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magical thinking, at the very heart of human language. Every day when we speak
we are in an unstable equilibrium between the two types of rationality that make up
our mental processes - and with them our linguistic processes.
When we make the effort to compose a clear, distinct argument, to formalize
it, even to make it mathematical, we are leaning towards one of the faces of our
language, that of classical rationality. When we surrender ourselves to poetic evo-
cation, dreamy or drunken fantasy, when we are possessed by obsessive rumination
or delirium, we veer to the other side.
Whether fascinating or terrifying, this is obviously deeper, the one that lies be-
hind, the one that was there before. But when we aim for all round intelligibility
(and in particular an all round intelligibility of what the words are saying) we have
to pay equal attention to both levels of rationality, integrating them into a genuinely
human rationality, a generalized rationality.
Every speech has to be understood by evaluating its balance between both kinds
of rationality and, from the rationality that allows us logical understanding, we have
to enter as far as possible into poetic rationality and interpret it, if we want also to
hear what unreason is trying to say, or at least listen to it as far as it is intelligible.
We shall be able to do this much better, the more open we are to rational un-
derstanding of the dual rationality of language. The dual rationality that allows us
to grasp Pythagoras' Theorem but also a poem by Baudelaire. The dual rationality
that allowed Descartes to write (and us to enjoy) the
Discourse on the Method
,but
that also allowed the Spanish film maker Luis Buñuel to conceive (and us to “un-
derstand”) the cinematic game of free association entitled
The Phantom of Liberty
.
Acknowledgement.
This paper is included in the research project FFI-2008-03599.
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