Welcome to Nuggets of Academic Knowledge with Dr  Angela Puca, where we explore Religious Studies concepts that pertain to magic and Esotericism.

Is the practice of magic irrational? As Olav Hammer explains, to gauge whether witchcraft and other magic practices are rational, we need to clarify what we mean by rational first.

The discussion on rationality dates back to a dichotomy created by   Max Weber, between instrumental rationality,  aimed at taking steps towards a specific goal, and value rationality, based on the idea that some goals of ethical or religious nature, for instance, are worth pursuing due to their intrinsic value. Instrumental rationality is the one we associate in common parlance with the idea of being rational, namely acting upon empirically-testable information evaluated through logical inference or deduction. However, this model of rationality is not only unhelpful to determine whether esoteric practices are rational but also any other human action or endeavour!

Acknowledging the limitation of this model, social science has produced a more realistic model, called bounded rationality, that considers cognitive weaknesses and social influences part of everyone’s process of decision-making. Such weaknesses may include not-well-calibrated correlations, confirmation bias and other types of biases,  the limits of memory, possible appeal to logical fallacies when drawing conclusions and so on. As a consequence, magic is, in Hammer’s words, ‘just as irrational or, rather, boundedly rational as any other product of natural thinking. It may not live up to the demands  of formalised, deliberate thinking, but few domains of human activity do that.” In this sense, Western esotericism is ordinarily irrational, just as any other product of our culture. Not more nor less.

Please,  support my work if you can, smash the Like button and don’t forget to subscribe to my   YouTube channel ANGELA’S SYMPOSIUM for full references and more detailed Academic Fun!

Ciao.

REFERENCE:
Hammer, O. (2019) Isn’t esotericism irrational? In: Hermes Explains Thirty Questions about Western Esotericism. 137-144, Amsterdam University Press. LINK TO BOOK: https://amzn.to/3GUo5SK

First uploaded 5 Nov 2021