The limits of rationality
It's easy to idealise rationality. After all, it has produced many of the modern wonders of the world, through its application in science and engineering. It's even tempting to let it replace religion, through a faith that all of the great existential questions will eventually succumb to careful reasoning and the application of the scientific method. But, even putting aside the fact that science has fundamental limitations in addressing these questions, it is actually impossible to be entirely rationally motivated. If we let ourselves believe we can be, we are in danger of both being manipulated and missing much of the beauty of life.
Rationality's blindspot
The thing with rational thinking is that it can tell you how to get where you are going, but not where you want to go. This was famously articulated by David Hume, who maintained that you can't determine what you ought to do just reasoning about the way things are. Any rational thought is in service of a goal defined outside of a rational framework. To be able to act rationally, you have to first decide on a system that can be used to assign value to different states of affairs. From this, you can start to understand how to behave so as to improve things. We therefore have to choose the overarching goals we want to pursue for their own sake — there is no way of deferring this choice of value system to scientific and logical reasoning.
As a serial over-rationaliser, coming to this conclusion has had a significant impact on me. Before, my enjoyment of art, music or literature came with a vague angst, urging me to try to understand why it made me feel a particular way, rather than just enjoying the experience itself. This made it difficult to appreciate things as they are without deconstructing them into their component parts, resulting in a narrowness of mind and rejection of experiences that didn't fit into a scientific-materialist mental paradigm.
My relationship with fantasy and myth offers a potent example of this. As a child, I was always drawn to these stories, an attraction that didn't wane into adulthood. But, as I developed a more rationalist view of the world, I started to feel unjustified in indulging in them. That was until I discovered Carl Jung's archetypes, which gave me a way to rationalise their potential benefits and the subtle truths they could convey. But, why did I have to wait for a 20th century psychoanalyst to tell me that something is meaningful, when I had felt it all along?
The realisation that finally made sense of this for me is that we are really driven by are our intrinsic values — things that we value for their own sake, such as love for one another, or the pleasure of reading a good story. These are in contrast to instrumental values, which we only value for their utility in furthering our intrinsic values, such as money, or railway networks. Intrinsic values are what makes life worth living, but are only evident through the positive conscious experience associated with them. As these experiences are entirely subjective, they are outside the range of rationality, which can only frame the world through an instrumental lens.
Finding our intrinsic values is no trivial task, but something that forces us to stare into the core of our humanity. If we value truth, for example, what costs to our wellbeing would we tolerate to obtain it? Or, how do we decide the correct trade-off between punitive justice and personal freedom? These questions have no ultimate answer, but pursuing them is one of the most rewarding and important things an individual can undertake — to know one's fundamental values is the only way to truly know oneself.
This undertaking can feel a bit awkward to start with, especially for those of us with a habit of delegating everything to the rational mind. However, I think it's instructive to refer back to my experience with myth and fantasy. I already knew it brought me value before I had a rational justification for it. So, if you are participating in an activity that brings you joy, or feels meaningful without a rational understanding of why, that's enough to know that it is resonating with a deeply held value. Being aware of the times things feel right is therefore a great place to start discovering the things you truly value. If this still sounds a bit imprecise, I also highly recommend a tool provided by clearerthinking.org, which helps you to think through commonly held intrinsic values.
Even if the above project of self discovery is not appealing, we cannot escape operating under a value system. If we fool ourselves into thinking we can justify everything with rationality, we will just act under one unconsciously — bringing with it the risk of being manipulated.
The dangers of over-relying on rationality
Any decision we make serves one end or another. Therefore, if we don't take responsibility to understand and fulfil our own values, we will take on those of others — most likely from people with vested interests, or forcefully held and dogmatic beliefs. This is a particular danger in our modern informational ecosystem. We are not given time to think for ourselves, but bombarded with the value systems of those most adept at advertising their own worldview.
Take the way we think about work. As observed by Bertrand Russell in his essay In Praise of Idleness, modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Many of us buy into the predominant modern narrative of the virtue of productivity. But, when we stop and think about it, how many of us would hold productivity as an intrinsic value? Isn't it an instrumental value inherited from a feudal era, when excessive work was the fate of most, to advantage of those in power? As Russell later notes, wouldn't we be more fulfilled by minimising our productive obligations and taking pleasure in doing things we want to do?
Our loss of perspective is even more evident in the way we think about money. In itself, it has no inherent value. It should be considered a tool, instrumental to the exchange of goods and services. Instead, we treat it as something to obtain in its own right, lauding those that have the most of it with admiration and status. This leads to individual CEOs and sports stars with a control over natural resources thousands of times greater than carers, teachers or nurses. If we stop to think about our deepest held intrinsic values, would most of us really feel comfortable with this?
It also pays to bear in mind that any economic policy must draw upon a value system. Despite this fact, some of those doing well in our current system like to pretend that it is completely rational. They lead with the assumptions of classical economics, in which well-behaved economic actors act rationally to serve their own self-interest. This is not a purely rational statement, as the assumptions suggest that one ought to value one's own wellbeing over that of others. Supporters of this view may retort that efficient markets ensure this selfishness will optimally distribute resources to fulfil everyone's wants and desires. In practice, however, markets aren't completely efficient — information imbalances allow people to accrue wealth, while providing little value to others. On top of this, communal externalities, such as the environment, are also neglected. This results in the slow degradation of our planet and society, with no consideration for the wellbeing of future generations. To really resonate with our intrinsic values, we need to drop the myth that a rational economic system exists, and build one with the value of present and future human life explicitly built in.
Towards a wiser future
We get systemic values that are misaligned with our collective wellbeing when we focus too much on instrumental, rather than intrinsic, values. We really desire the mental states associated with positive experiences, those of beauty, joy or love. But, our collective sense of instability and anxiety leads us to overemphasise instrumental factors that we believe will allow us to experience these feelings in the future. Sadly, we often postpone them indefinitely, never stopping to smell the roses.
One of the major issues is that we lack a communal framework for discussing our intrinsic values. As they reside in the world of subjective experience, we have no precise way of discussing them. Conversely, instrumental values can be discussed through precise and rational language. The net result is that we can only ever agree to further our instrumental values, even though we may share very similar intrinsic ones. We end up bulldozing forests to build carparks, or building skyscrapers full of offices instead of cathedrals.
Imagine a world in which we actually took our intrinsic values seriously at the level of societal policy. Finally, we could justify funding an art exhibition for the beautiful experiences it invokes, rather than for its promise of an increase in town-centre footfall and gift shop revenues. Even scientists could honestly advertise their research as the pursuit of truth, rather than a utilitarian search for new technology.
To be able to reach this future, it is essential that we take the time to think clearly about what we really value and how we want to achieve it. We are finally at a moment in history where we have the technological power to shape the earth as we see fit, while having the potential leisure time to enjoy it. However, we cling to our values of no-holds-barred productivity, brought forward from a history of scarcity. This is accelerating technological progress without a coherent direction and driving us to the edge of an existential cliff. If we take a moment to realise that we aren't serving our intrinsic values this way, we can change things around and build a society that not only works for everyone, but is also filled with beauty and love.
We have to realise that rationality, particularly in the form of scientific thought, cannot provide us with a value system. Instead, we must turn inwards to discover our intrinsic values. Thankfully, we don't need to approach this undertaking alone, but we can turn to philosophy and its noblest goal — that of teaching us how to live. Great thinkers before us have wrestled with these questions, mapping out the terrain of values and providing us the tools to think about them. We can therefore step into the void in good company, taking on the responsibility to define what we intrinsically value for ourselves.
What might be the role of temperament relative to intrinsic values?
This is an excellent article, very well written.