The Logic Of The Curve

There are many people who consider themselves rational or logical. Many of them have an incomplete understanding of what logic and rationality means.

If you think in straight lines, you will think that a curve is illogical. In fact the logic of the curve is more advanced than the logic of the line. If you advance your understanding of mathematical logic, you will know that a curve can be approximated by infinitesimally smaller lines. There is logic to such things as feeling and spirituality, although it may differ from one’s own logic. There is vastly profound logic in nature, and it is a higher logic than anything that the merely logical mind knows how to devise. The complexity of a tree or a brain is astonishing, and a mind that holds such things in contempt is a mind that has either an inadequate knowledge or inadequate cognitive faculties.

I can reason well enough. I also know that there is more to life and to reality than what is believed by the merely rational. Rationalism of one form or another will always be followed by romanticism of one form or another. The mind has contempt for such things as nature and feeling until it has studied them enough to find in them greater logic than anything that it has itself known how to devise. At that point contempt gives way to respect and even awe. And the lack of such respect is a mark of either inadequate cognition or inadequate knowledge.

The proponents of this inadequate linear thinking keep making a habit of portraying anyone with any affinity for curvature as a loon. It is seen as drugs, mental illness, what have you. They are wrong – absolutely wrong. There are all sorts of things running by all sorts of logic. A curve has at its root as much, if not more, logic, than a line. And in seeing such things as illogical, the linear mind blindly and ignorantly stomps on things more complex and intricate than itself and denies the world the benefit of what such things have to offer.

That something runs by a logic different than oneself does not make it illogical. It makes it run by a different logic. The logical stance is to figure out the logic by which the thing in itself runs. To call it illogical is an illogic in itself. The logic is a method, not an ideology. And the true task of the rational mind is to understand the underlying logic and work with it to accomplish genuinely beneficial results.