Irrationality

As irrational (from Latin: irrationalis, " unreasonable" ) refers to facts or ideas that the human reason (Latin ratio) contradict or evade this. The term irrationality is this part used interchangeably as substantivized adjective for the irrational, sometimes he refers to the human trait of irrationality.

In mathematics, "irrational" means " out of proportion ". Are real numbers, which can not be expressed by a fraction of two whole numbers, like for example the number π circle, which is determined by a mathematical algorithm.

Definition

In everyday parlance, the term is used in different meanings. To describe a state of affairs as "irrational " may mean that he is perhaps the mind is not accessible but, ie is not rationally explicable. However, it can also mean that he, because it contradicts rational criteria ( the requirement of consistency about ), can not exist per se. The concept of " Ir -rational " is to be distinguished also by the psychological concept of the unconscious, ie content that are not aware of either only at a certain time, or, as some brain processes, in principle run never aware, however contrary to reason not directly.

Furthermore, it should be noted that any consideration may, at any belief in, each thinking about the irrational only within a certain conceptual discourse going on and is in principle subject to the logical rules of language and reason. So is the use of the term "ir - rational" even always the rational forward to what is Ir - rational negative taken into consideration.

Conceptual history

The concept of irrationality comes from mathematics and experiment on the Transzendentalphilosphie (1790) was the Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon first used philosophically in his work. Obviously this writing a response to the previously published Critique of Pure Reason (1781 ) by Immanuel Kant was Following the Irrationalitätsbegriff collection holds to the philosophy of German Idealism: In a letter from Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling to 1801, in a letter to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi from 1804 as well as in science teaching 1804 spruce speaks of the " proiectio by hiatum irrational ". Schelling used in his lectures on the Philosophy of Art 1802/1803 the term irrational by presenting art as a higher form of reason, which is irrational for the analytical mind. Soon, we find the concept of the irrational in the aesthetics of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his Science of Logic. CG Jung distinguishes in his teaching of analytical psychology between rational ( thinking and feeling ) and irrational mental functions ( intuiting and feeling ), see → Positive Philosophy.

In order to rehabilitate the irrational, which culminated a few decades later in the justification of psychoanalysis, Fyodor Dostoevsky has rendered outstanding services in the 19th century.