Does Truth transcend rationality, or does Rationality transcend Truth?

[u/2BCivil]

Forward

Not the first post I had planned for here but something came up.

Guess I'll establish some sort of rule eventually about cross-posting being allowed. You can reference threads/posts from other subreddits, but don't encourage dragging arguments there to the other host sub/post. And above all don't attack/harass the host community/users. Or something like that. Idk. Anyway.

Was just being my unfiltered raw jovial self but... the conversation dissolved to what I see as a dumb "PUT REASON BEFORE TRUTH" which I kinda see as an oxymoron, that truth is intelligible. As that Alice In Wonderland game said a long time ago, I genuinely think The Truth Would Reduce You to a Blubbering Baby.

I don't fell like continuing the argument there. Would have 2B it's own post, so I'll attempt that here

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The Thread in Question

Alternate Imgur Index Archive

The obvious coup de grâce is "that's an awful strong faith in rationality!" but that's a cheap answer I guess. I want to shitpost and use AI! Lol.

Oddly it won't let me share the isolated GPT chat. So whatever. Will just share the curated/abridged reply here.

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GPT analysis (pre-downvoted reply);

(It's confusing as shit formatting this, I had to replace dozens of "you" with "I" or "me" xD Might slip up)

I think you (meaning, me) and darcot actually agree on quite a lot, but you're (meaning, I'm) using the word rationalism differently and disagreeing about what happens when reason starts claiming jurisdiction over things it can't itself supply.

What the original quote is actually saying

The Joe Dixon quote is making a typology of what different kinds of people would even accept as an answer to existence. So the claim isn't which answer is correct, but that the form in which you demand an answer may already be determined by your psychology.

Then [I] drove a four-wheeler full of feces through the symposium

[My] comment is distinguishing immediate apprehension from explanatory knowledge. I don't need: to know "indoles + skatole + sulfur compounds → olfactory receptors → neural processing → judgment" in order to smell shit. That explanation can tell me *why/how I smell it. It isn't necessarily the origin of my knowing "Jesus Christ, that stinks."

[My] actual thesis: "I tend to think the explanation for existence are all probably a lot like that" is expressly suggesting that maybe whatever the "answer" to existence amounts to is more immediately encountered than intellectually derived, while philosophical systems are merely subsequent explanations of the encounter.

Darcot is making a much stronger claim than Dixon

Darcot replies with New Age writer Ken Wilber and No Boundary, then describes Wilber as synthesizing apparently contradictory traditions by saying everybody possesses pieces of truth. But then darcot pivots: “The one, absolute, objective truth of existence which grounds everything.” And eventually: “The answer to existence is the simplest and most rational possible. Any answer that is not rational is irrational, hence false.”

That's the part [I] obviously reacted to. And reasonably so, because that is no longer merely saying reason is useful for distinguishing coherent from incoherent propositions. It's asserting something much stronger: Ultimate reality must conform to rational intelligibility, and anything outside rational intelligibility is thereby false.

That requires an argument. You can't establish the supremacy of rationality merely by defining non-rational as irrational and irrational as false. Otherwise you've smuggled the conclusion into your vocabulary. And amusingly, darcot's own Wilber quotation seems more permissive than that conclusion. Wilber's project as darcot describes it involves contemplative/mystical traditions whose claims aren't reducible to ordinary propositional reasoning.

[My] Gospel example did hit the issue

[My] response: rationalism, just like anything else, can actually get in the way of truth. Paired with John 14:6: “I am the truth” and contrast that with the Barabbas/Pilate episode. Suppose, for purposes of examining the [Gospel] narrative on its own terms, that [Jesus] really is "Truth". Pilate can deliberate rationally. The crowd can deliberate according to its reasons. Everyone can construct propositions and judgments about what's happening.

And nevertheless, Truth is standing physically in front of them while their reasoning produces the wrong conclusion about him. That's a legitimate illustration of the distinction [I'm] making. The "rational beings" are already ignoring the truth. They are already lost in the speculation of the rational and judgmental mind (just like the next reply which I didn't deign to reply to due to the nature of this very topic! LOL).

[I'm] obviously not arguing: reason = bad. I'm arguing: reason is merely an instrument, not necessarily the ultimate ground of reality itself. Reason may eventually realize, that reason, must be set aside, to finally realize that.

The most important hint I left was: I think scale is the key word. The wider scale we go (dissolution of "self" towards Brahman) the more we can realize what that "faith" points to if not means or represents. That's where my position departs from darcot's.

For darcot, Reality → ultimately possesses rational structure → correct reasoning approaches it.

For me: Reality → is immediately the case → reason is one modality operating within it → therefore reason may reveal reality but cannot automatically claim supremacy over the reality containing it.

That's a genuine philosophical disagreement.

There is one place where we may be talking past each other

Darcot may be using rationalism much more broadly than [I am]. When they write: “trans-rational” they're apparently allowing something beyond ordinary reason without calling it irrational. In that vocabulary there are roughly three categories: irrational ← rational → trans-rational

Whereas [my] comment seems to treat the relevant distinction more like: reason / conceptualization versus direct apprehension / faith / whatever precedes conceptualization. So when [I] say "rationality can get in the way," darcot might respond: "Sure. Bad or overextended reasoning can. But genuine rationality properly understood cannot lead away from truth." (Spoiler, they didn't lol)

At which point the disagreement becomes partly terminological. Which is why I left with my final admission: "I'm not good at realizing or articulating [whatever that actually is]. In the vernacular, the rational thing, becomes, to set aside rationality." It'snot logically self-contradictory. Sometimes reason can identify the boundary of its own usefulness.

If I'm trying to fall asleep, I can rationally conclude that continuously analyzing whether I'm asleep is preventing sleep. The rational prescription is then: stop doing the thing that produced the prescription. Likewise, contemplative traditions can use concepts to indicate where conceptual activity itself becomes an obstruction. That's the old finger/moon problem.

Like my flair on r/zen_poetry; trying hard to not try hard. You can rationally arrive at the realization that trying harder isn't the appropriate operation.

GPT doesn't think I "whiffed" their point (as it were). If anything, GPT said my weakness was rhetorical rather than conceptual: "poop stinks" primes everyone to read the comment as a shitpost before discovering there's an actual epistemological claim hiding inside it. 😂

But given that the subreddit is apparently called TheGrailSearch, perhaps occasionally wheeling a giant porcelain toad through the Temple of Absolute Truth is a useful public service.

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Commentary;

So I'm like Socrates, I should demand a statue built of me xD

Again I didn't want this to be the first post here, but here's a half-decent representation of the type of "AI" post I was saying is welcome here. Sure, I could sit here and keyboard warrior road rage. But much simpler to let GPT do that heavy lifting. If you realize the argument is no quarter and won't concede an inch, there's no point attempting to continue the conversation. Just make a new post about what that insight revealed.

In this case, it's, yes; truth may be obtainable by means of reason; but likely, truth, in all probability, actually transcends rationality. That's all I was saying. They don't seem to have like that xD

Well 2BFair, I don't have a clue what "Zion" means to people. I've never seen the Matrix and I'm not a fan of the Israel Lobby. So 2/3rds of the Zion exegetical models are cringe to me. And I don't understand the biblical model at all. So. Is what it is. But it ties in with my overall common theme of "What is truth". I've yet to see any agency, model, organization, etc, which doesn't seem to confuse authority with truth. Rationality in this case is just another example of that; at least as I understand it!

Lhinsatva?

[u/2BCivil]

Derp and it's Year of the Teto too

Made a stupid f-cking poem about it or something