Rationality verses intuition
From the authoritative statements of ‘rational’ economists to the generally pejorative condemnation of all things ‘irrational’, ‘rationality’ looms large as a touchstone of acceptable thought in the Anglo-American world. The same emphasis is not, however, put on rationality in East Asia.
In The Way and The Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece, Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin identified ‘clarity and deductive rigor’, or one might say ‘rationality’, as characteristic of Western thought since the Ancient Greeks. In contrast, they see the Chinese having been much more concerned to identify ‘correspondences, resonances and inter-relationships’. Several seminal Chinese classics, the Daode Jing and the Yi Jing have clearly played a major role in consolidating this characteristic.
Indeed, these texts strongly suggest that clarity and deductive rigor may be convenient for the human mind but will invariably distort and distract from the reality of the natural world. They also suggest that there is a constant need for care and humility in scanning the environment with a disciplined intuition in order to identify where we are being misled by our certainties and assumptions, often disguised in rational structures.
It can be surprising and a little unsettling to develop the practice of stepping outside familiar rational structures and using intuition to explore an environment with fresh attitudes. The identification of relevant ‘correspondences, resonances and inter-relationships’ that have previously been neglected often exposes the most familiar certainties to a great deal of uncertainty and re-evaluation.