In the broadest sense, irrationalism is a philosophical doctrine that restricts, belittles, or completely negates the role of reason as the main and decisive component in cognition. This trend highlights other types and varieties of human abilities - insight, imagination, feelings, instincts, intuition, contemplation, and so on, and the like.
As a rule, irrationalism is an idealistic doctrine that recognizes not the mind, but something else as the basis of the entire universe. Basically there are three options. The first is to place at the forefront the absolutized possibilities of human consciousness and the subconscious (Schopenhauer's irrationalism). The second is the recognition of God as a transcendental unknowable entity that stands above the faculties of the mind and can be known only in the process of some mystical unity. The third option is that irrationalism is the so-called “unknowable,” which, in principle, is a priori inaccessible to awareness by the human mind, although it lies at the basis of consciousness and can manifest in one way or another. This opinion was developed in their writings by Kant, Frank and Spencer.
Irrationalism is the lowering of the role of rational consciousness and reason. At its extreme point, it is close to agnosticism. However, agnosticism focuses on the absolute fundamental unknowability of the whole world. The starting point for such a philosophical trend as irrationalism was skepticism. Pirron, the founder of this school of thought, says that all things are equally unexplored, indefinable, and indistinguishable. As a result, no opinion or judgment can be either false or true. Such philosophical doctrines and concepts as relativism (the doctrine of the conventions and relativity of consciousness and cognition) and nihilism (denial of the generally recognized) are directly related to skepticism (and, therefore, to such a trend as irrationalism in philosophy).
In the Middle Ages, it was irrationalism that was the basis of all philosophy and theology. Scholasticism and Christian mysticism based on the concepts of Johann Eckhart and Bernard Klerossky believed that it is impossible to know the Lord God rationally, but you can mystically contemplate it. Already since the Renaissance, one could say that irrationalism is the antipode and antithesis of the emerging realism. At that time, the ideas of an irrational view could be qualitatively divided into three main groups:
- Irrationalism as a reaction to Hegel’s panlogism and rationalism.
- Existentialism as a doctrine of the irreducibility of a person’s personality to intellect alone.
- A critical attitude to the intellectual abilities of man, which originates in ancient skepticism.
At the same time, the branch of irrationalism, which later became an independent course, originates and branches off - the existentialism mentioned above, which developed the idea that the essence and personality of a person is not intelligence, but a kind of existence that cannot be expressed, but can be described using emotional and the irrational side of the human mind.