Human, All Too Human

Have you ever wondered how you can be more rational, thoughtful and intelligent? Here is a primer:

1 Know what you believe. This is a process though. Develop habits that engender understanding and precision in thinking. If you want to know how to be more rational, you need to know what habits of thinking develop rationality.

Francis Bacon once wrote in his essays Of Studies that “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man”. This is very true. Refining your beliefs is a step toward being more rational. Intelligent people know that they are ignorant about many things. Be more intelligent by being more aware of your ignorance and your knowledge.

Write down what you believe about the world: God, the universe, ethics, politics, your priorities, etc (to get the ball rolling). You do have opinions on all these matters. Everyone does. But not everybody takes the time to scrutinize their beliefs. This is what separates the irrational people and the rational people. If you want to know how to be more rational, you need to know what it means to be irrational too, and know the difference.

2 Integrate the mind with habits that accord with good reasons. This might sound vague but it is not. Your actions stem from ideas. Your ideas may be clear or cloudy. Your ideas may be understandable and articulate, or hard-to-understand and inarticulate. Now, you can’t make everything fit in little logical box, this is true. When it comes to ethics, theology, and extremely complex theories or paradoxes, for instance, everything isn’t perfectly intelligible. However, a good and rational person can be honest about these things. A rational person can say that everything isn’t perfectly clear yet they have strong hunch, or an intuition, or faith that something is true or false. Knowing how to be more rational involves being honest with yourself: Gnothi seauton (Greek, for ‘know thyself’).

3 Continually reflect, prioritize and pray, and continually revise yourself. What is ‘yourself’? Who are you? Some say a person is the sum of their experiences or memories, but this says very little, doesn’t it? What is better, is saying this. You are what you stand for and how you stand for it. You are what you pursue and in what ways you habitually employ to obtain your goals.

To be brief, always try to improve better habits of thinking and living. Take a class in logic maybe. Start a diary. Replace inconsequential bantering with meaningful conversation on a daily basis. It is not easy to be rational and good and intelligent. It takes hard work. As Socrates said, “the unexamined life isn’t worth living”. Think about this. And if you don’t have enough answers (you won’t of course), start with other people’s beliefs and try to respond to them using disciplined thinking.