Irrationality as a resource for coping with uncertainty

Transformations connected with modern processes of informatization and digitalization make a person’s habitual living environment fundamentally different and change himself, requiring new forms of behavior and choices of a model of action. In the paradigm of existential psychology, the article substantiates the thesis about irrationality as a potential resource for coping with the experience of discomfort of uncertainty. The author reviews irrationality as a manner of thinking, as a way of behavior in a diverse social reality, as a mode of existence of an individual in conditions of uncertainty and as an integral part of the modern self. The novelty of the author’s approach lies in the fact that irrationality is seen as a specific extra way of compensating for the accelerating obsolescence of individual experience, the non-adulting of contemporary people and the becoming of a fragmentary identity. Using irrationality contributes to the transformation of modern man into an “open system” and actualizes the ability to behave, shifting the frames between the already accepted, “own” senses and values of the subject and those potentially possible and realizable for him. A comparative analysis of the possibilities of rational and irrational behavior in situations where existing experience is insufficient but a person cannot avoid the need to make decisions and act is carried out. The author formulates provisions about the possibilities of an irrational attitude in interaction with reality as the basis of transgressive behavior and the use of new possible “logics” (axiologic, Bayesian logic, imaginative logic) in a person’s exploration of reality and himself.

uncertainty, personality, experience, rationality, irrationality, identity