It’s Only Rational
Over the past fifteen months, the Octet Collaborative has been using this essay space to explore the question of what it means to be human. Back in September 2024, we began with the fundamental concept of imago Dei: to be human is to be made in the image of God.
On this point, the vast majority of the Christian tradition has agreed, but as we noted in that opening essay, there has been disagreement on what this means. In particular, the long-held notion that being made in God’s image refers primarily to our rationality has come in for significant criticism over the past century or so: too one-dimensional, too disembodied, too focused on capacities that not all humans share (certainly not to the same degree). And so more recently, theologians have emphasized ways of framing imago Dei in terms of relationality (to be human is to be made for, and even dependent upon, relationship with God and neighbor) and vocation (to be human is to be called to a role as stewards of God’s creation and witnesses to his glory).
We’ve devoted separate essays to relationality and vocation, but in this essay we’re circling back to rationality. Although it has legitimately been critiqued as incomplete, that doesn’t mean that it’s invalid. We are more than brains on sticks - but to be human is to have a rational mind. The goal of this essay is to explore what that means - and then to investigate briefly one of the ways this idea has gone wrong in recent years, and how it might be retrieved.
In the Christian tradition running through Augustine, Aquinas, and up to the present day, the rational soul is what sets humanity apart from other living things. Aquinas held that all living things have souls: they all have an internal principle of motion toward the end for which they were made. In the case of plants, this principle motivates growth (it naturally moves the acorn to become the oak), but nothing more. The animal soul enables creatures to also move freely and actively respond to stimuli in their environment. Only humans, however, have a rational soul, which enables reflection, abstract thought, and consideration of more than what to do and how to move through the world, but why. Most importantly, only the rational soul can contemplate and enjoy relationship with God, and this is ultimately its purpose. This direction toward an aim, we will see, is a crucial aspect of rationality as an aspect of imago Dei.
In the last 25 years, rationality has taken on a new meaning. The modern rationality movement is devoted to a ruthless pursuit of truth based on empirical investigation and unbiased, algorithmic methods of deriving true belief, often modeled on or explicitly invoking statistical inference. Originating on blogs such as Overcoming Bias and its offshoot, LessWrong, the point of the rationality movement is to overcome the biases (hence the blog’s name) and heuristics that muddle human thinking. Rationality in this sense is connected to other movements such as effective altruism, which seeks to apply the methods of rationality to efforts to do good in the world.
My intention in this essay is not to provide a full critique of the rationality movement, which would require a much longer post. Rather, I simply want to point out one key aspect of 21st-century rationalism that distinguishes it sharply from a Christian understanding of what rationality is.
Rationality, as understood by the 21st-century movement, is directed by only three things. First, facts - rationality is rigorously empirical. Second, valid rules of inference - 21st-century rationality deliberately applies algorithmic methods (such as Bayes’ Rule) of ascertaining truth from sets of facts, in order to eliminate subjective biases. The third factor arises in the case of what is called “instrumental rationality,” which is the practical form of rationality that doesn’t just pursue the truth, but also applies the truth to the pursuit of desired aims; it is these aims which constitute the third factor directing rationality.
Rationality, on this view, is a capacity, or a power - a tool to be wielded in pursuit of achieving whatever it is that we might want. This, by the way, reverses Augustine’s view of things: rather than rationality governing the appetites, the appetites direct rationality.
More significantly, in making rationality a tool, this view divorces our minds from who we are: rationality becomes no more a part of who you are than your power drill or your calculator. It is a tool for arriving at true beliefs and then pursuing one’s aims based on those true beliefs. But where do one’s aims come from? If rationality determines what is true, how does it identify the good and the beautiful? Some goals may be self-evident, such as self-preservation or the sustenance of human life (many of the goals of the effective altruism community have an undeniably universal appeal). But beyond these, what is worth pursuing? What is worth loving? Under the terms of rationality, it would seem that either we simply want what we want for no other reason than that we want it, or else our aims have to be derived according to the same rationalist methods that we use to pursue truth… in which case, rationality is both the tool for achieving our aims, and the tool for telling us what they are.
This is the stark difference with a Christian anthropology. The Christian understanding of rationality as a key component of imago Dei says that our rationality, being a thoroughly integral part of who we are, must be aimed where the human is aimed. Rather than an undirected tool, it has a definite orientation to the true, and the good and the beautiful, all of which find their source and perfection in God.
This suggests one way that rationality may be retrieved for the modern era; one modest suggestion involves a return to yet another past essay: The vice of curiosity. In this essay, we discussed the problems with a desire for knowledge without direction: knowledge for the sake of knowledge, knowledge for the sake of power and control as an end in itself (curiosity, in precisely this sense, is listed as the first of twelve virtues of rationality in one of the most significant essays published on LessWrong). But like any vice, that sort of curiosity is never more than a parasitic distortion of something positive - a virtue. In this case, the virtue that curiosity is studiousness - which, we would like to suggest, can make a modest contribution to a healthy understanding of what rationality is for, and how it might more fully bear the image of God.
Studiousness is the deliberate application of the intellect toward learning and understanding, as directed by well-ordered desires. Where curiosity pursues knowledge for the sake of knowledge, studiousness pursues knowledge for the sake of divinely defined good. This good may simply be the awe-inspiring beauty of the object of study (a mathematical proof, a constellation, a sonnet, etc.), or it may be love of neighbor. Where curiosity pursues knowledge as an exercise in self-directed power, studiousness is the intellectual aspect of the prudent stewardship of creation. Where curiosity has pride as its motivation, studiousness is driven by humility (which is not a low self-regard, but simply an accurate one). Studiousness, in short, pursues knowledge for the sake of that good, which begins and ends in God, that is the aim of humanity. Curiosity is misdirected, or undirected; studiousness directs the intellect to its proper end (God, of course—but also all other things in relation to God; the virtue of studiousness capaciously embraces every intellectual endeavor). “Perfect intellect,” writes theologian John Webster, “is not intellect unbounded but intellect wholly devoted to that which it has been given to discover.” (“Curiosity,” in The Domain of the Word, T&T Clark: London, 2013, p. 195)
The virtue of studiousness informs a richer conception of rationality than mere cogitation. Rationality is directed toward the true, the good, and the beautiful; it finds its end in the God whose image it bears. Rationality as an aspect of imago Dei is no mere capacity, as though it were a (neutral?) technology for achieving one’s aims. It is embodied, affective, made for relationship, given in service to the vocation of being human and bearing God’s image to the rest of creation.
MIT’s mission statement speaks of the generation and dissemination of knowledge; as an institute of higher learning, it is irrevocably devoted to the life of the mind. The intensity of the work performed here does not always allow much time for reflection, or for asking why seeking knowledge is a worthwhile aim. This is one of the reasons that the Octet Collaborative exists: to open up spaces of rest, dialogue, hospitality, wisdom, and wonder, where the image-bearers who people MIT’s labs and corridors might consider what rationality is truly for, and might flourish more fully in the process.
