seems to me that the irrational cannot exists. Of course in the ordinary use of the term, the irrational is all around us. "Irrational" is used as a term of censor for certain kinds of behavior, or as a description of that which is intelligible as otherwise non-intelligible. Still, to think of something as irrational is already to put a negative sign on a rational concept.

From my angle, the real cannot help being rational, as the "real" is already a concept. And to organized qualia at all is to be rational. For what is order?

For me, to say the real is rational is not to say that I or anyone can know the cause of everything, for instance. Rather I am only saying that the intelligible structure of experience is exactly thought, exactly rationality. An error counts, with me, as rationality. But this is to use rationality is a particular sense. Rational as thoughtful. We evolve our system of concepts in accordance with experience.

---------- Post added 04-07-2010 at 12:12 AM ----------




But what are "we" and what is the "universe"? From my point of view, the distinction of man/universe is contingent. You might just as well say that the universe structures its perception of itself.

To say "as we know it" would actually be redundant. For to add this disclaimer is just to manifest a rational qualification. It's like Kant's thing-in-itself, which is a tricky and ultimately flawed concept, in my opinion.

To think of the universe as it is in-itself, is still just to think of it in "human" terms. The concept of the universe-in-itself is arguable absurd, although it makes sense on the surface. What can we mean by it? For this concept is still just the universe-for-humanity-but-paradoxically-simulataneously-in-itself..?

---------- Post added 04-07-2010 at 12:17 AM ----------



Well, in a practical sense, you're right. But I must stress that this is philosophical and not a natural science assertion.

Let me put it another way.

To the degree that experience is thinkable, it is also rational. To call something real, one must have thought it, conceptualized it. For language, in my opinion, is thought, and thought is language.

A person can be in error and yet this error is still the intelligible structure of their experience. And this is why error is bad. Of course error is relative. And the individual is an abstraction, as we all have parents and a society that influences the intelligible structure of our experience.

For me, the point of the quote is self-consciousness.

Mental mastrubation as usual.

As I have said, I think there are things which are irrational, and also things which are supra-rational. Isn't it possible that reality is supra-rational, that is, far exceeds our rational ability? I mean, science entertains the idea of an infinity of universes nowadays. I would say that is supra-rational.

Mental mastrubation as usual.

A youth who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learnt the first proposition, inquired, "What do I get by learning these things?" So Euclid called a slave and said "Give him three pence, since he must make a gain out of what he learns." - Stobaeus, Extracts

When negative numbers were invented, a lot of folks felt the same. Or worse, they thought that negative numbers were evil. And also the number zero was a suspicious import once. The "real is rational" is for me a significant philosophical point. But maybe you have more of an engineers attitude. An engineer is never going to use a transcendental number in its transcendental form. He's going to round it off.

Yes indeed, there are many stories to usefulness in scorned things, when Marco Polo introduced the money bill, everybody laughed at it, and only saw the negative side of it, as I do with this kind of philosophy.

Ofcause there's a slim chance that your kind of philosophy some day will gain useage, but I doubt it.

The thing is, I see great potential in Reconstructo, so when he spends time with navel gazing philosophy I get sad and my world crumbles inside.

In the begining

Personally, of course, I think the universe is inherently rational and ordered.

We discover truth we do not invent it.