Rationality - A Good Choice - For Life

[monart]

Rationality – A Good Choice - For Life

[A Simple Re-Minder]

 

To be rational is to choose to be good in order to live as a human being. Rationality is good for happiness.

A basic fact of life is that its existence is conditional. Life needs values for sustenance. Human life needs rational values and the work to produce them. Success is neither automatic nor guaranteed; it depends on will and skill. Rationality is a choice and requires effort.

If the choice is to live, then choosing to think and be rational is a good choice, because rationality sustains and promotes life and so is good for life. A good life is the way to a happy life, so rational actions lead to a successful life of happiness. Reason and rationality is the only human, moral way to live.

Rationality is the virtue of acting in accordance with reason. Reason is the ability to know reality through sense and logic - identifying, abstracting, and integrating sensory, perceptual observations into concepts and propositions.

Forming concepts, making words, is a uniquely human method of knowing: the basic means by which are possible the philosophy, science, technology, art - all the cultures of modern civilization that bring unprecedented comfort and convenience, safety and security, entertainment and exploration, health and happiness, etc. All these life-enhancing conditions and opportunities are products of reason needed and to be enjoyed for a fully realized life (but too often taken for granted or, worse, depreciated and decried).

Rationality is the ethical source of the virtues of independence, integrity, honesty, justice, and courage. Without rationality, there is no real reason for those virtues. It is rationality’s grounding in reality that gives the reason for all the values of rights and romance. From rationality comes truth, goodness, and beauty. By rationality and its connection and correspondence to reality, is sanity maintained. Rationality ensures against being a stupe and a fool, or a crook and knave.

Because reason is the cardinal value and rationality the primary virtue - does that mean that one should be fully, 100% rational all the time? Yes, living isn't always easy; it's not without obstacles and oppositions, conflicts and confusions, mistakes and misunderstandings. But rationality is the only true way to solve the problems of life and achieve full self-realization, which is happiness. Why should one not choose the best possible, using the best means possible? Why settle for less?

One is not infallible or invulnerable, not omniscient or omnipotent, but one is confident and competent to know and do the very best one can. That's the way to make and enjoy life. That's life's meaning and purpose: to achieve happiness by the best standards and all the virtues of rationality.

Since reason can know what is real and true, it is the source of what one feels or experiences as being for or against the well-being of life. Without reason, the feelings of emotions are blind and shallow, unconnected with or opposed to reality. With reason, emotions are solid, deep, and in harmony with reality. Rationality ensures feelings are pure and do not conflict with true thinking, bringing the bliss which is the reward of life. “Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy.” –Ayn Rand.

To reason is to live as a human being. Reason is the source and means by which human life survives and flourishes. A successful, thriving life is a happy life. Rationality is the good choice for life and happiness.

[Source: "The Objectivist Ethics", Ayn Rand]

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"Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of man's reason. Yes, reason could solve human problems—but nothing else on earth or beyond it, can." (From “Apollo 11” by Ayn Rand.)

 

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Image:

A future world built by rationality: The High Frontier, an orbital country in space, envisioned by Gerard O’Neill. Painting by Don Davis, circa1975. (Note the family by the water, the butterfly near the rock, the birds and clouds in the sky, the bridge connecting the towns.

Edited January 23 by monart