Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

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Well apparently you don't understand what I'm saying. It doesn't help that I accidentally typed "selfless" instead of "selfish", so my meaning of "rationality is not selfishness, selfishess is not rational" did not come across.

"Rationality", as in the rational way of making decisions and taking actions, is only defined up to a specific set of values, goals, or preferences (however you want to phrase things) -- those goals are a free parameter.

Hence you completely misunderstood, again, continuously making the assumption that "rationality" entails acting something like a banker, seeking some sort of personal profit in everything and caring for nothing else. Again, this just isn't true. If we take the Christ-character in the New Testament as speaking sincerely, for instance, he was acting rationally for his goals.

So again, the issue is not that one has to discard rational thought in order to take a "leap of divinity", but instead that you are assigning "more divinity" to certain goals, and therefore certain actions, than to others -- this all being contingent on your belief in the Scripture.

I think you're being a bit overly pedantic about the use of the word rational. Yes, everything you're saying is true, rationality is framed by the individual's goals. That said, I think it's fair to assume that values, goals and preferences such as "not being poor" and "staying alive" are parameters that are on average not that free. By your definition this is "rationality" and I don't think it's controversial to say your average human is "rational" in this sense.

I don't think he's being overly pedantic -- these kinds of things are difficult to talk about because we bring different definitions to the table. I tried to use "rational" in the context of the original article, which perhaps I failed to do so. The interviewer notes the contemporary critique of Enlightenment rationality, which Saul seems to share. So when I critique this kind of rationality, I mean a type of faculty that is in a different category from emotions and faith, that is separated from Saul's description of the other faculties of humanity.

I think Eli and I are caught in what Wittgenstein might call a "language game." We seem to be using the same word but we're really meaning two different things. It'd be like if I thought basketball was a game involving kicking a ball into a net (soccer) and Eli thought it was a game involving throwing a ball into a net (basketball). While in that case we do have one objective definition of basketball, we don't necessarily have one universally accepted definition for "rationality."

I'm kind of reaching my limit here in terms of knowledge of philosophy; I've perhaps confused things by framing my descriptions using two contradictory definitions of rationality: that of the Enlightenment idea of rational (which I critique) vs St. Maximos the Confessor's idea of rational (which I advocate). I think that Eli is arguing from a Kantian sense, in terms of actions being rational up to a subjective idea of an ultimate good. Luckily for us, I've found a paper that discusses these three topics and will hopefully clear up the miscommunication we've had: http://www.academia.edu/10973797/A_Byzantine_Critique_of_Enl...

Edit: I initially said that Eli and I are perhaps in agreement, but assuming he's arguing from the Kantian sense then we aren't.

>That said, I think it's fair to assume that values, goals and preferences such as "not being poor" and "staying alive" are parameters that are on average not that free. By your definition this is "rationality" and I don't think it's controversial to say your average human is "rational" in this sense.

Well certainly. But by that standard, we really have no need for "divine irrationality", nor any need to insult the everyday rationality of real people.

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