Rationality And Love

There are some people who are of the opinion that romantic love is irrational.

For an opposing view, we have John Nash, a pioneering mathematician, stating that truth is found in the equations of love.

The World War II generation was hardly irrational; but many of them practiced love – successfully. I know a man who was Vice President of the National Academy Of Science – as well as a military colonel – who started his marriage with love at first sight. To the best of my knowledge his marriage continued “till death do us part,” and they raised a very successful family while continuing to love one another till a very late age.

One persistent problem I find in people who think themselves rational is that they consider as being irrational anything that runs by a different logic than what they themselves practice. Something is not exactly the way they think, so it must be irrational. This kind of arrogance and stupidity gives birth to such claims as “taken as a whole the universe is absurd” or “the only absolute is that there are no absolutes.” You have projected your method upon the world; and, when finding the world run by a different method, consider the world itself to be irrational. That is the worst form of hubris that I've ever come across.

To these people, the correct response is that the method exists to discern reality rather than the other way around. Logic exists to discern the universe; universe does not exist to be logical in your eyes. One error this leads to, according to its own mechanism, is the error of nihilism – an error of which I myself was guilty when I was a teenager. If you believe that reality is what can be proven, then the logical outcome of the fact that nothing can be proven to a man with brain damage or a man who refuses to listen to evidence is that nothing is real, and it's Strawberry Fields Forever. So it is important to adjust the definition of what is real. What is real is what exists, whatever your opinion on it may be.

That you cannot understand the logic of something does not mean that it is illogical. It means that your understanding of the matter is not advanced enough. And the correct solution is improving your understanding, so that you can parse it into your supposedly logical worldview.

The correct place of logic is to understand things, not to stomp on things that one wrongfully considers to be irrational. And that is the case with love and any number of other important things.