‘If you wake up after a night in Phoenix Park, you think: What is the point?'

Psychotherapist Kevin Sludds experienced homelessness in his teens, sleeping rough in the Phoenix Park and elsewhere. The experience has shaped his professional outlook. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd The human desire for knowledge runs deep. It underpins our social order, our education system and the economy. But the paradox of knowledge is that getting more of the stuff doesn't necessarily make us smarter. In fact, it can make us sick. There's a remarkable scene from the classic BBC series The Ascent of Man, where presenter Jacob Bronowski stands in Auschwitz, where several members of his family were killed, and declares: 'We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.' Science itself has revealed that uncertainty is built into the universe, Bronowski observes. This draws him towards what he calls a 'principle of tolerance... the realisation that all knowledge is limited'. Dogmatism dressed up as rationality is not only a source of moral decay. It also affects our mental health. Kevin Sludds explores just how in a forthcoming book, Living Beyond Reason, that draws on his experience as both a psychotherapist and a lecturer in philosophy in Ireland and overseas. Sludds, from a north Dublin inner city family with Wexford roots, is not your typical academic. As a teenager he was homeless for a period of time, and the experience has shaped his professional outlook. 'What I carry with me is the cold – I remember feeling bitterly cold.' But he also recalls an aspect of homelessness 'that is never spoken about' – how it confronts people with 'overt philosophical questions'. [ The Gaelic philosopher who wrote 'one of the most influential books of our time'Opens in new window ] 'If you wake up after a night's sleep on the Royal Canal or in Phoenix Park, as I did, you think of all the days and weeks ahead and ask: What is the point? What is this thing called life?' People have a need for food and shelter, he says, but they also have a need for meaning in their lives. Sludds's writing is admirably devoid of cliche, scathing of elites, and rich with put-downs. Not everything should be reduced to 'convenient collops of cognitive information', he says. (Journalists take note.) The 'young and fabulously wealthy' Ludwig Wittgenstein comes in for particular criticism for trying to police the investigation of meaning under strict linguistic rules. The Austrian philosopher adopted a 'religious attitude' in later life when he came to appreciate his early work was marked by 'extreme dogmatism', Sludds notes. 'Our search for meaning has now routinely become equated to what's trending,' Sludds says, but that doesn't mean our 'everyday emoji ways of living' are ignorant or futile. A 'traditional move' of intellectual elites is to 'dismiss large cohorts of people because what they engage in is popular', he says. (Thumbs up and '100 per cent' for that comment!) Emojis aside, Sludds has a soft spot for what he calls an 'anti-rationalist' stance. He explains further as this week's Unthinkable guest. To what extent are modern mental health problems the result of a demand for certainty? 'To a very large extent, I would say. Taking the human condition to be one which is absolutely or essentially rational means, by extension, that to account for a sense of objectless fear, bafflement or depression, we must compartmentalise others and apply outrageously reductionist labels to them. As a consequence, we not only have an ever-growing number of mental health disorders but of people who self-diagnose, and a simultaneous distancing from the reality that our lives very often do not conveniently conform to notions of reasonableness or order.' What can we learn from Wittgenstein's quest for a rational answer to the puzzle of life? 'Fundamentally what we can take from Wittgenstein is an alertness to avoid arrogance and the inflated claims made for reason... The propensity in clinical psychological and philosophical rationalist circles has been to eke out answers, missing the key point that there are few genuine insights in absolutes.' [ Ten lessons from philosophy: Guard your privacy, forgive your enemies, lean into happinessOpens in new window ] Is there a danger of the anti-rationalist stance collapsing into self-delusion? For example, I could take the anti-rationalist stance that a loving God is watching over me. That might be consoling amid life's troubles, but I'd be kidding myself. 'The earnestness, or otherwise, with which we respect those who proclaim a belief in God stems, I would suggest, from the word 'faith', rather than from someone merely deciding to take an 'anti-rationalist stance'. If faith is ignored and the belief is based solely on decision-making, an individual expecting an outcome of solace – ie 'God watching over me' – during life's travails is likely to be disappointed. An embrace of the uncertain and a step away from the delimiting idea of our being animal rationale is the best defence against life's vagaries.' You make reference to the 'emoji-world' that many of us inhabit. What are you driving at there? 'The key point here is that there is meaning in our apparent scattered or discordant emoji ways of living, our swimming in the shallow end of life's coarsest distractions. What the analytically rigid wish to dismiss is the 'mob of men', and elevate sages away from the hoi polloi so they can act as our guides. But what is actually required is the humility to stand out from ourselves and accept we live beyond reason and without definitive answers, recognising the world of difference which is present daily to us between our knowing and our living.'