ON BEING RATIONAL

To be rational is to be engaged in collaborative, corrigible, historically informed inquiry and deliberation. Critical intelligence is merely the beginning of rationality. Substantive rationality also requires reflective and imaginative inquiry. Its active exercise presupposes trust and mandates a commitment to the common good, to responsible attempts to create the political institutions and social conditions on which intellectual and political trust can flourish. Without these, formal and calculative intelligence are – however brilliant – mere cleverness; and without these, rationality can undo itself.