Are Humans Rational ?

What does 'rational' means when it applies to human thought ? It means logical, reaching decisions based on the operation of reason alone. It is immediately obvious what the problem is - human beings do not think rationally, we are creatures of our emotions. Our greatest art, literature and music, maybe even maths, is what moves us and fills us with awe. I think we like to believe we are rational and logical because to accept that we are at the whim of our emotions is, for many of us, to base our decisions on foundations of sand. At the moment Y12 are considering courses they may like to apply for at university if they did this logically they could look at factors the courses with the highest incomes for graduates, the most employable graduates and so on. However, nobody advises choice based on such logic but on 'love' for the subject. What does this mean ? It means we feel emotionally attached to the subject and we gain immense satisfaction from studying it. Nothing is sadder than the university student who has felt they ought to take a course for reasons of income and status and then find that they can't stand it, as sometimes happens in my experience with law. We don't base the choice of our life partner on logic, falling in love is the height of illogic and yet it happens to most of us. Freud pointed out a century ago that it is unconscious mind which makes decisions for us not our conscious rational ego.Freud recognised the irrational as a potential danger. He wanted to understand it scientifically. He also wanted to regulate irrationality in the interest of human civilization as a whole. As he told one of his friends, irrationality was a "comprehensible object of science." Freud was convinced that man is not a rational being. Man's behaviour, guided as it was by inner forces, was irrational. Within the mind there is mental activity that is independent of consciousness. This is the unconscious mind. For Freud, the implications of such a discovery were profound: it meant that man's actions are not always rational. The great tragedies of human history can be interpreted as the consequences of man's irrationality: wars, murders, torture, massacres and famines.In the eighteenth century when western man was freed from the shackles of dogmatic religious belief there was a movement called the Enlightenment which sought to understand the world in terms of reason Freud undermined its principles with his exposure of the dark side of the human mind. Does it mean that if our actions are irrational and based on unscious drives that humanity has no hope ? No, there is always the possibility of hope because most people are good, loyal generous and loving. Emotion is an essential part of our being, our lives are lived at their best in and through others. I have just become a grandfather and I have a strong, what we psychologists call 'affectional bond', love, for my tiny grandaughter. In this sense emotion can be the most positive experience in our lives ,and the worst ,the experience of loneliness when we are deprived of all affection.