Psychoanalysis found out more than 100 years ago that our rational thinking is sometimes just a self-deception, the enlightenment of which sometimes leads into dark realms. Recent psychology has confirmed and deepened this knowledge in many ways, just a few Peter Wasons groundbreaking experiments on “motivated reasoning” and confirmation bias or to the analyses Kahnemans and Tverskys reminded of heuristic wrong ways of thinking. Some currents in the neurosciences have even more radically questioned the concept of rationality in human action, for example in the wake of the experiments by Benjamin Loves.
However, the back of rationality is not empty. Marxist analyzes have, for example, illuminated bourgeois ideology as a logically coherent depth behind people’s apparently subjective reasons for action and decoded subjective consciousness itself as an expression of social power structures. More recently, the thesis has also been explicitly put forward that there is a hidden purpose behind everythingthat nothing happens by chance and that everything is connected to everything else. One could almost speak of a rationalistic totalitarianism here.
In this respect, the understanding of human rationality is pervaded by a profound dichotomy and duplicity. Ernst-August Dölle had shown that such constellations require a dialectical resolution, that dichotomy and duplicity do not represent a stable ontological basis for a scientific reconstruction of rationality.
Now, a new study in Journal of complex Rationality 2023;1(4) provided a neuropsychological explanation for this perspective. Mirror neurons actively work towards a synthesis of dichotomy and duplicity and can pharmacological even supported. Concepts of hybrid rationality or, synonymously, inverse irrationality, are likely to give Ernst-August Dölle’s research new relevance in the future. According to the BMBF, a funding program is to be prepared in order to secure Germany a leading role in research in this area. One can be curious.