I never put down a book without finishing it. A super-rare exception to that rule (though preserving the letter of the law, since I read a digital copy) is Justin Smith’s Irrationality: a History of the Dark Side of Reason, which I’ve just given up on. I came to it out of frustration with E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational, a much better book which I’ve been writing about lately. One serious problem (or, more charitably, enduring challenge) posed by Dodds’ classic is that it never, and perhaps can’t, define the irrational which it claims for its subject. I expected that Smith, notionally a professional philosopher, would do better, but actually he does worse.
Smith aspires to write a history of irrationality, which means that he claims to have a notion of what irrationality is. But the seams start to show right away with the anecdote that begins Smith’s introduction, the story of Hippasus’ murder by Pythagoreans enraged at the former’s having publicized the secret of irrational numbers. That irrational numbers like the square root of 2 exist, glosses Smith, is proof that the universe isn’t actually rational as Pythagoras had maintained. Classicists know, however (and this isn’t the only error of fact or interpretation that I, as a specialist, was able to spot in the book), that “rational” and “irrational” here just have to do with ratios. The Pythagoreans (not Pythagoras himself, probably, although Iamblichus, the source of the anecdote, wouldn’t have made this exception) believed that the universe could be explained as a series of ratios between whole numbers; the square root of two, since it can’t be expressed as such a ratio, throws a monkey wrench into that system. Pythagoreans (or, better, their Latin interpreters) used
“rationality” and “irrationality” in so far different a sense from the modern one that it’s hard to see any contiguity between the two usages.
The same kind of claims might be advanced for much of the evidence Smith brings together. “Rational” is a predicate said of so many different things – numbers, logic, arguments, nature, political organization and thought, to name just a few – that it loses all definition.
Dodds has a similar problem – he equivocates between social rationality, a kind of functionalism, and individual rationality, a system for evaluating belief coherence – but at least his various senses of “rational” stand in a dialectical relation to one another. Society developsbelief-based means of controlling individual irrationality that appear ends-rational from society’s viewpoint, as ensuring the survival of the collective; from the viewpoint of the individual, however, these beliefs appear irrational because incoherent. An age of criticism thus follows an age of credulity. Since man’s irrational impulses still need to be controlled by society, however, a new age of credulity ensues.
We could argue about whether a lot of the entities invoked by Dodds – society, beliefs, human nature – actually exist, but, assuming they do, reason still operates in his argument despite Dodds’ refusal to define it univocally. Smith aspires to something similar, characterizing the overall argument of his book as a dialectical approach that praises some reason, but not too much (poor Adorno and Horkheimer get dragged in to give this position a pedigree, though I don’t think they would have recognized it.)
As it plays out, though, this is not really a dialectical argument but rather a statement of what I would pejoratively call a “moderate” position. Because he dislikes the extreme irrationalist and rationalist positions for consequentialist reasons (e.g., too much reason brings about the French Revolution), he situates himself as near to the midpoint between these extremes as he can get. Sometimes, as with the goofy equivalence Smith draws between neo-nazis and #metoo twitter, this means inventing an extreme: the moderate needs to have enemies on both sides.
There’s a kind of magical thinking involved in taking such a position – the belief that not being wrong makes you right, as though there were only a limited number of ways to be wrong – and it shows throughout the book. Smith seems to believe that his moderate position, perforce that of a reasonable man, gives him the authority to speak ex cathedra on a pretty wide range of issues where he has no actual expertise. Does being a political moderate, for instance, equip you to dismiss Lacan, Freud, Zizek and all of French theory without so much as offering a counterargument? It does if you believe you’ve already established your credentials as a reasonable man and if, as Smith does, you find that body of work personally distasteful.
You don’t necessarily need to take all those texts on board, but a book that claims to be offering a critical history of irrationality should do better than that kind of idle polemic. The more of it you read, the more you get the sense that what Smith says he wants to avoid – treating rationality as a mere “term of approval” – is in fact the presumption that underlies the whole project. Rationality seems to mean so many different things in this book because it actually doesn’t have a substantive definition, being just synonymous with “stuff Justin Smith likes.”
That’s disappointing, all the moreso since Smith has a job at a French university. You expect the French to know better, but maybe that expectation is just a holdover from happier times. In France as everywhere else, “reasonable men” like Smith are under attack on all sides as people seek to overthrow the regime of market neutrality of which such people are avatars. When that regime remained unchallenged, it could afford to sponsor internal critics like the French theoreticians Smith despises. Now that it’s under attack, it hires dragoons to write polemics in its defense. If Smith’s book is any indication, this slackening of intellectual standards on the part of the ancien regime won’t save it: nobody, not even its fiercest advocates, can make a convincing case for moderatism.